I’m quite neutral on this post. On the one hand, it is short and simple, with a clear concept that has some impact/relevance. On the other hand, I think the concept is somewhat inaccurate (and very imprecise): the reasoning mainly supposes a pattern/relationship that the size of your audience is inversely proportional to the size of your message. This makes some vague sense, but the numbers used seem to fall apart when you think about it and expand it a bit more: if you want to coordinate thousands of people, you have five words… but what if I want to coordinate 100,000 people? Do I have one word? You quickly run into a wall, since you can’t have less than one word.
The specific numbers actually aren’t important here (and to the author’s credit, they point out that the numbers are made up, even though the claims self-referentially produce the title). What does matter is what this crack in the reasoning starts to reveal: there’s way more to what affects audience size, and its relationship to message size is more complicated. For example, millions and millions of people have read book series like Harry Potter, and it has influenced entire fandoms. (This specific example, as opposed to something like some political movements, may not be about detailed “coordination,” but regardless) The point is that if people enjoy the message or the coordination, more people will be likely to read or engage in it. You can have a small message that coordinates nobody, and a large message that coordinates many people. Smaller messages might be more effective ceteris paribus up to a point, but I think you’ll also find that messages that are too small may also be less effective at reaching large audiences because they are too small.
Ultimately, I get the big idea—there is some relationship between content size and audience size—but I don’t think it does much to improve my model of the world, which already vaguely recognized this. Furthermore, unless someone completely didn’t even recognize that basic fuzzy relationship, this post seems like it could actually distort their model of the world. I think a similarly short post could have been less inaccurate while still sparking thought.
I’m quite neutral on this post. On the one hand, it is short and simple, with a clear concept that has some impact/relevance. On the other hand, I think the concept is somewhat inaccurate (and very imprecise): the reasoning mainly supposes a pattern/relationship that the size of your audience is inversely proportional to the size of your message. This makes some vague sense, but the numbers used seem to fall apart when you think about it and expand it a bit more: if you want to coordinate thousands of people, you have five words… but what if I want to coordinate 100,000 people? Do I have one word? You quickly run into a wall, since you can’t have less than one word.
The specific numbers actually aren’t important here (and to the author’s credit, they point out that the numbers are made up, even though the claims self-referentially produce the title). What does matter is what this crack in the reasoning starts to reveal: there’s way more to what affects audience size, and its relationship to message size is more complicated. For example, millions and millions of people have read book series like Harry Potter, and it has influenced entire fandoms. (This specific example, as opposed to something like some political movements, may not be about detailed “coordination,” but regardless) The point is that if people enjoy the message or the coordination, more people will be likely to read or engage in it. You can have a small message that coordinates nobody, and a large message that coordinates many people. Smaller messages might be more effective ceteris paribus up to a point, but I think you’ll also find that messages that are too small may also be less effective at reaching large audiences because they are too small.
Ultimately, I get the big idea—there is some relationship between content size and audience size—but I don’t think it does much to improve my model of the world, which already vaguely recognized this. Furthermore, unless someone completely didn’t even recognize that basic fuzzy relationship, this post seems like it could actually distort their model of the world. I think a similarly short post could have been less inaccurate while still sparking thought.