I haven't (yet) clicked any links in this post, but I suspect that the explanation is at least partly due to the same dynamic you see with people who leave comments: very few people who read any given post will comment on it. 90%+ of people are lurkers, for better or worse, *even if* they consider themselves infovores. An infovore may like this post, but not click on any of its links, because she has dozens of other tabs open with *other* links that she's clicked from some other page.
I like this thought a lot. Infovores tend to be very aware of the hard trade-offs that need to be made to consume the very most essential information, and that means skipping a lot of links. Perhaps there is an important age difference there also, as younger infovores have relatively more things to discover and older ones are already familiar with a lot of the information being linked in any given piece of writing.
This strikes me as related to Tyler's hypothesis that many curious people find shortcuts for evaluating links without clicking on them to save time.
Alternative hypothesis: people don't click on links until they are referenced by multiple bloggers. Most links are mundanely repetitive and not worth reading... until they do something that other filler content won't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
Depends on how many read on mobile. I almost always click on links when the desktop browser is open but almost never on smartphone. It's load time+laxk of space, difficulty of getting back to the article
Generally, in my experience - having been on the web for about as long as there has been a web - links are for one of three main purposes:
1. They are the source document under discussion. This one is obvious. It is also the most common reason for me to click from a blog or a secondary source (newspaper, magazine, review article). I want the straight stuff in that case. Real infovore territory.
2. Serving as a reference. They reiterate and support the text that is underlined. In this case, if I don't believe or understand the author, I can go to the link and get some additional details; the definition of a word, etc. Most of the time, if I don't believe, I stop reading anyway, but sometimes a source can push me over to believing... and yes, links in this sense signify the willingness to 'show your work.' You can claim credibility without earning it with a link, until someone catches on. You can fake it with ...
3. Rick-rolling the reader. Sometimes it's a joke, a falling cat, or whatever. Usually it's not funny enough for me to want to have clicked.
Thank you for your insights! I did attempt a bit of a joke/inadvertent rick-roll under "what is the deal?" since it links to a Jim Carrey parody of Jerry Seinfeld. Reconsidering based on your comment, so maybe I'll just put that here.
I love Substack, but one of the things I hate about it is that when you hover over a link, it doesn't show you what the link goes to. I like to evaluate a link before I click on it. Is it an xkcd cartoon that provides a humorous commentary? A journal article? Another one of your posts? A different post? By taking away my ability to see what a link may be, Substack reduces the chances that I'll click on it.
Also, tbh, and this is on me, a lot of my Internet reading is low-quality reading. Sometimes I just look at my Home page on Reddit but without clicking on any of the posts. I just skim endlessly. I am constantly in search of things to read but then I abandon them halfway, or become overwhelmed because I've opened 8 articles.
The third thing is, I think clicking on links disrupts my flow. The way I TEND to use links in Substacks is that I click so that they open in a different tab, and then I go look at that tab sometime later. That works better for a link in a list full of links (like a "here are the cool things I found this month" post) than it does for a link that is meant to provide context in an article.
I guess the main way to sum up the above is to say, I have ADHD. Or something similar.
I think you can still preview links on substack by holding the click to see the url and then letting go. Works for me anyway, but I may not be describing the motion accurately enough to replicate…
I have a similar sense of “links break flow”, even if I’m interested in a topic. I want to read an article the way the author meant it, and often the claim being supported by the link isn’t the main point of the article. The type of link I’m most likely to follow is “here’s a related interesting thing, in particular a blog post by the same author”.
If your goal is to get people to follow those, you might want to put those in footnotes. That way, clicking the link doesn’t break the flow of the article - I’m at the end anyway.
I enjoyed your post and only clicked one link. I have come to view links similar to footnotes or endnotes. They are there for the author to justify or add or for those who want to go deeper. Not for the majority of people.
Also, a 25% clickthrough rate would blow e-mail marketers away. Most clickthrough rates for e-mail campaigns are below 5%.
First, I want to say that the way that a lot of people use hyperlinks makes for a really bad reading experience that taxes working memory more than is necessary. I read so that I can understand what's written, not to have an adventure tracking facts, papers, and memes through the internet.
