Right now I’m coaching for Inkhaven, a month-long marathon writing event where our brave residents are writing a blog post every single day for the entire month of November.
And I’m pleased that some of them have seen success – relevant figures seeing the posts, shares on Hacker News and Twitter and LessWrong. The amount of writing is nuts, so people are trying out different styles and topics – some posts are effort-rich, some are quick takes or stories or lists.
Some people have come up to me – one of their pieces has gotten some decent reception, but the feeling is mixed, because it’s not the piece they hoped would go big. Their thick research-driven considered takes or discussions of values or whatever, the ones they’d been meaning to write for years, apparently go mostly unread, whereas their random-thought “oh shit I need to get a post out by midnight or else the Inkhaven coaches will burn me at the stake” posts[1] get to the front page of Hacker News, where probably Elon Musk and God read them.
It happens to me too – some of my own pieces that took me the most effort, or that I’m proudest of, have zero notable comments or responses. I’m not upset about it. I’ve been around the block. It happens.
But for those people, those new bloggers who are kind of upset about the internet’s bad taste, might benefit from reading artist Dimespin’s essay written to other visual artists: “Why people like your doodles better than your finished works.”
e.g.:
Excerpt from dimespin’s essay. There’s more, it’s a great piece, go read it.
This piece is good and even if you’re not a visual artist, you can probably make your own analogies by reading it. That said, to spell out a few for the writerly crowd:
The quick post is short, the effortpost is long
Here is the most important thing I can tell you for writing things that people might choose to read on purpose: Make it short. Everyone has 10,000,000 other things they could be reading. Make it efficient. Make it count.
If you are Scott Alexander, you can get huge readership on your long articles. If you aren’t, try either writing short things or becoming Scott Alexander. Pro tip: One of these things is easier than the other.
The quick post is about something interesting, the topic of the effortpost bores most people
The random historical event you read half a sentence about on Wikipedia and it caught your eye? Maybe that means that it could catch a lot of people’s eyes, and your quick post has brought it to them. If you’ve spend ten years formulating a theory about your field of work, that might only be interesting to people who care about that field. Or it’s about one of those “what is good anyhow” or “my theory of consciousness” type questions that people either already know about or already know they don’t give a shit about. Everyone has their own theory of consciousness, Harold!
The quick post has a fun controversial take, the effortpost is boringly evenhanded or laden with nuance
The quick post is low-context, the effortpost is high-context
The quick posts that aren’t even about a thing you’re an expert in – well, okay, you don’t know a lot, but you’ve written it as a non-expert and it’s at a non-expert’s level of understanding. Most readers aren’t experts in whatever random thing. You are automatically going on this journey of discovery with them.
Meanwhile, it’s really hard to explain something you have a detailed technical understanding of, in a way that’s approachable to others. You haven’t spoken to someone who ISN’T a software engineer in eight months. You’re tripping over feldspars left and right. Even if you try to explain it to a novice, you might not do it very well. “To appreciate why this modern factory design choice is interesting, we have to understand the history of automobile manufacturing logistics. In 1886 – ” Okay, maybe you’re right, but I’m also already closing the tab.
The quick post is has a casual style, the effortpost is inscrutably formal
Excessive linguistic density frequently triggers a distinct reticence in opportunistic audiences to apply interpretive labor to the text in question.
AKA: oh my god, just talk like a normal person, nobody wants to read all that.
You might put formal language into a piece because you are an expert and you’re thinking about it in jargon and conceptual terms. In this case, try saying it like you’d explain it to your buddy who doesn’t know jack shit about it.
You might also use formal language in an attempt to Make It Look Professional – unless you’re aiming for a really particular audience that eats up formality, just stop doing that! Readability is kind.
If you’re a writer and you’ve run into this situation and you’re upset about the internet’s bad taste and lack of discernment, my main advice is that on some level, you gotta get over it. You will never have any control over what random people find interesting, or what the algorithms decide to promote, or anything at all about other people. You’re lucky to be getting an audience at all, and if you are, you’re doing at least something right.
