Some readers may take you a little more seriously if you have very high karma, or a little less seriously if you have very low karma.
In practice, though, if you have very high karma then the chances are that you’re active enough that those readers will recognize you and form whatever opinions they do more on the basis of experience than of your karma score, and the state of having very low karma doesn’t tend to persist very long: someone who posts things other LW participants like will soon not have very low karma, and someone who doesn’t will usually notice and give up. (Or improve.)
I have to click through to your user page to look at your karma score; do a statistically significant fraction of readers check karma before evaluating a post?
Hardly; I think you need a minimum of 10 karma to create new posts, and if you have negative karma you can’t comment more than once per five minutes or something like that (the time might depend of your karma, and it may be 30-day karma and not total karma). Apart from that, nothing.
I think I missed a part of the meta-discussion: Are there any consequences for having a high or low karma, other than position on the leaderboards?
Some readers may take you a little more seriously if you have very high karma, or a little less seriously if you have very low karma.
In practice, though, if you have very high karma then the chances are that you’re active enough that those readers will recognize you and form whatever opinions they do more on the basis of experience than of your karma score, and the state of having very low karma doesn’t tend to persist very long: someone who posts things other LW participants like will soon not have very low karma, and someone who doesn’t will usually notice and give up. (Or improve.)
I have to click through to your user page to look at your karma score; do a statistically significant fraction of readers check karma before evaluating a post?
I doubt anyone does it often. Probably many people never do it at all. (I think I’ve been curious enough to bother once or twice, ever.)
Hardly; I think you need a minimum of 10 karma to create new posts, and if you have negative karma you can’t comment more than once per five minutes or something like that (the time might depend of your karma, and it may be 30-day karma and not total karma). Apart from that, nothing.
You also need to pay 5 karma to comment on highly down voted posts (I think this means posts with −5 karma or more).
And you can’t downvote more than 4 times your total number of upvotes (or net upvotes, I can’t recall).
Negative net karma can also reduce the rate at which you can post.