Triberr Experiment #2: Post Length

Within Triberr there’s a function to give karma to posts.

You click a little graphic and give the post a thumbs up, or a thumbs down.

I enjoy testing the psychology of people, and yes, sometimes messing with their minds. This time I wanted to test the policy that bloggers and people give weight to blog posts that are filled with content and generally longer.

So, I posted a short post. It was titled “Copyright infringement is awful...” and then gave just a short piece of information afterwards. Roughly a 25 word post. Yep, very short.

And low and behold – it received negative thumbs. Thumbs down.

Bingo.

It demonstrated what I had originally knew would happen. Bloggers place value on content, and often that value comes in the form length, whether the content is good or not. Even though the post was something occurring in my life, a real event, not many took to liking it – because it was short.

What I like to point out is that the most powerful blog posts don’t always contain length as their mainstay. They contain truth. A point. A personal opinion placed in a public venue sharing worth and intelligence.

For example take one of my posts, “What is the meaning of life?” It’s a three word post – yet I believe – contains a message more powerful than 90% of my content. A type of power that has the capability of changing lives and moving. Real, literal movement in lives.

So for me that post is more worthwhile than some posts I write filled with over 800 words.

Now I understand we have Twitter for 140 characters. We have Facebook for up to 500 characters. And blog posts for an infinite amount of content. But I believe short posts and long posts all have their place on a blog.

Why not? Isn’t it your blog?

I continually notice this “rat race” for content on blogs, in leiu of sharing the bright (sometimes dark) content of lives. We often forget the stories. We forget the communicating. We forget the human.

Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I’m right. It doesn’t really matter – but I’d love to hear your thoughts.

*Eventually blog fans took care of the blog post, and ended up generating a conclusive positive thumbs up score.