It seems to me that there are lots and lots of people who want to write posts but they're concerned about whether those posts will be received well. I've read, also, that more people put "public speaking" as their worst fear than "death" when surveyed. If we made a karma prediction tool, maybe that would help get people posting here. Here's what I'm thinking:

First, we could create a checklist of the traits that we think will get a LessWrong post upvoted. For instance:

• Is there an obvious main point or constructive goal?
• Is the main point supported / is there a reasonable plan for the constructive goal? (Or are they otherwise framed in the correct context "This is hypothetical" or whatever.)
• What type of support is included (math, citations, graphics, etc).
• Was the topic already covered?
• Is it a topic of interest to LessWrong?
• Is it uplifting or unhappy?
• (Or do a separate survey that asks people's reasons for upvoting / downvoting and populate the checklist with those.)

Then we could post the checklist as a poll in each new post and article for a while.

Then we could correlate the karma data with the checklist poll data and test it to see how accurately it predicts a post's karma.

If you had a karma prediction tool, would it help you post more?