Also, I wonder if, on average, only a third or so of Zvi's readers even read much of Zvi's posts. Substack can tell you who opens the email (if they download images, I've no idea how many people are like me and don't download them by default), or who opens the post in the app or browser, but I don't think they tell you if the readers made it to the bottom of the page or how many minutes they spent reading.
Just for fun, I thought I'd look at what sort of links Zvi has on his posts. I chose his car seat article. The links are just the sort of thing I wouldn't click. Things like a random Youtube clip that as a reader I'd (correctly) suspect isn't relevant to the article, links to papers that Zvi quotes or paraphrases (I'd skimmed the main paper at least a year ago and if I were truly interested in arguments around whether car seats act as contraceptive maybe I'd read the others), links to webpages with random facts that Zvi quotes, tweets that he quotes and that I'm not interested in learning more about, a LessWrong post that's pretty much just a picture of car seats.
If you want people to click links (for whatever reason), you shouldn't be summarizing the linked material as this is either redundant or implying that the reader shouldn't be clicking the link!
I wouldn't be surprised if Zvi mostly uses links to help him keep straight what is going on when he goes back to review old posts (sources he used, what he had just heard about at the time, etc.) If so you are probably right that many users are OK to skip most of the time. [And I know that I personally don't read all of Zvi's posts...]
But on the other hand, how do you know Zvi is a reliable source if you never click a link? Should you trust his covid and child safety advice (pretty high stakes) if you haven't clicked even a single source to evaluate, whether it is redundant or not?
As an aside, I really appreciate hearing about the user experience with links here and I have already made various changes based on feedback in this comments section. Anything I could be doing better? :)
I actually don't trust Zvi as a reliable source for anything important, and it's not just because I've clicked some of his links. There's context beyond just links, of course.
Also, I don't have any feedback. I've not read enough by you.
Proposition: if they use the links like they are making a "Second Brain" (e.g. Logseq, Roam, Obsidian, Athens), most of the time people will treat it as a Wikipedia article and proceed as such. The con is that people WILL treat the whole thing as an expert opinion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten
The main reason I don't click on links is a lack of time. I've had a problem in the past of subscribing to too many newsletters and blogs and noticed that when I read every additional link in the main piece I tend to get lost in the sauce and can never keep up. However, I always tap+hold on links (I read exclusively on mobile) to determine if the link seems interesting where in which I might end up visiting the link, after all.
TL;DR I always feel crunched for time and would rather read the author's actual piece than the links.
Hmm. The one link I clicked (looking for an explanation of Gell-Man amnesia) didn’t help at all. Maybe the reference is somewhere on that Wikipedia page? But I don’t want to lose my train of thought looking for it. So now I feel like I click too many links.
Also, commenter Maxwell E gave a good summary on a recent post you may find helpful:
"The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is not uncommonly cited among rationalist-adjacent circles. It states that readers tend to be able to easily identify mistakes about their own field of research in popular news coverage or essays, while simultaneously abstaining from reasonable skepticism about the accuracy of news coverage for fields the reader is unfamiliar with.
That is, we tend to assume that anyone who can write engagingly and who comes off as confident and knowledgeable is correct, even though our priors on accuracy ought to be largely informed by how accurately the writer represents the field in which the reader has firsthand experience."
I love getting so much feedback on the links in this post! When I click on the link it goes to this,
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. … You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. …
You read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
I'm glad my reply didn't come across as too snarky! I tried the link the first time on my phone and the "#" part of the link didn't work, so I ended up at the top of the page. But it works on the laptop.
This mini-experience did make it clear to me that the biggest reason I don't click links is because it makes me lose my train of thought. The rabbit hole is infinite.
I am, at least momentarily, now very attuned to the links in posts and to my choices of whether or not to click. Also, TIL that the author of a post actually notices whether clicks links or not. Had no idea.
Haven't decided yet how useful it is as a metric to seriously track for platform growth, but it seems to be one of the more accurate pieces of data Substack provides. Go figure!
