It's hard for me to tell with this rich and plentiful data, but I also suspect that Halfhaven created higher quality posts, since there are more people who can publish a good post every other day than there are people who can publish a good post every day.
Halfhaven organizer (and unsuccessful participant) here.
I think it depends on what your everyday life is like, and that's different for different people. Like, if your work is low-stress and then you get time to relax, there are various things that you think about "in the background", and letting the topic mature for 2 days can be better than trying to post something immediately. But if your work is high-stress, and immediately afterwards you take care of kids, and then you have maybe 2 hours of free time and you need to choose whether it's cleaning your room, doing some exercise, reading your favorite websites, or posting a blog, that's not really conductive to great writing.
Once a week definitely sounds more sustainable. That said, Halfhaven wasn't meant to be sustainable for longer than the two months. (And I failed to do even that.) But the idea behind both Inkhaven and Halfhaven wasn't to be sustainable, but to try something extreme, and see whether it starts some fire. Halfhaven was just a slightly less extreme version for those who couldn't afford the fully extreme version.
There is a tradeoff between quality and quantity, and even worse the quality is not measurable (otherwise we could try to optimize for some formula involving both quantity and quality). There was already a suggestion somewhere on Less Wrong that very long articles should count as multiple articles, so that at least the rules do not nudge you so much towards writing 500 words long pieces. (Though this could create an opposite bad incentive: once you have a topic in mind and already started writing, it could be tempting to keep adding more and more words; after all, there is always sometime else to add, but no one wants to read too long ramblings.)
Hmmm, a possible metric could involve karma on LessWrong. Like, you have to make one post every few days, but for each N karma points on LW you can skip one. But I feel like getting LW involved in the game could get one banned. (Well, probably not, but it still feels like burning some commons. We should post on LW because we believe we have something valuable to say, not because we have committed to generate some quantity.)
Another experiment along these lines: blog-a-thon!
The output was pretty good, but it was fairly stressful and lasted quite a long duration. I think the blog-a-thon ended up being mostly useful for pushing mostly-finished-drafts into actually-published-posts, rather than getting people started on drafts in the first place — which is I think is great, tbc.
Some changes I'd make to future blog-a-thons:
Overall quite happy with how the blog-a-thon went! :)
Yeah, and I would guess that this fixing-up of drafts happened a lot early in Inkhaven, but was less sustainable except for folks who have a month worth of viable drafts sitting around. I definitely don't have that many drafts, but maybe other people do.
I probably could've talked about this dynamic in more detail, but I'm glad that you actually went and ran the experiment.
To balance the cost, you could do some events that are net positive for the house, such as people losing money if they don't post, rather than buying them something if they do.
Personally, I found the first week or two of Halfhaven to be useful. After that, Goodhart's Law took over. I wanted to put more time into each post, so I chose not to continuing publishing at the proscribed schedule. After that, I continued to find value in hanging out on the Halfhaven Discord.
Hey, I did Halfhaven, and I'm not sure it's right to say it's really a faster pace than Inkhaven, since Inkhaven was an in-person residency where the residents were working either part-time or not at all, and could focus entirely on writing. Halfhaven, on the other hand, was something you did in addition to your normal life.
I kind of agree that one post a day (or every other day) feels too frequent, but also, too frequent for what? Is the goal to produce great posts during the event, or to improve as a writer? I think the optimal frequency for these two goals are likely different. If the goal is to get better at writing quickly, then I'm reminded of the story people quote from the book Art & Fear:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
It may be the case that the optimal pace for learning will simply feel too fast, because it's not the optimal pace for exploiting your existing skills to make great posts (in the short term).
Committing to writing 1 post a week has been a really good practice for me. Although I decided to take December off for a variety of reasons, the need to keep publishing has forced me to become a more efficient writer, to write about topics I might otherwise have neglected, and of course to get more feedback on my writing than I otherwise would if I spent more time effortposting and less time actually posting. I expect to keep it up in 2026.
The Problem
One of the main complaints I heard about the Inkaven Residency is that it put too much pressure on people to write too quickly. The fellowship was based on the premise that people who publish every day have historically gotten very good at writing. The problem is that ability to publish every day is strongly correlated with latent potential as a writer and ability to publish good things every day; people tend to publish only what they feel good about, so if someone is publishing every day, then many of them can likely produce things they feel good about very quickly.
When you actually try to make people write every day in hopes of making them into people who can publish high-quality thing frequently, then you run into Goodhart's law:
Or more commonly,
There is, however, a countervailing force, which made Inkhaven less bad than the above reason would suggest: practicing writing often makes you better at writing. Not always enough to make up for immense time pressure, but enough to do something at all.
The Experiments
Halfhaven
The Halfhaven camp took the Inkhaven format but modified it to be fully remote and with posts required every other day, intended for those who "have a school / job / family / other excuse, and can't simply take a month off."
It's hard for me to tell with this rich and plentiful data, but I also suspect that Halfhaven created higher quality posts, since there are more people who can publish a good post every other day than there are people who can publish a good post every day. Some people take longer to think of good things, or tend to write about things that take more effort and time per unit blog-goodness, such as research or talking to a thousand people[1].
My 1/7thHaven
For the past ~4 months, since early August 2025, I've been writing a post every week, with two exceptions, once for a reasonable excuse and once for simply failing to Do The Thing. Instead of being kicked out of the program for failing to post, I simply lost[2] a small amount of money, calibrated to be the least amount of money that would get me to reliably post something.
I feel like this has allowed me to make much higher-quality writing that often requires significant research and developing new ideas, while also pressuring me to put out my shorter-form ideas.
Conclusion
Going for writing extremely often is not always the best strategy, but writing as fast as you can sustain makes you better at writing. Balancing frequency with quality standards is important. I would like to see more people doing commitment devices, but I don't want people to be scared off by the reports of Inkhaven being too difficult for some people.
Although that particular author seemed to have done that very quickly, so maybe this isn't a good example.
Specifically, paid two of my friends for the service of embarrassing me for not publishing anything.