There is a weighted bias on the direction of the arrow presses.

The arrow buttons convey no information other than indicating that an audience is near. It is a poor man's analytics system. That is all. Naturally, people are only going to let someone know that a comment was seen if they like it – for a couple of reasons:

1. It takes time out of one's day to press a button. There is an opportunity cost to that. Nobody is going to literally pay for content they don't like when there is no obligation to. How stupid would that be?
2. As before, the reason we come here and not write in our private journals is because of the audience. Even if we ignore that there is a cost to pressing the button, why would the audience want undesirable content to know that it has been seen? Wanting to be seen is the whole reason for its creation! The audience obviously would want to hide the fact that they exist in such cases to not further incentivize creation of such content.

If you receive no button presses or replies, that's when you know that you've created something nobody is a fan of. When the fans are interacting with your work, you know you've created something they want. And it is clear what type of work brings out more fans! This is a community. Your personal tastes are irrelevant.

Clearly my replies are off topic and shouldn’t count towards your metric.

If off-topic is what the audience wants, off-topic is what the audience gets. It's not for me to decide. Again, if it were for me I'd write in my private journal.