Separate feedback / food for thought: You mention that your post on mapping discussions is a summary of months of work, and that the second post took 5h to write and received far more karma. But did you spend at least 5h on writing the first one, too?
I see. Then I’ll point to my feedback in the other comment and say that the journalism post was likely better written despite your lower time investment. And that if you spend a lot of time on a post, I recommend spending more of that time on the title in particular, because of the outsized importance of a) getting people to click on your thing and b) having people understand what the thing you’re asking them to click on even is. Here are two long comments on this topic.
Separately, when it comes to the success of stuff like blog posts, I like the framing in Ben Kuhn’s post Searching for outliers, about the implications for activities (like blogging) whose impacts are dominated by heavy-tailed outcomes.
Separate feedback / food for thought: You mention that your post on mapping discussions is a summary of months of work, and that the second post took 5h to write and received far more karma. But did you spend at least 5h on writing the first one, too?
I would say I took at least 10 hours to write it. I rewrote it about 4 times.
I see. Then I’ll point to my feedback in the other comment and say that the journalism post was likely better written despite your lower time investment. And that if you spend a lot of time on a post, I recommend spending more of that time on the title in particular, because of the outsized importance of a) getting people to click on your thing and b) having people understand what the thing you’re asking them to click on even is. Here are two long comments on this topic.
Separately, when it comes to the success of stuff like blog posts, I like the framing in Ben Kuhn’s post Searching for outliers, about the implications for activities (like blogging) whose impacts are dominated by heavy-tailed outcomes.