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.
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?
Well, to kibitz the anti-kibitzing, it looks to me like:
would match pretty easily against something that looked for
and deleted it, similarly on the Recent Posts but without the , checking for the identity of the two matched strings is optional (I forget how to do this offhand with REs).
That particular hack looks like a bad idea. What if somebody actually put a bold-face link into a post or comment? However, your original suggestion wan't as bad. All non-relative links to user pages get blocked by the anti-kibitzer. (Links in "Top contributors" and stuff in comments seem to be turned into relative links if they point inside LW.) It's gross, but it works.
Version 0.2 is now up. It hides everything except the point-counts on the recent posts (there was no tag around those.) (Incidentally, I don't have regular expressions because by the time my script gets its hands on the data, it's not a string at all, but a DOM-tree. So, you'd have to specify it in XPath.)
I think trying to do any more at this point would be pointless. Most of the effort involved in getting something like this to be perfect would be gruesome reverse engineering, which would all break the minute the site maintainers change something. The right thing to do(TM) would be to get the people at Tricycle to implement the feature (I hereby put the code I wrote into the public domain, yada yada.) Then we don't have to worry about having to detect which part of the page something belongs to because the server actually knows.