If you’re smart, you can convert these flickers of fame into more readership for your other better stuff – but the attention of the internet is best modeled as a random swarm of locusts that will occasionally land on your ripe fields based on its inscrutable whims. You can go crazy analyzing it or you can just keep farming.
Maybe you should just do the opposite of all these things so your writing becomes popular? Well, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.
If you care about maximizing readership, I dunno, sure. Clickbait is popular for a reason – it works. If you don’t lie to the readers or advocate for anything evil, then I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong by optimizing for readership.
Note that some topics have inherently wider appeal than others – a short light post discussing something concrete and weird about the world is definitely going to get more readers than a piece that compares different philosophical schools. But if you care about philosophy, maybe the second piece is more important to you to write. The numbers aren’t a proxy for value of the piece or quality of its ideas.
Even if you’re exclusively interested in maximizing reception, audience might matter. I think very few people cared about my 2017 summary of a 2015 Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biosecurity report, which is fair – I wrote it because I had already read this 83-page-long report, and figured someone else might just like to see my notes. And empirically they did, because a major biosecurity funder came up to me at an event and said they read it and really appreciated that I wrote it – they wanted to know what was in the original report and didn’t want to read 83 pages. This was a fantastic audience for it to reach. Or, like, if you want to contribute to the academic discourse, probably you want to engage with the academic literature, and that’s just inherently gonna dissuade many casual readers.
But listen, I bet you’re not just writing to maximize audience. Friend of the blog Ozy Brennan once said that being a writer requires “the absolute conviction that total strangers should listen to you because your words are interesting and valuable” (as well as “the decision to choose a career where you never leave the house or talk to anyone”.)
You’re here to say something interesting and valuable, right? I don’t think you ought to smooth out everything you touch for the masses. You want to say something that only you could say or that will hit the reader who needs it at the right time. You want to impress that one guy at the Blogging Club, or you practice “blogging as warnings scrawled on the cave wall”, or you’re writing for nice future AGIs creating rescue simulations of you based on your digital text corpus. Listen. Don’t lose your mind about it. Just try to say something beautiful and true. Or, failing that, say something fascinating and baffling.
But, I mean, obviously it’d be nice if the masses turn out to want to hear it too. I get it. There’s nuance.
This post is mirrored to Eukaryote Writes Blog, Substack, and Lesswrong.
- ^
Nobody has dropped out yet! Isn’t that amazing?
Scientists also have this problem :-)
“Why, oh why all these people are citing that paper of mine and no one cares about the other one which I really like.”
Maybe other people are doing it wrong? I find that the posts I put the most research, thought, and effort into, are in fact the most popular posts I’ve made, with the exception of that one post that was really easy to write that announced a thing of public interest. Maybe it’s LessWrong being different here as well? I seem to live in the more intuitive world where effort correlates noticeably with the amount of attention it gets, and I’m confused that people are experiencing the opposite.
I find that some of my effortposts are definitely appreciated on LessWrong, while others aren’t.
Two recent posts on LW that I put a lot of effort into: Four types of approaches for your emotional problems at 44 karma, and Creative writing with LLMs part II, at 2 karma. Going a little longer back, Genetic fitness is a measure of selection strength, not the selection target was something I worked on a lot and thought was quite important, but only got 57 karma.
Some of this is I think a question of target audience. Genetic fitness definitely has that “narrow technical point relevant only to a few” quality that eukaryote talks about. I also learned from the comments that its central thesis had been a little unclear/muddled; I did clarify that in the comments, but people may have stopped reading before they ever got far enough to read the clarification. Four types of approaches got a more positive reception on my Substack and people messaging me about it in private. I’m not totally sure what happened with Creative writing, but I assume that it just wasn’t something LW found particularly interesting and maybe even found a little cringe, whereas a couple of people who were more into LLM-driven creative writing have told me they found it useful.
While Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people was low-effort and is now at 163 karma. My most successful post of late, How anticipatory cover-ups go wrong is at 299 karma; I’d call that medium-effort.
But then I have definitely also had successful high-effort posts! Book summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain is at 336 karma and took a lot of effort. So did Building up to an Internal Family Systems model (295 karma) and My attempt to explain Looking, insight meditation, and enlightenment in non-mysterious terms (241 karma).
