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.
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.