Fwiw, my experience has been more varied. My most well received comments (100+ karma) are a mix of spending days getting a hard point right and spending minutes extemporaneously gesturing at stuff without much editing. But overall I think the trend points towards “more effort = more engagement and better received.” I have mostly attributed this to the standards and readership LessWrong has cultivated, which is why I feel excited to post here. It seems like one of the rare places on the internet where long, complex essays about the most fascinating and important topics are incentivized. My reddit posts are not nearly as well received, for instance. I haven’t posted as many essays yet, but I’ve spent a good deal of effort on all of them, and they’ve all done fairly well (according to karma, which ofc isn’t a great indicator of impact, but some measure of “popularity”).
I weakly guess that your hypothesis is right, here. I.e., that the posts you felt most excited about were exciting in part because they presented more interesting and so more difficult thinking and writing challenges. At least for me, tackling topics on the edge of my knowledge takes much more skill and much more time, and it is often a place where effort translates into “better” writing: clearer, more conceptually precise, more engaging, more cutting to the core of things, more of what Pinker is gesturing at. These posts would not be good were they pumped out in a day—not an artifact I’d be proud of, nor something that other people would see the beauty or the truth in. But the effortful version is worth it, i.e., I expect it to be more helpful for the world, more enduring, and more important, than if that effort had been factored out across a bunch of smaller, easier posts.
Fwiw, my experience has been more varied. My most well received comments (100+ karma) are a mix of spending days getting a hard point right and spending minutes extemporaneously gesturing at stuff without much editing. But overall I think the trend points towards “more effort = more engagement and better received.” I have mostly attributed this to the standards and readership LessWrong has cultivated, which is why I feel excited to post here. It seems like one of the rare places on the internet where long, complex essays about the most fascinating and important topics are incentivized. My reddit posts are not nearly as well received, for instance. I haven’t posted as many essays yet, but I’ve spent a good deal of effort on all of them, and they’ve all done fairly well (according to karma, which ofc isn’t a great indicator of impact, but some measure of “popularity”).
I weakly guess that your hypothesis is right, here. I.e., that the posts you felt most excited about were exciting in part because they presented more interesting and so more difficult thinking and writing challenges. At least for me, tackling topics on the edge of my knowledge takes much more skill and much more time, and it is often a place where effort translates into “better” writing: clearer, more conceptually precise, more engaging, more cutting to the core of things, more of what Pinker is gesturing at. These posts would not be good were they pumped out in a day—not an artifact I’d be proud of, nor something that other people would see the beauty or the truth in. But the effortful version is worth it, i.e., I expect it to be more helpful for the world, more enduring, and more important, than if that effort had been factored out across a bunch of smaller, easier posts.