It’s hard for me to tell with this rich and plentiful data, but I also suspect that Halfhaven created higher quality posts, since there are more people who can publish a good post every other day than there are people who can publish a good post every day.
I think it depends on what your everyday life is like, and that’s different for different people. Like, if your work is low-stress and then you get time to relax, there are various things that you think about “in the background”, and letting the topic mature for 2 days can be better than trying to post something immediately. But if your work is high-stress, and immediately afterwards you take care of kids, and then you have maybe 2 hours of free time and you need to choose whether it’s cleaning your room, doing some exercise, reading your favorite websites, or posting a blog, that’s not really conductive to great writing.
Once a week definitely sounds more sustainable. That said, Halfhaven wasn’t meant to be sustainable for longer than the two months. (And I failed to do even that.) But the idea behind both Inkhaven and Halfhaven wasn’t to be sustainable, but to try something extreme, and see whether it starts some fire. Halfhaven was just a slightly less extreme version for those who couldn’t afford the fully extreme version.
There is a tradeoff between quality and quantity, and even worse the quality is not measurable (otherwise we could try to optimize for some formula involving both quantity and quality). There was already a suggestion somewhere on Less Wrong that very long articles should count as multiple articles, so that at least the rules do not nudge you so much towards writing 500 words long pieces. (Though this could create an opposite bad incentive: once you have a topic in mind and already started writing, it could be tempting to keep adding more and more words; after all, there is always sometime else to add, but no one wants to read too long ramblings.)
Hmmm, a possible metric could involve karma on LessWrong. Like, you have to make one post every few days, but for each N karma points on LW you can skip one. But I feel like getting LW involved in the game could get one banned. (Well, probably not, but it still feels like burning some commons. We should post on LW because we believe we have something valuable to say, not because we have committed to generate some quantity.)
Halfhaven organizer (and unsuccessful participant) here.
I think it depends on what your everyday life is like, and that’s different for different people. Like, if your work is low-stress and then you get time to relax, there are various things that you think about “in the background”, and letting the topic mature for 2 days can be better than trying to post something immediately. But if your work is high-stress, and immediately afterwards you take care of kids, and then you have maybe 2 hours of free time and you need to choose whether it’s cleaning your room, doing some exercise, reading your favorite websites, or posting a blog, that’s not really conductive to great writing.
Once a week definitely sounds more sustainable. That said, Halfhaven wasn’t meant to be sustainable for longer than the two months. (And I failed to do even that.) But the idea behind both Inkhaven and Halfhaven wasn’t to be sustainable, but to try something extreme, and see whether it starts some fire. Halfhaven was just a slightly less extreme version for those who couldn’t afford the fully extreme version.
There is a tradeoff between quality and quantity, and even worse the quality is not measurable (otherwise we could try to optimize for some formula involving both quantity and quality). There was already a suggestion somewhere on Less Wrong that very long articles should count as multiple articles, so that at least the rules do not nudge you so much towards writing 500 words long pieces. (Though this could create an opposite bad incentive: once you have a topic in mind and already started writing, it could be tempting to keep adding more and more words; after all, there is always sometime else to add, but no one wants to read too long ramblings.)
Hmmm, a possible metric could involve karma on LessWrong. Like, you have to make one post every few days, but for each N karma points on LW you can skip one. But I feel like getting LW involved in the game could get one banned. (Well, probably not, but it still feels like burning some commons. We should post on LW because we believe we have something valuable to say, not because we have committed to generate some quantity.)