I think stuff EY says gets double digit votes with only limited exceptions, and I don't think it would matter much what he said as long as it was spelled right and generally on-topic. I think EY says a lot of interesting shit in highly interesting ways, but many of the vote counts for his comments are based of the fact he is a celebrity around here.
I think this is... well, half right. I've seen plenty of Eliezer comments with zero, near-zero, or negative karma; his less contentful comments tend to stay around zero where they should be, and the negative ones tend to be a lot more negative than I'd expect them to be from their content. On the other hand, when he posts something insightful, he also tends to get voted up more than I'd expect from the content. Same goes for Lukeprog, Yvain, and the other high-karma users (though I can't recall ever seeing a negative-karma Yvain post, now that I think about it).
In other words, I suspect that community status serves as an amplifier rather than a scalar bonus. Since almost everyone has a positive karma balance, though, this hashes out to a positive effect on average.
(Incidentally, I have met a lot of the high-karma users in the flesh, but I don't think it affects my votes much on average. I think that in most cases I treat their meat presence and their online persona as quasi-separate entities in my mind.)
Part of the explanation for this (though probably not all of it), is people like me who go looking for recent comments from people we've identified as often saying insightful things. I don't indiscriminately upvote all such comments, but more eyeballs means more upvotes.
To whoever has for the last several days been downvoting ~10 of my old comments per day:
It is possible that your intention is to discourage me from commenting on Less Wrong.
The actual effect is the reverse. My comments still end up positive on average, and I am therefore motivated to post more of them in order to compensate for the steady karma drain you are causing.
If you are mass-downvoting other people, the effect on some of them is probably the same.
To the LW admins, if any are reading:
Look, can we really not do anything about this behaviour? It's childish and stupid, and it makes the karma system less useful (e.g., for comment-sorting), and it gives bad actors a disproportionate influence on Less Wrong. It seems like there are lots of obvious things that would go some way towards helping, many of which have been discussed in past threads about this.
Failing that, can we at least agree that it's bad behaviour and that it would be good in principle to stop it or make it more visible and/or inconvenient?
Failing that, can we at least have an official statement from an LW administrator that mass-downvoting is not considered an undesirable behaviour here? I really hope this isn't the opinion of the LW admins, but as the topic has been discussed from time to time with never any admin response I've been thinking it increasingly likely that it is. If so, let's at least be honest about it.
To anyone else reading this:
If you should happen to notice that a sizeable fraction of my comments are at -1, this is probably why. (Though of course I may just have posted a bunch of silly things. I expect it happens from time to time.)
My apologies for cluttering up Discussion with this. (But not very many apologies; this sort of mass-downvoting seems to me to be one of the more toxic phenomena on Less Wrong, and I retain some small hope that eventually something may be done about it.)