"Messages" are the currency of the universe: the more and better messages you emit, the more successful you will be. Some messages take no time, some take a great deal of time; message rate and type varies substantially over a human's 30k days of life.
> The more messages a person writes, the more the person cares, and the more their opinion will be taken into account
That sounds like a terrible idea. People who post a hundred angry tirades are rarely the most insightful ones. Additionally, this gives weight to low-effort, low-value messages.
Obviously the secretary won't do a simple message count, but try to take substance and length into account, but it is the primary feature under evaluation, as it's written.
So the summary is that a longer message has a higher chance for a response, but it's more efficient to just spew out a lot of shorter messages and spam everyone.
It's kind of interesting that there's some kind of conservation rule at work there. The amount of effort you have to expend must scale with the number of bits you want to convey correctly _and_ the number of people you successfully convey it to. Delegating to other people will corrupt the message. Large 1-to-N blasts can only convey a few bits before people stop reading or get confused. To perfectly communicate all of the information to all of the people, you'd have to go express it to them individually.
> The graph clearly shows that in raw terms, it helps guys to write longer messages. But when we factor in the actual time it takes to type a given message, it becomes clear that in terms of time put in vs. conversations generated, shorter is actually better.
Often, the most concentrated the message, the higher the impact. Sometimes a single sentence followed by silence is more powerful than a 1-hour talk. Counter-intuitive (but who said communication was straightforward).
I love this concept. I always begin messages with the most actionable or important thing at the top, and the rest that follows is the context. Respect the time of others and don't bury the lede
It truly is a cognitive burden for people who care about how their words are perceived and understood. Logically, I see two ways to succeed in communicating to large groups.
One way is to tune down your level of awareness of, or your psychological attachment to, how your message is being perceived; i.e. turn off the filter and just talk, public perception be damned.
The other way would be to improve your mental approximation of how people are perceiving and emotionally responding to your message, taking the integral of emotional response like some kind of social calculus. Perhaps this consists of bucketing people into groups, the way politicians do, only in more of a real time fashion? I'm not sure, but I do find it interesting.
The time you spend composing a message should be proportional to the number of people in your intended audience.
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