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Notes -
Catching up on weeks-old culture war threads on mobile, I'm cursed with not being able to easily see the comment score (at least as compared to on desktop with its larger screen real estate), which means I sometimes expend significant effort trying to extract the insight from a post, only to realize at the bottom of a post that, considering the negative or otherwise low comment score, I'm not stupid, but the post was stupid.
(I understand the admin team, and perhaps even the majority of the community here, is opposed to moving the comment score up to the top of posts out of some egalitarian and anti-herd-mentality principle. I find that misguided, but since this is an excellent free product nonetheless, I would be ungrateful to complain too much.)
Having to suffer through the aforementioned, however, has led me to identify a specific heuristic for quickly recognizing one category of posts that generally perform poorly, as measured by community feedback. The pattern: a post that contains lots of formatting and significant number of embedded links.
I would guess the following reasons contribute to this:
Most posters here think quality insights are generally self-explanatory, especially to readers who are ideologically sympathetic or at least are rational and charitable, and so there is little need to invest the time to preemptively solve for [citation needed]. A post without any citation is thus more likely to reflect the original poster's belief that the post will be ideologically well received by the community.
Including a handful of interesting and helpful links is usually positive, but the moment one post contains more than, say, five embedded links, it becomes increasingly like a chore as the average link quality invariably regresses to the internet mean, and the presumption on a reader's time to read all those added links ironically means one is unlikely to read any, which in turn lowers a reader's trust of the sincerely of the poster. I imagine there is a rationality name for this, but colloquially it's like replying to a subpoena or FOIA request by dumping heaps of irrelevant documents.
When it comes to culture war topics, the community likely distrusts citations from the establishment/authorities, which may be less concerned with the truth and more with not causing "harm". There is so much drivel around that someone who peddles tons of links to Nature or New York Times or the CDC is liable to be regurgitating NPC speech. On the other side of the partisan divide, a flat earther is perhaps aware enough to be insecure and so tries to buttress his position with tons of links to Zero Hedge or whatever the pertinent equivalent is today.
There is something low status about expending too much effort in making a post that suggests a poster isn't very busy/successful in real life, in which case their writing probably won't turn out to be worth reading either.
When GPT-5 comes out I'll ask it to run an analysis on this site using the above rule. Until then, I'll just present this as a fun hypothesis without investing any effort to back it up with empirical data.
PS: I have not read this week's culture war thread yet, so this is definitely not an attack on any specific poster.
I dunno, my highest voted comment ever had lots of formatting and upwards of 50 links.
And looking at my top comments in general, and also specifically those ones that have been AAQC'd, I see that "strong thesis supported by a bulleted or numbered list" seems to do well.
I do agree that eloquent and passionate rants also do well here, but I think that effortposts with backing links are also well-received when people put in the effort to make them.
Were you thinking of some particular well-formatted and linked post(s) that didn't get the support you expected it to recently?
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