Open thread, September 9-15, 2013

Metus

Open thread, September 9-15, 2013 — LessWrong

Comment Permalink

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.

Gunnar_Zarncke13y-10

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 o... (read more)

1Gunnar_Zarncke13y

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.

6Kaj_Sotala13y

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.

See in context