Gleb_Tsipursky comments on Making a Rationality-promoting blog post more effective and shareable - Less Wrong

1 Post author: Gleb_Tsipursky 16 February 2015 07:09PM

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Comment author: Arran_Stirton 22 February 2015 11:36:48PM *  1 point [-]

(As a rule, using non-standard formatting when posting to LessWrong is a bad idea.)

There are some improvements you can make to increase cognitive ease, such as lowering your long-word count, avoiding jargon, and using fewer sentences per paragraph. I'd recommend running parts of your post (one paragraph at a time is best) through a clarity calculator to get a better idea of where you can improve.

You may also want to look into the concept of inferential distance.

Comment author: Gleb_Tsipursky 23 February 2015 01:11:04AM 0 points [-]

Excellent resource on the clarity calculator, and thanks for the feedback overall.

Comment author: Arran_Stirton 23 February 2015 02:32:01AM 1 point [-]

No problem, some other things that come to mind are:

  • It's best to start the articles with a 'hook' paragraph rather than an image, particularly when the image only makes sense to the reader if they know what the article is about.
  • Caption your images always and forever.
  • This has been said before, but the title should make sense to an uninitiated reader. Furthermore to make it more share-able, the title should set up an expectation of what the article is going to tell them. An alternative in this case could be: "What do people really thinking of you?"; or if you restructure the article, something like "X truths about what people think of you," *For popular outreach the inferential distance has to be as low as you can make it; if you can explain something instead of linking to it, do that.
  • Take a look at the most shared websites(upworthy, buzzfeed and the likes), you can learn a lot from their methodology.
Comment author: Gleb_Tsipursky 24 February 2015 08:00:24PM 0 points [-]

Good point on the hook paragraph, thanks! I'll talk to our editing team on how to balance the hook paragraph with the image better.

By caption, you mean include the quote in the image below the image itself?

Yeah, we're working on the titles, it's a really good point. Hard to come up with good ones, but we will take a look at the sites you suggested for ideas. And good thoughts on the inferential distance, we'll keep that in mind.

Really appreciate the feedback!

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