Analyzing a blog

Reading is fundamental
Wong
Jan 14, 2020

The audience for this blog post would be people in their teens to mid thirties, with at least a high school level of education. The post is written in a way that is easy to understand and most online users that leave comments would be in that age group. People with an occupation that creates written online content may be interested in this post as it shares information on what most online users do when visiting a web page.

Jeff Atwood introduces the blog post by showing a picture of what information most discussions have beside a person's username, and how this will encourage users to post more because they can control the post count to make it bigger.

Atwood's main argument is that people need to spend less time talking and more time listening. He says that too much talking has a negative effect on the value of the conversation because no one is listening, they are just waiting for their turn to talk.

He cites two pieces of research to support his argument. The first is the Ars Banana Experiment. In this experiment, there was an article about how guns at home are more likely to be used stupidly rather than for self defense. Partway through the article, it asked people to mention “bananas” in their comment. It wasn’t until on page 3, the 93rd comment, that someone mentioned bananas. This shows that most people did not read the article completely before leaving a comment. The second is the Slate Experiment, which shares collected analytic data based on real usage, shows that most people won't read the entire article before leaving a comment. The data shows that most visitors only read about 50% of the article. Both of the cited research pieces show that most people are more eager to talk than to listen.

Atwood says that there is too much talking, and that we need to encourage listening. Some of his proposed solutions are to remove interruptions to reading, measure and display read times, give rewards for reading and update in real time. He says the main interruption to change is pagination as it is a barrier to reading and updating conversations in real time allows people to read conversations as if they are engaged in a live conversation. Measuring and displaying read times and giving rewards for reading times lets other readers know which users actually took the time to read the article before leaving a comment.