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Alicorn comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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An inquiry regarding my posting frequency:
While I'm at the SIAI house, I'm trying to orient towards the local priorities so as to be useful. Among the priorities is building community via Less Wrong, specifically by writing posts. Historically, the limiting factor on how much I post has been a desire not to flood the place - if I started posting as fast as I can write up my ideas, I'd get three or four posts out a week with (I think) no discernible decrease in quality. I have the following questions about this course of action:
Will it annoy people? Building community by being annoying seems very unlikely to work.
Will it affect voting behavior noticeably? I rely on my post's karma scores to determine what to do and not do in the future, and SIAI people who decide whether I'm useful enough to keep use it as a rough metric too. I'd rather post one post that gets 40 karma in a week than two that get 20, and so on.
A related question: If I have a large topic to cover, should I cover it in one post, or split it up along convenient cleavage planes and make it a sequence? (If I make sequences, I think I'll learn my lesson from the last one I tried and write it all before posting anything, so I don't post 2/3 of it and then stop.)
I really like the "sequences" approach - it's easier to read and digest a chunk at a time, and it focusses discussion well, too.
Long posts are more offputting than short ones, and individual steps are more likely to be correct than entire theorems - both of these points would suggest posting sequences preferentially.
As for a specific reference on length: thirty-three hundred words sharply focused on a single, vivid subject is pushing the upper limit of what I find comfortable to attack in a single sitting.
Posting 2/3 of a sequence and stopping is fine if people turn out not to be interested. I recommend fast posting and fast feedback.