Yeah, it’s a bit more nuanced in CredRank because there are “epoch nodes” that act as an intermediary layer between the users and their contributions, and that’s how we account for time in CredRank (rather than running PageRank once for every week like we do now). But that only changes how things work for users, whereas we have “cred sink” problems with other nodes, like Discourse topics, as well.
So one idea I’ve been thinking of is basically to give each node an extra edge with weight w pointing to the seed node, so that if a node doesn’t have much outbound connection it’ll flow the extra cred away to the seed, but as it gets more outbound weight the seed node asymptotically only receives alpha (i.e. the “extra” edge becomes insignificant when a node has lots of outbound edges). Though I’m not sure how to pick w in a principled way. Also, I kind of want to change how edge weights work in general, c.f. this post.