I’ve noticed the quality of LW posts varies greatly, even among top posts. Some of this is subjective or comes from what I want out of LW, but I suspect some posts are not nearly as useful or fun to readers in 2020 as their karma makes them appear.
Answers should be links to particular posts with more than ~75 karma that the answerer has a relatively unknown strong criticism of, or a general pattern (e.g. posts from LW 1.0 often have a higher score than they deserve because [reason]). Please give a reason why, and don’t automatically downvote a post someone else links.
Posts from LW 2.0 have a reliably higher score than posts from LW 1.0 because people’s vote weight went up. Everyone used to vote 1, but now people can vote between 1 and 15.
At some point it’d be good to backdate people’s vote strengths (i.e. change their votes on previous posts to their current weak vote score of 1, 2 or 3) to even things out a little.
Asides from the obvious karma accumulation, I think LW1 used to have a big community that fell apart after… stuff happened. I’m not really clear on the details since I discovered rationality well after LW2 was built, but that’s the impression I’ve gotten from a few halfhearted investigations.