General Discussion

Boils down to convenience for ONE writer vs. convenience of 100s of readers. Assymetric
https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=8762614

In the General Discussion forum, most threads have at least 300 views. Many have much more, but that would include multiple views as discussions progress. But let's assume 300 readers per Original Post and per most posts at the beginning of a thread as a lower bound on the number.

Dashing off quick OP with an opaque title and a sentence or two saves the writer time. Let's say it takes 30 seconds to do that. For comparison, let's say that a more informative title and several sentences summarizing key points and making a convincing case to view the video (live or YouTube) takes two minutes, 120 seconds for a little more typing and a little more thinking.

On the other side of the equation, a reader reading the better written OP can read it and decide whether to pursue it further within say 20 seconds. But dashed-off OP can easily take 60 seconds to puzzle out what it is referring to and then to glean from sparse clues enough information to decide to whether to pursue it.

However, to dramatize the case, let's suppose the difference in time is only 6 seconds instead of 40 seconds.

If there are 300 readers for every writer, dashing off an OP saves the writer 90 seconds and costs the readers 300 x 6 = 1800 seconds or half an hour.

On the other side of the ledger, if the writer spends an extra 90 seconds she/he saves readers half an hour of time.

Now, isn't it progressive and considerate to invest a mere 90 seconds to save the community a half hour?

Multiply that out by dozens of threads and it becomes easy to see that considerate writers make the community much more efficient.

Who is the writer writing for anyway? Their own ego or the edification and enjoyment of 300 readers?