Something that unites those three is that they were specifically written with LW as the target audience, with me asking myself something like “what is the LW-optimized way of expressing this idea that LW readers might find especially interesting”. Of my low-karma effortposts, Genetic fitness did have that quality, but Four types of approaches was written for a broader audience and I could definitely have done more to express it in a more LW-adapted style. For Creative writing, I was somewhat thinking about the LW reception—in particular, I was a bit defensive about the previous post in the series apparently having given the impression I’d fallen for LLM sycophancy and thought of LLM outputs as better than they were, so a substantial chunk of the post was about critiquing and rewriting LLM outputs—but I did also explicitly have the thought of “well, this is something that I personally find interesting and I’ll just put it out there and see if anyone else does, and if not too bad”. So I guess a lot of that is explained by the extent to which I was tailoring it to my target audience. (Though Don’t ignore bad vibes was not particularly LW-tailored.)
(My recent post about the importance of the target audience for your writing, a medium-effort one, is at 50 karma.)
Yeah! It’s great that someone noticed it and spelled it out.
The same is true for music, at least in my experience. I’m in a group of friends who like to write songs and play them together. Well, their quick throwaway tunes almost always sound more fun to me than their high effort stuff. And they like my quick throwaway tunes more than my high effort stuff. It’s gone on like this for awhile.
Maybe that’s one reason why lots of practice is needed: to make my window of “fast, unedited work” longer.
Right on! I think you should have emphasized that part more, right from the start. (As written, you’re kinda connoting that the quick post properties are better and the effortpost properties are worse, until readers get to the last section.)
If I publish a scrupulously-researched 80-page review article on bacterial chemoreceptors, it’s sure not gonna go viral on Hacker News, but that’s still a very valuable thing I did.
See also: related comment of mine.
Based on a true map of the territory. (I really like this advice a good exploration strat seems similar to the one about taking photographies, it is really just about taking a bunch of them and you’ll learn what works over time.)
See also Writing That Provokes Comments (step 1: be wrong)
Since you mentioned him earlier, this is something Scott Alexander manages to avoid with his effort post (not to say that he doesn’t put effort into all his posts). He can write 30k words of careful reasoning on the Miracle of Fatima and yet reading it doesn’t feel like engaging with a dense, wordy academic paper.
Years ago when I was in school one of my professors told me (well probably the whole class but...) you should be able to write the thesis of your entire paper on two or three index cards.
My initial thought was, then all the other writing is really a waste of effort I could put elsewhere. Not quite true. But that does seem to map over to the doodle—finished art point made. A lot of writing in the paper is the details and often can prove more distracting/noise to the main insight.
But I do have another thought on that. If you can put an interesting idea down in a very short set of statements or bullets the core to the thought is clear. The rest of what you write is about the author’s view. Just offing the index card view opens up the field for every reader to take that idea/thought where they want to explore. That is often much more interesting for a reader.
Some points:
1. “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” Brevity & elegance =/= low-effort.
2. Footnotes/endnotes, collapsable boxes, and appendices exist for a reason. Good writing succinctly conveys an idea and withstands deeper scrutiny. The internet is not paper.
3. Often a few in-depth reads > a million skims. Small group dynamics are potent—e.g., NrX and Mencius Moldbug, or early Tumblr. True for both development of ideas & influence.
4. “You will never have any control over what random people find interesting, what the algorithms decide to promote, or anything at all about other people.” Literally false:
Somebody has nontrivial technical & regulatory control over what an algorithm promotes. Algorithms are not natural processes. It is possible to become this ‘somebody’ or reason with them.
The citizen has varying control over social technology & media via the political process. Unless you really mean “you should never have any control...” But do you mean this?
Taste-makers and trend-setters exist. Likewise content aggregators, traditional media gatekeepers, and advertisers. Listen to them speak in private, do they feel powerless? And they listen to criticism.
Arguing specific actors should be accountable for the sanity of online culture is reasonable and realistic. Online writers are allowed to join in too.