Word count is relevant if the author has a complicated point to get across, or is putting in an enormous amount of effort and not being rewarded commensurately. It isn’t so much about the reward, but reading between the lines around curation outcomes.
I’ve got some more metrics I’ve been working on for this data set, and I will be publishing more insights in the near future. Images Per Post, Words per image, “pay per image”, all broken down by communities and tags.
It will take some time to sift through the data, but I also want to see if there is any long-term trend where a certain subset of authors have lower than average word counts or images per post, but above average payouts.
I know there’s a lot of auto voters out there, but at the same time, there’s also a lot of people who see a name they know, and upvote blindly, without addressing the quality of each individual post against its peers.
My underlying thesis is that authors should be competing for the reward pool based on merit, and as a rising tide drives all ships… we can hopefully see the subjective (not the objective) quality of posts increase.
I agree with your point that some subjects need longer posts to get into full details.
But data shows there isn't always a correlation between the length of the post and its reward, and that is normal.
Looking forward to the other correlations you've made. The one about images will be interesting. I tend to believe posts with more images do better on rewards. And yet, I rarely add more than 1 on mine...