There's a reason things like twitter are popular. They are cheap to write in an input cost term. People who justify them on the basis of "more digestible" are idiots. Readers read at any length that's well written. They gravitate to short form when long form starts getting crappy
-
-
Let's work out what a minimum-wage person in CA might be able to do. Min wage is $13. At 40h/week that's $520. Assuming they balance their budget somehow, their cost-of-life is about $3/hour. If they write 300/words per hour in their leisure time, it's 1c/word input cost.
Show this thread -
So by my cost/length curve, their natural chunk size is probably around 100 words if they want it to be good. They're best off tweeting rather than even targeting short blog posts of 300 words.
Show this thread -
The social psychology there is that the leisure hours are going to be so full of the stresses and anxieties of life at that income level, and the leisure hours available in such low-energy, smaller sessions, their output at bigger chunk sizes is going to be abysmal.
Show this thread -
Of course there are outliers. People who've written great works in prison or while subsisting on food stamps or slaving away in gulags. But the very rarity of such cases tells you that it takes the force of enormous passion/creative vision to override the default sweet spot
Show this thread -
It's some mix of mythologization, passion, special circumstances, special constitutions etc.
Show this thread -
tldr: there actually is a meaningful unit economics to writing, but most people are not aware of it because they rarely think in terms of production cost, only the realized market value... which for the median published public word is 0.
Show this thread -
Probably less than 0 actually. Negative if you count all those people writing words on non-free servers and not making anything from it.
Show this thread -
Note that this entire thread is about just the input costs of writing alone, assuming nothing very special in terms of research beyond just casual reading you would do anyway/living life and using that as fodder.
Show this thread -
Special research costs that can be directly attributed to the writing itself: - Reading things you would not otherwise read - Archival research - Interviewing - Travel for on the ground data collection
Show this thread -
Research costs that should NOT be attributed to writing are costs that can be attributed to a higher-value output. Ie research on a time machine to write about a time machine is not really research about the the writing, since the time machine is the more valuable output.
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.