Related to Information Cascades
Information Cascades has implied that people's votes are being biased by the number of votes already cast. Similarly, some commenters express a perception that higher status posters are being upvoted too much.
EDIT: the UserScript below no longer works because it is a very old version of the site. LessWrong v2.0 Anti-Kibitzer is for the new version of the site (working as of May 2020). It has the added feature that each user is assigned a color and style of censor-bar to represent their username, which makes threaded conversations easier to follow.
If, like me, you suspect that you might be prone to these biases, you can correct for them by installing LessWrong anti-kibitzer which I hacked together yesterday morning. You will need Firefox with the greasemonkey extention installed. Once you have greasemonkey installed, clicking on the link to the script will pop up a dialog box asking if you want to enable the script. Once you enable it, a button which you can use to toggle the visibility of author and point count information should appear in the upper right corner of any page on LessWrong. (On any page you load, the authors and pointcounts are automatically hidden until you show them.) Let me know if it doesn't work for any of you.
Already, I've had some interesting experiences. There were a few comments that I thought were written by Eliezer that turned out not to be (though perhaps people are copying his writing style.) There were also comments that I thought contained good arguments which were written by people I was apparently too quick to dismiss as trolls. What are your experiences?
Just installed it, works like a charm -- I'll keep it this way. If only it could hide the sidebar as well.
Also, thanks to this post, I'm now aware of the fact that there are posts other than those listed on the homepage! I have no prior experience with Reddit, so I assumed that the front page is completely community-driven, but it turns out that it is for 'PROMOTED' posts only!
I spotted the word 'anti-kibitzer' in the sidebar, but was unable to find the post on the front page -- that's how I discovered the 'NEW' and 'POPULAR' links under the site banner.
I've upgraded the LW anti-kibitzer so that it hides the taglines in the recent comments sidebar as well. (Which is imperfect, because it also hides which post the comment was about, but better will have to wait until the server starts enclosing all the kibitzing pieces of information in nice tags.) No such hack was possible for the recent posts sidebar.