Blog Analysis
Harris
January 15, 2020
The way the blog is written makes it feel like the article was written for a general audience based around teens and young adults. The more laid back terms and phrases make the article sound more directed toward a high school graduate level.
The writer starts the blog by talking about numbers that represent how many posts a user has made. Then goes into his first point, about how showing the number of posts someone has made encourages more talking than listening.
This question brought me in because it started an idea, giving me some food for thought if you will.
His main idea is about how listening is better than talking, and he believes the internet should encourage reading rather than typing.
Attwood brings up to experiments done by bloggers, one is called the ‘Ars Banana Experiment’ and the other is called ‘The Slate Experiment’
The Ars Banana experiment tests to see how many people comment before reading through the whole article.
The Slate Experiment is analytics on Farhad Manjoo’s article. The analytics showed that most people only read half of his article.
These two examples are good ideas and prove a point by showing a small number of people read through the article.
Attwood gives four different solutions to these reading issues he has brought up.
He proposes to have the pages load automatically.
He proposes a timer for registered users so the site runners or other users could see how long someone has spent on reading an article.
Attwood suggests giving rewards to people who read through all of the articles.
Make reading the articles, comments, and likes all updated live.
These are his four main points of improvement.
There are a few issues I have picked up with the blog itself. For starters, Attwood starts off by talking about an issue with the numbers representing the number of posts someone has made. Attwood states that the numbers encourage more talking than listening/reading. The two examples he gives are based more on articles than other social media like Twitter or Instagram which both show the number of posts someone has made.
The two articles Attwood uses don’t discuss his main point and question, “the more you talk, the better the conversation, Is this the right message to send to everyone in a discussion? More fundamentally, is it even true?”
While focusing more on the “listening is a better” aspect, Attwood doesn’t answer the question proposed at the beginning.
The articles do not prove that listening is better, nor do they prove that “the more you talk, the better the conversation.”. The two experiments provided only prove that retention rates on articles are low.
The first three points he uses toward the end focus on fixing the issues with retention rates on articles rather than answering the question.
The fourth is more general in turn and could work to improve the quality of discussion.
