As a blogger, I found (a few years ago) I reliably got more comments on what I thought were my *worst* posts. Now that’s more or less no longer true; I can write stuff that’s reasonably “meaty” for a blog post and still spark debate, though I’ll never get a ton of attention as long as I stay out of the Petty Bullshit Gravity Well. Full-fledged theories are bad for getting comments (and also more likely to be wrong in retrospect). Semi-formed ideas fleshed out with facts and references and imagery are better.
Semi-formed ideas fleshed out with facts and references and imagery are better.
Was this the main thing you do now that you didn’t do a few years ago? Anything else you can think of that’s changed? (It does very much match my experience of the ingredient))
Full-fledged theories are bad for getting comments (and also more likely to be wrong in retrospect).
Interesting—this seems obviously usually-true in retrospect but I hadn’t thought of these two facts at the same time. I think the things separating a full-fledged theory (that’s wrong) from a something-less-than-a-full-fledged-wrong-theory, is something like:
if the author has this entire ontology that seems wrong and they’ve doubled down on it to flesh out an full-fledged-theory, my reaction is more like “I can’t even”, rather than “hey, that’s not right.”
Relatedly, I feel much worse telling something that their baby is bad than that their half-formed idea is bad.
Theories are just plain longer, which means I have to invest more and think about more things at once to figure out if it’s bad
The sort of person doing this I think tends to just not be as good a writer. This seems weird and confusing, and maybe false, but it’s the association I just formed. Or maybe “young writer trying to come up with a grand theory” is a clearly defined genre (even if it’s not the majority of theories), that I recognize. When I see a grand-theory, my first impulse is to skim to the comments and see if commenters think it’s worth my time to engage with.
Having had a week to think even more about this (after deliberately not having a dedicated conclusion when I posted this, for similar reasons), I think my thesis statement for “what good kinds of posts will get the attention and comments that we want”, is something like:
Be slightly wrong, and leave people with unsolved problems, with “Semi-formed ideas fleshed out with facts and references and imagery” being a pretty good way to accomplish that.
The main difference between my blogging “back then” and now is that back then my goal was to write things that were absolutely true and absolutely uncontroversial. I didn’t achieve this goal—it was never realistic for the blogging medium. And sometimes I threw caution to the wind and wrote extremely controversial things. I’m now aiming for pretty true and not very controversial.
As a blogger, I found (a few years ago) I reliably got more comments on what I thought were my *worst* posts. Now that’s more or less no longer true; I can write stuff that’s reasonably “meaty” for a blog post and still spark debate, though I’ll never get a ton of attention as long as I stay out of the Petty Bullshit Gravity Well. Full-fledged theories are bad for getting comments (and also more likely to be wrong in retrospect). Semi-formed ideas fleshed out with facts and references and imagery are better.
That’s interesting.
Semi-formed ideas fleshed out with facts and references and imagery are better.
Full-fledged theories are bad for getting comments (and also more likely to be wrong in retrospect).
if the author has this entire ontology that seems wrong and they’ve doubled down on it to flesh out an full-fledged-theory, my reaction is more like “I can’t even”, rather than “hey, that’s not right.”
Relatedly, I feel much worse telling something that their baby is bad than that their half-formed idea is bad.
Theories are just plain longer, which means I have to invest more and think about more things at once to figure out if it’s bad
The sort of person doing this I think tends to just not be as good a writer. This seems weird and confusing, and maybe false, but it’s the association I just formed. Or maybe “young writer trying to come up with a grand theory” is a clearly defined genre (even if it’s not the majority of theories), that I recognize. When I see a grand-theory, my first impulse is to skim to the comments and see if commenters think it’s worth my time to engage with.
Having had a week to think even more about this (after deliberately not having a dedicated conclusion when I posted this, for similar reasons), I think my thesis statement for “what good kinds of posts will get the attention and comments that we want”, is something like:
Be slightly wrong, and leave people with unsolved problems, with “Semi-formed ideas fleshed out with facts and references and imagery” being a pretty good way to accomplish that.
The main difference between my blogging “back then” and now is that back then my goal was to write things that were absolutely true and absolutely uncontroversial. I didn’t achieve this goal—it was never realistic for the blogging medium. And sometimes I threw caution to the wind and wrote extremely controversial things. I’m now aiming for pretty true and not very controversial.