Raemon's comment below indicates mostly what I meant by: 

It seems from talking to the mods here and reading a few of their comments on this topic that they tend to learn towards them being harmful on average and thus need to be pushed down a bit.

Furthermore, I think the mods' stance on this is based primarily on Yudkowsky's piece here. I think the relevant portion of that piece is this (emphases mine):

But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting.  (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)

So the garden is tainted now, and it is less fun to play in; the old inhabitants, already invested there, will stay, but they are that much less likely to attract new blood.  Or if there are new members, their quality also has gone down.

Then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other, and at that point some of the old members, those with the highest standards and the best opportunities elsewhere, leave...

So, it seems to me that the relevant issues are the following. Being more tolerant of lower-quality discussion will cause:

• Higher-quality members' efforts being directed toward less fruitful endeavors than they would otherwise be.
• Higher-quality existing members to leave the community.
• Higher-quality potential members who would otherwise have joined the community, not to.

My previous comment primarily refers to the notion of the first bullet-point in this list. But "harmful on average" also means all three. 

The issue I have most concern with is the belief that lower-quality members are capable of dominating the environment over higher-quality ones, with all-else-being-equal, and all members having roughly the same rights to interact with one another as they see fit. 

This mimics a conversation I was having with someone else recently about Musk's Twitter / X. They have different beliefs than I do about what happens when you try to implement a system that is inspired by Musk's ideology. But I encountered an obstacle in this conversation: I said I have always liked using it [Twitter / X], and it also seems to be slightly more enjoyable to use post-acquisition. He said he did not really enjoy using it, and also that it seems to be less enjoyable to use post-acquisition. Unfortunately, if it comes down to a matter of pure preferences like this, than I am not sure how one ought to proceed with such a debate. 

However, there is an empirical observation that one can make comparing environments that use voting systems or rank-based attention mechanisms: It should appear to one as though units of work that feel like more or better effort was applied to create them correlate with higher approval and lower disapproval. If this is not the case, then it is much harder to actually utilize feedback to improve one's own output incrementally. ^[1]

On LessWrong, that seems to me to be less the case than it does on Twitter / X. Karma does not seem correlated to my perceptions about my own work quality, whereas impressions and likes on Twitter / X do seem correlated. But this is only one person's observation, of course. Nonetheless I think it should be treated as useful data.

1. ^{^}

   That being said, it may be that the intention of the voting system matters: Upvotes / downvotes here mean "I want to see more of / I want to see less of" respectively. They aren't explicitly used to provide helpful feedback, and that may be why they seem uncorrelated with useful signal.  

"It wouldn't have mattered to me whose name was in the title of that post, the strong-downvote button floated nearer to me just from reading the rest of the title."

I think this is right from an individual user perspective, but misses part of the dynamic. My impression from reading lesswrong posts is that something like that post, had the topic been different, maybe "Jesus was often incredibly wrong about stuff", would have been ignored by many people. It would maybe have had between zero and a dozen karma and clearly not been clicked on by many people.

But that post, in some sense, was more successful than ones that are ignored - it managed to get people to read it (which is a necessary first step of communicating anything). That it has evidently failed in the second step (persuading people) is clear from the votes.

In a sense maybe this is the system working as intended: stuff that people just ignore doesn't need downvoting because it doesn't waste much communication bandwidth. Where as stuff that catches attention then disapoints is where the algorithm can maybe do people a favour with downvote data. But the way that system feeds into the users posting rights seems a little weird.

There are plenty of people on LessWrong who are overconfident in all their opionions (or maybe write as if they are, as a misguided rhetorical choice?). It is probably a selection effect of people who appreciate the sequences - whatever you think of his accuracy record, EY definitely writes as if he's always very confident in his conclusions.

Whatever the reason, (rhetorical) overconfidence is most often seen here as a venial sin, as long as you bring decently-reasoned arguments and are willing to change your mind in response to other's. Maybe it's not your case, but I'm sure many would have been lighter with their downvotes had the topic been another one - just a few people strong downvoting instead of simple downvoting can change the karma balance quite a bit