Ways People Read
I’ve often been surprised by the variation in the reasons different people follow the same blog. If you don't want to attract the wrong crowd, you could try making sure your writing is boring or incomprehensible along all of these axes except the ones you intend.
| Evaluates things by/responds to | Representative example |
|---|---|
| Scanning for shibboleths and fnords | Democrats; Republicans |
| Vocabulary size, production value, pictures of brain scans | I Fucking Love Science |
| Conventional wisdom plug and chug | Best Practices; Politifact readers; People who check for p<0.05 but can't explain what a p-value is |
| Complex self-consistent conceptual structures, clever phrasing and style | Ribbonfarm readers, Slate Star Codex on bad days |
| Force-fitting fixed world-model without moving parts | Fundamentalists; Dumber Marxists |
| Adapting fixed world-model with moving parts | Marxists; Libertarians; People who want Econ 101 to apply to everything |
| Narrative coherence, granfalloon reinforcement | "Outrage porn"; Everyday Feminism; Vox; Breitbart |
| Hypocrisy, irony, smugness, shaming | Woke Twitter; Rational Wiki; 4chan |
| Poking holes in other people's narrative coherence | Slate Star Codex |
| Fixing weaknesses in own world-model | Less Wrong(?), People who know whether or not they can draw a can opener |