Years back I heard that 10 is a bad number for this kind of thing.
The reasoning goes that because it's a round number people will assume that you chose it to be round and that at least some of your entries are filler to get up that number.
Whereas if you have 11 reasons or 7 or whatever, people will think that number is the actual number you needed to make all your points.
That's subject to being Goodharted. Having unusual numbers as list size is a sign of trustworthiness, up until people start deliberately creating such lists to be seen as trustworthy, which causes them to cease being so.
Good post. Are you familiar with the pioneering work of BuzzFeed et al (2009-2014) indicated that prime numbered lists resulted in more engagement than round numbers?
worker bees are infertile
Only for social bees, like honey bees or bumblebees - > 90% of bee species are solitary, and most certainly fertile (if they are to have any chance of being successful evolutionary). Which I suppose only serves to support your point even more...
Short-form is a winning strategy when the content can be made short-form and be no/little worse off for it. Do you have any examples of content which you think would be better condensed into a top 10 list?
11. I like asking LLMs to write me lists of interesting things, please add more training data for that.
It might even fit the bee's mind better than an actual bee ever could. But we can't know for sure, because unlike humans and LLMs, we cannot ask bees questions