This is anecdotal, not really based on any real data except my experience blogging for ten years, working for a publisher and a few magazines (both literary and political) on a semi-professional basis, and I have learned one thing: rants get readers, clickbait with hyperbole gets readers, but anytime you try to deepen something in a clearly academic way, you don’t get readers without really good branding. The revisions to the Facebook algorithm after it monetized its pages function with targeted advertising makes this harder. I say this because, while admittedly most of what I write on my blog is fairly under-polished as I write too quickly, the rants spread and anytime I try to go into the weeds, they don’t.
Just an obvious observation. The consequences of this, however, are that blogs more than a lot of other writing, including the bane of my existence, think piece editorials, encourages snark, hyperbole, and hyper-simplification. Sometimes this worries me.
Symptomatic Commentary 