Although encouraged, you don’t have to read this to get started on LessWrong!
This is grammatically ambiguous. The “encouraged” shows up out of nowhere without much indication of who is doing the encouraging or what they are encouraging. (“Although [something is] encouraged [to someone by someone], you don’t have to read this...”)
Maybe “I encourage you to read this before getting started on LessWrong, but you do not have to!” or “You don’t have to read this before you get started on LessWrong, but I encourage you to do so!”
This is grammatically ambiguous. The “encouraged” shows up out of nowhere without much indication of who is doing the encouraging or what they are encouraging. (“Although [something is] encouraged [to someone by someone], you don’t have to read this...”)
Maybe “I encourage you to read this before getting started on LessWrong, but you do not have to!” or “You don’t have to read this before you get started on LessWrong, but I encourage you to do so!”