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Gunnar_Zarncke comments on Open thread, September 9-15, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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During preparation of a Main posting on games which got longer and longer I wondered what a typical size of a Main posting might be. So I took a sample of the 12 most recent articles (not including status postings).
For these I got an average of 3000 words and a standard deviation of 2500 words. The camel has two humps though. 9 postings were below 3000 and three were above 6000 (by lukeprog and EY).
I was urged to write a lukeprog-style Main posting on parenting (I may) so I take that to mean that postings with more than 6000 words are OK - if they have a high quality.
And you probably shouldn't try a Main posting if it has less then 1400 words.
At 10,000 words (not including the notes), A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivtion is one of the most highly upvoted articles at the site. But so is Your Inner Google at only 300 words.
Reading only the introduction of "A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation" (which incidentially is by lukeprog) reveals that it's a very special case and additionally an experiment of a long post.
And while "Your Inner Google" is interesting and insightful it is criticised for being too short in a much upvoted comment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7mx/your_inner_google/4u6t
This doesn't say that you can't do such posts - but you should really consider the reasons for doing so.
A comment on karma and long posts: You do not get more karma for longer posts. So if you feel that your post is too long posting smaller parts not only may keep if more focused it also gains you more karma :-)
On the other hand: I got the impression that longer more well researched articles don't necessarily net more karma. There seems to be a limit to when people feel compelled to vote up on an already upvoted article. Don't do that.
I actually earned significantly more karma from my own recomments on my posting than from the posting itself (but than that may be to it being in Comments instead of Main). I have an eye on my karma because I am new here.
You can generally game for more karma by breaking comments into individual chunks. This has the additional advantage of getting better feedback of what worked and what didn't in a comment.
I suspect that a really excellent long post will gain more karma than a comparably excellent shorter post. (But excellence is harder to achieve for long posts.)
I should at this point make the usual remarks that to a good first approximation you shouldn't care about your karma unless it starts changing in major and unexpected ways, but I see you've dealt with this by remarking that you're new here, so karma-watching probably gives you more information than most and karma hazards have more impact on you than most. Even so, if you're contemplating writing something substantial and posting it in Main, the question "what will this do to my karma?" is probably just a substantially inferior proxy for "will this be useful, and be seen as useful, by LW readers?".
I do not intend to really use this proxy. It's just that as a newbie I can't get around noticing patterns in karma. And maybe sharing them is at least interesting for other newbies.
If one of you postings or comments sits at 0 points I always wonder how many voted it up and dow. Or phrased differently: Was it uninteresting or controversial.
If it sat at 1 point with 51% positive I'd know that about 100 people voted on it. For p=percentage positive and k=points the number of upvotes is $kp(2p-1)$.
So I recommend against leaving a comment or posting at zero when it is obvious that some voting was going on.
Two rules:
If you come across a controversial posting with zero points vote it (whatever the direction). If you see that you are the only voter (percent positive 100%) you can still unvote it.
If you encounter a score of -1 or 1 and want to vote it to 0 then use any random process at your disposal and vote only with 50%.
These two rules should have the effect of avoiding permanent 0 while still not hindering crossing 0.