What’s going to happen, regardless of how people rate, is that people will read the articles that get lots of links. People who come directly from google will read what has lots of links, whether internal or external. People who become regulars here will read what gets linked to from contemporary LW articles. Some small number of new regulars will use the ratings to decide what to read, but most of them won’t do that until after they read a bunch that were linked recently.
What’s going to happen, regardless of how people rate, is that people will read the articles that get lots of links. People who come directly from google will read what has lots of links, whether internal or external. People who become regulars here will read what gets linked to from contemporary LW articles. Some small number of new regulars will use the ratings to decide what to read, but most of them won’t do that until after they read a bunch that were linked recently.