I'm not suggesting people go through and upvote every Less Wrong article; they can distribute their new votes however they want. So if that algorithm is correct, the impact would be for new people that sign up for Stumble Upon to sometimes vote for LW, or people that have dormant SU accounts that can log in and vote for Less Wrong. This is a bit different from an organized ring of people stumbling low quality content -- my intention is to create a culture of people on Less Wrong stumbling articles that they like.
Where did you get info about that algorithm? The last time I was actively stumbling things, for my old biology/genetics blog, it didn't seem to work that way. That algorithm doesn't quite make sense to me, as it implies that sites will start getting less and less traffic as they write more blog posts -- and with that old blog, stumbling new articles as they came up seemed to make a difference.
This is a breakdown of Less Wrong's recent new user traffic, data sourced from the Less Wrong Google Analytics account.
67% StumbleUpon
16% Google
5.4% Reddit
3.6% Hacker News
3% Harry Potter story
0.7% Facebook
0.3% Overcoming Bias
4% "The Long Tail"
The 16% for Google is artificially high because many of those hits are users that are using Google as an address bar by searching for Less Wrong.
So we get an order of magnitude more traffic from Stumble Upon than anywhere else -- sometimes thousands of new users a day. Stumble Upon has been Less Wrong's biggest referrer of new users from the beginning of the site. That was surprising to me and I suspect it is also surprising to you. Some of our very best users, like Alicorn, came from Stumble Upon.
What can you do?
In order to get maximum Stumble power, you can't just stumble LW articles and only LW articles. You need to use Stumble Upon for a minute or two every now and then and vote up or down the random links it gives you. I know, it's annoying, but what are a few dust specks when we are talking about saving the world?
Thanks to Louie for help with this post.