We find ourselves in a perpetual tug-of-war between a desire for more reliable, higher quality posts and the ability of people to engage and contribute at all. The trade-off is this:
The higher the standard, whether style or rigor, the fewer people will write posts. To our dismay, this includes people who would actually meet the standards but fear that they would not beforehand. Naturally the potential contributions from people below the requirements are lost.
While this makes each post more productive to read, it also means that each post is higher-effort to read, which to our dismay often means posts stop being engaged with; we run the risk of churning out a small amount of posts which are very high quality but very poorly read.
So striking that balance prevents us from setting much in the way of style standards; we usually prefer to let the community speak which rewards multiple styles. I myself am on the write early, write often side of the fence.
The mods may have a more nuanced and up-to-date opinion with respect to meta information like writing guides.
Welcome to LessWrong!
We find ourselves in a perpetual tug-of-war between a desire for more reliable, higher quality posts and the ability of people to engage and contribute at all. The trade-off is this:
The higher the standard, whether style or rigor, the fewer people will write posts. To our dismay, this includes people who would actually meet the standards but fear that they would not beforehand. Naturally the potential contributions from people below the requirements are lost.
While this makes each post more productive to read, it also means that each post is higher-effort to read, which to our dismay often means posts stop being engaged with; we run the risk of churning out a small amount of posts which are very high quality but very poorly read.
So striking that balance prevents us from setting much in the way of style standards; we usually prefer to let the community speak which rewards multiple styles. I myself am on the write early, write often side of the fence.
The mods may have a more nuanced and up-to-date opinion with respect to meta information like writing guides.