I'm sure this has been proposed already, but sorting the answers by votes count has the side effect of bringing the first answers to the top (FGITW problem), with them not always being the best (this happened to some of my answers).
The default sorting has been changed already from sorting by the newest answer (in order to solve the SCITE problem) to the current sorting, but this introduced this new issue.
At first I tought that since answers can be manually sorted by votes count already, my proposal could have been to customize the sorting behavior on a per user basis and to randomize the default one, which seemed like the best option to give anyone a chance, perhaps only for logged in users (we want not logged in users who don't have the capability to cast votes to see the best answers first) and giving them the chance to change it, so that conscious users could actively choose whether or not to sort answers by votes count as it is right now, but as it has been pointed out by Seth obviously this is not good from an anwer's user perspective. I hope that someone can come up with a good solution to this.
awkanswer which is far more complicated, but it's after because it has been posted later, and sometimes (maybe not in this case, but think of say a third answer addedd to an old question on which the first and the second answers have tons of upvotes) this is likely to stay as it is. Of course being a good first answer having been present from more it will usually always have more upvotes of a newer one because of that, [cont...]