When it comes to assessing whether a long comment or post is hard to read, quality and style of writing matters, too. SSC’s Nonfiction Writing Advice endlessly hammers home the point of dividing text into increasingly smaller chunks, and e.g. here’s one very long post by Eliezer that elicited multiple comments of the form “this was too boring to finish” (e.g. this one), some of which got alleviated merely by adding chapter breaks.
And since LW makes it trivial to add headings even to comments (e.g. I used headings here), I guess that’s one more criterion for me to judge long comments by.
(One could even imagine the LW site nudging long comments towards including stuff like headings. One could imagine a good version of a prompt like this: “This comment / post is >3k chars but consists of only 3 paragraphs and uses no headings. Consider adding some level of hierarchy, e.g. via headings.”)
To add one point:
When it comes to assessing whether a long comment or post is hard to read, quality and style of writing matters, too. SSC’s Nonfiction Writing Advice endlessly hammers home the point of dividing text into increasingly smaller chunks, and e.g. here’s one very long post by Eliezer that elicited multiple comments of the form “this was too boring to finish” (e.g. this one), some of which got alleviated merely by adding chapter breaks.
And since LW makes it trivial to add headings even to comments (e.g. I used headings here), I guess that’s one more criterion for me to judge long comments by.
(One could even imagine the LW site nudging long comments towards including stuff like headings. One could imagine a good version of a prompt like this: “This comment / post is >3k chars but consists of only 3 paragraphs and uses no headings. Consider adding some level of hierarchy, e.g. via headings.”)