---
title: Contribution style
---

If we take a broad view of the content creation pipeline, there are
many steps leading up to the publication of a piece of work:

- Brainstorming ideas
- Prototyping
- Writing up the final version
- Copyediting
- Giving feedback

In addition, if we consider just the final output format, there are
many styles:

- Blog post
- Book
- Wiki page
- Social media post (e.g., Facebook post)
- Academic paper

Finally there is a choice to focus on the kind of contribution:

- Original idea/discovery
- Replication (e.g., the replication of a scientific study)
- Popularization/distillation

We can use the term "contribution style" to refer to these
choices. Why are some contribution styles more popular than others?
How do people decide what contribution style to use? Are some
contribution styles "better" than others? Why are some contribution
styles more socially or financially rewarded than others?

The "opposite" of contribution style might be "consumption style":
one's preferred consumption format for information. One can ask
similar questions like, should one prefer certain formats? How should
one reward the creation of work (e.g., principles for "liking" things
on Facebook)? Should one stick to popularizations of scientific works
or read the original papers (this isn't a dichotomy)?

{% include toc.md %}

## Decision process

How do people decide what contribution style to use? In general, the
decision process seems to involve many factors (how fun it seems,
value produced, prestige, habit) and might not be fully conscious.

## Page history

This page is an attempt to abstract several things I have been
puzzling over:

- Why do some people make content creation a lifestyle, by being
  extremely transparent about "what they are up to" by releasing
  things online, while other people are private about what they do?
- The Facebook "liking" problem: how do I choose what things to react
  to on Facebook? What am I even optimizing for? How do I avoid some
  things I don't like about Facebook reactions, like circlejerking
  behavior, and liking things that are "too popular"?
- The feeling that blogging is "overrated" or socially over-rewarded
  compared to editing wikis. (Wikis have a canonicity about them, yet
  people prefer to imprint their ego on everything by posting things
  on their website or writing a blog post with their name on it.)

## External links

- <https://www.gwern.net/Links#collaboration-style>