I want to see links and references—it gives me a sense of confidence that what you’re saying is correct. But I don’t necessarily want to verify. To be honest I’m surprised the numbers are as high as they are.
Also outbound links to reputable sites help with SEO. As do inbound links
I was interested in acquiring more context for the “Bryan Caplan strategy” of linking to one’s prior work as a means of self-promotion.
So I clicked the link in your article.
I was sent to an Econlib essay titled “A Package of Populist Deregulation”. This article does not describe in any direct way the “Bryan Caplan strategy”. Hmmm...interesting.
It seems you may have never intended to provide context for the “Bryan Caplan strategy”. After-all, the strategy seems simple enough and you described it well in your post. But if that’s true, why did you create the link?
Possible theories:
1) You wanted to boost awareness of Bryan Caplan the person.
But wouldn’t a Twitter profile or personal website be more fitting for this purpose?
2) You wanted to boost awareness of Bryan Caplan’s work.
Makes sense. It seems Bryan Caplan has written a fair amount on Econlib. But isn’t that a limited sample size? For ex, what about his books, Substack, etc. So this doesn’t seem likely.
3) You employed a sort of intermediated Bryan Caplan strategy for Bryan Caplan by posting some of his prior work (rather than your own work).
I somehow think this is the most likely reason other than #4. Although it’s still a bit of a jump, and is out of context.
4) It was a mistake.
The boring, but maybe most likely reason.
I’m really not sure. It could be any of these 4 reasons, or other reasons I’m not listing here.
Perhaps this is an explanation, if I may suggest, that one often does not click on links.
Really appreciate this feedback! I think this falls most under implication #6 (my own personal edification) since I liked the way Bryan linked to four of his own works right at the beginning of the blog post I linked and want to learn from that example later.
That said, I may have been better off not linking to it since the more general tendency I was referring to for Caplan to link to his own work frequently is well known to people who follow him and not directly explained anywhere to my knowledge so the link could easily be expected to be something it is not as you experienced.
It is also very hard to get feedback on how good of a job I am doing at providing links so I really appreciate all the feedback on this from you and others in this comments section :)
i thought i was the only one! although the links in my posts are less substantiating background info, more me just adding another layer to my quips
still, most of the emails i get make a point of saying how much they all liked the links. maybe people who like links REALLY like links, and everyone else is kinda indifferent
I clicked a link to Zvi. Also, I too do "links" posts and am surprised at how few readers actually click on any of them. Now allow me to proposition your readers with a link: https://jasonmanning.substack.com/p/links-for-may
I found your thoughts on assisted suicide quite insightful (which makes sense, seeing as you've written a book on the subject!). A short excerpt for those passing through here, noting there is much more at the link :)
"I suspect that as demographic decline accelerates support for assisted suicide will increase. A large population of the elderly and infirm, supported by an increasingly small population of working-age people, produces lots of pressure to normalize it."
May 12, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by Age of Infovores
In the case of my links posts it might be because I give summaries and quotations, so people figure they're already seeing the highlights. And often they are, as its more of a digest post than a pure link listing like at Marginal Revolution or Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex 10.
Arnold Kling does the same snippet and commentary thing and I think I'm more inclined to dive deeper if he specifically adds that the whole thing is worth a read (which I too should start doing for pieces that I think deserve it). Making the link more mysterious and tantalizing might do more to motivate the curious. I notice Marginal Revolution keeps them down to a list of single sentences. Alexander gives a little more. I'd be curious to compare relative rates of click through for each.
interesting observation. on my newsletter Five Things (https://getfivethings.substack.com/) about 20% click on links, which I find extemely low, as I only share 5 things and why would someone subscribe to my newsletter who is not interested in clicking on the links?
The problem with this paradigm is that you cannot control the direction of user self-curation, and that it demonstrate revealed preference. This is basically the 80/20 rule remixed with Sturgeon's Law, that most things you find interesting might be banal for the general population as your personal life experiences are better-than-average. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_lawhttps://www.celent.com/insights/467280569
The counter-rule for this is to do the barbell-strategy of information: 85% of content would be adjacent to public preference, 15% would be off-the-walls curiosities. But avoid contrarianism for retaining sanity. Maybe this could work? https://themindcollection.com/the-tenth-man-rule-devils-advocacy/
One has to note that MR posts sometimes or entirely just links. I would add these links are not just "links" but curated information foremost. If they were coffee table books, MR would simply have better images.
