Datum: I know at least one person who refuses to read LW links, explicitly because they are walls of text about abstract ideas that she thinks (incorrectly, IMO) are over her head. This occurs even for topics she’s normally interested in. So things like that do limit LW’s reach.
Whether they do so in a significant fraction of cases, I don’t know. But the impact is non-zero.
Datum: I know at least one person who refuses to read LW links, explicitly because they are walls of text about abstract ideas that she thinks (incorrectly, IMO) are over her head. This occurs even for topics she’s normally interested in. So things like that do limit LW’s reach.
Whether they do so in a significant fraction of cases, I don’t know. But the impact is non-zero.