How should I interpret this?
You're #1! You're #1! You're #1! Your score is even lower than mine. I'll have to try harder.
You have to decide how you want to interpret it. Maybe you say a higher percentage of stupid things. Maybe you say a higher percentage of controversial things. Maybe your style rubs people the wrong way. Maybe those more likely to rate are biased against you.
(That's actually a real weakness of the scoring system - potential bias of those who vote more.)
But my real question is what do you hope to accomplish by interpreting the score? If we know that, we might better know how you should interpret it. The score itself is really very limited information that marginally constrains the probabilities of people's opinions of you.
I think you're better off looking at your posts, and seeing how you feel about them. Look at the high downvoted posts, and evaluate them. Are you proud of them? Ashamed? As long as I'm proud of the post, I consider downvotes bonus points. I try to avoid giving myself those bonus points when people are just annoyed at my tone. Tone is an unfortunate confounding factor, particularly for me.
I just noticed that if I hover my mouse over the big green dot with my total karma, it says, "81% positive". Presumably 81% of the votes on my posts and/or comments have been positive.
I checked out the % positive for everyone on the all-time top 15 list:
Average = 90.6%, Standard deviation = 4.93%
So I'm 1.95 standard deviations below average for the top 15. Not only am I at the bottom of the list, we would expect me to be at the bottom of the list of the top 39 users. (Assuming these numbers are representative of the top 39 LessWrong users, which is dubious, and that LessWrong users are "normal", which sounds even more dubious, 97.44% of them have a higher upvote/downvote ratio than me.) I've gotten about 6744 down-votes, a bit more than Alicorn's 6711, but still second to Eliezer's 15225.
How should I interpret this? I could say that I'm the most-controversial poster on the top 15 list, and be proud of that. But if I'd had the highest %positive score, I'm sure I'd be proud of that, too. As long as I'm extreme in some way. Or if I were closest to the average, I suppose I could also be proud of that.
Before checking, would you guess that the top 15 have higher, or lower, % positive scores than most users?