As one anecdata point, I do generally skip articles with much negative karma. I read via RSS, so I just hit ‘mark read’ on them. LW users are not big downvoters, most of the time, so if something has more than a few downvotes, I have found that I probably don’t want to read it.
And of course, comments with a score of −3 are hidden by default, so many people probably don’t read them.
As one anecdata point, I do generally skip articles with much negative karma. I read via RSS, so I just hit ‘mark read’ on them. LW users are not big downvoters, most of the time, so if something has more than a few downvotes, I have found that I probably don’t want to read it.
And of course, comments with a score of −3 are hidden by default, so many people probably don’t read them.