What is the correlation between upvoting and benefit to readers of LW?

Do posts with more upvotes actually provide more (real) value to community members? Is there any evidence to support this hypothesis? How this could be measured at all?

Regarding confirmation bias: personally, as a LessWrong member, are you more likely to click on an upvote for posts you agree with or for posts you disagree with? Or to the post interesting, but not questioning your assumptions and your map of the reality? To be honest? Could you count your upvotes/​downvotes during last, I don’t know, year, and check the ratio?

And do the posts you initially agree with really make you less wrong?

There are two different criteria for comments (like and agree), but only one for posts (like). Perhaps there is room for improvement here.

Below is the letter from (supposedly) admins (italic emphasis is mine):

P.S. to admins: No, I will not pay attention to what content gets upvoted, sorry. Also I will not “invest in improving my output” specifically to moderators of LW, as I already do it on a constant basis.

Quick note to say that your recent posts and comments haven’t been up to LessWrong’s standard, and I’ve rate limited you to posting once per day. To get a better sense of the site’s norms, I’d recommend paying attention to what content gets upvoted before writing again. Here are some common issues that are worth specific attention (not that any of these necessarily apply to you):

- quality of reasoning
- ignoring of well-known existing arguments or evidence
- poor formatting, punctuation, or grammar
- low clarity
- inappropriate/​hostile tone
- appearing on the site over a “pet topic”

PS: If in a few months you have invested in improving your output, you can message us and share evidence of your progress and we can re-evaluate.