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.
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.
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.)
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.)