My assumption is that many of these successes would tend to be widely distributed around some mean, rather than being narrowly concentrated at one point.
So if a joke needs to be 7⁄10 funny to get a laugh, but a comedian delivers what is actually a 6.5/10 joke, you’ll still get some subset of people who find it funnier than it is, such that it gets an appropriate amount of laughs.
Probably there’s some inefficiency, but because of this effect, the number of laughs/number of upvotes I think gives quite good information about the perceived quality of the joke/post.
My assumption is that many of these successes would tend to be widely distributed around some mean, rather than being narrowly concentrated at one point.
So if a joke needs to be 7⁄10 funny to get a laugh, but a comedian delivers what is actually a 6.5/10 joke, you’ll still get some subset of people who find it funnier than it is, such that it gets an appropriate amount of laughs.
Probably there’s some inefficiency, but because of this effect, the number of laughs/number of upvotes I think gives quite good information about the perceived quality of the joke/post.