3 ms·

And also if you say something controversial.

• logicallee 10y ago
  What you point out is an interesting effect. Blog posts that are controversial know that there's a chance a sh$#storm will ensue in the comments. In the case of general bloggers, such as researchers i.e. not people who are actively trying to troll or generate pageviews, but on personal blogs, how does this affect writing that is controversial? I don't know academic publishing well enough to compare. I think that as far as controversial claims that would make it to somewhere like Hacker News, the effect is that if the controversial statements are wrong, then the comments will shoot them down, and the story will be buried. Furthermore, the rest of the comments will pile on the first comment that points out that the blog post is mistaken. Perhaps an effect of this is that you can tell from the tone that some blog posts take, that they are being extremely careful to lay a rock-solid foundation, and kind of "convert" their readers who might otherwise vehemently disagree with them. For a recent example, check out this blog post: https://gregfallis.com/2017/04/14/seriously-the-guy-has-a-point/ https://gregfallis.com/2017/04/14/seriously-the-guy-has-a-po... I actually just noticed something really interesting! The very first words in this blog post are: "I got metaphorically spanked a couple of days ago." Would any academic article on any subject start in this way? So the effect of the backlash against controversial statements, on the writing style of blog posts, is interesting and in many cases highly visible. It is hard for me to compare this with academic writing. (But it certainly wouldn't start with words like that.)