I think that by providing links with so little context, Tyler probably induces much more link clicking than if he were to include commentary the way other link-centric posters do. A lot of the fun for me is trying to figure out why he chose to link to what he did.
He also has built a really strong reputation for sharing interesting things, which people are willing to trust with their clicks.
All of the above. but the one that seems most dubious is actually Tyler's because who can post every day? I think he's success has to do with the content what he does post. I don't read his stuff everyday and may only go to my IRS and find that there are 25 or 30 posts on which to catch up.
I haven't (yet) clicked any links in this post, but I suspect that the explanation is at least partly due to the same dynamic you see with people who leave comments: very few people who read any given post will comment on it. 90%+ of people are lurkers, for better or worse, *even if* they consider themselves infovores. An infovore may like this post, but not click on any of its links, because she has dozens of other tabs open with *other* links that she's clicked from some other page.
I like this thought a lot. Infovores tend to be very aware of the hard trade-offs that need to be made to consume the very most essential information, and that means skipping a lot of links. Perhaps there is an important age difference there also, as younger infovores have relatively more things to discover and older ones are already familiar with a lot of the information being linked in any given piece of writing.
This strikes me as related to Tyler's hypothesis that many curious people find shortcuts for evaluating links without clicking on them to save time.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/12/tuesday-assorted-links-396.html
Alternative hypothesis: people don't click on links until they are referenced by multiple bloggers. Most links are mundanely repetitive and not worth reading... until they do something that other filler content won't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
Depends on how many read on mobile. I almost always click on links when the desktop browser is open but almost never on smartphone. It's load time+laxk of space, difficulty of getting back to the article
Generally, in my experience - having been on the web for about as long as there has been a web - links are for one of three main purposes:
1. They are the source document under discussion. This one is obvious. It is also the most common reason for me to click from a blog or a secondary source (newspaper, magazine, review article). I want the straight stuff in that case. Real infovore territory.
2. Serving as a reference. They reiterate and support the text that is underlined. In this case, if I don't believe or understand the author, I can go to the link and get some additional details; the definition of a word, etc. Most of the time, if I don't believe, I stop reading anyway, but sometimes a source can push me over to believing... and yes, links in this sense signify the willingness to 'show your work.' You can claim credibility without earning it with a link, until someone catches on. You can fake it with ...
3. Rick-rolling the reader. Sometimes it's a joke, a falling cat, or whatever. Usually it's not funny enough for me to want to have clicked.
Thank you for your insights! I did attempt a bit of a joke/inadvertent rick-roll under "what is the deal?" since it links to a Jim Carrey parody of Jerry Seinfeld. Reconsidering based on your comment, so maybe I'll just put that here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0Z7O9Xe57E
I love Substack, but one of the things I hate about it is that when you hover over a link, it doesn't show you what the link goes to. I like to evaluate a link before I click on it. Is it an xkcd cartoon that provides a humorous commentary? A journal article? Another one of your posts? A different post? By taking away my ability to see what a link may be, Substack reduces the chances that I'll click on it.
Also, tbh, and this is on me, a lot of my Internet reading is low-quality reading. Sometimes I just look at my Home page on Reddit but without clicking on any of the posts. I just skim endlessly. I am constantly in search of things to read but then I abandon them halfway, or become overwhelmed because I've opened 8 articles.
The third thing is, I think clicking on links disrupts my flow. The way I TEND to use links in Substacks is that I click so that they open in a different tab, and then I go look at that tab sometime later. That works better for a link in a list full of links (like a "here are the cool things I found this month" post) than it does for a link that is meant to provide context in an article.
I guess the main way to sum up the above is to say, I have ADHD. Or something similar.
I think you can still preview links on substack by holding the click to see the url and then letting go. Works for me anyway, but I may not be describing the motion accurately enough to replicate…
I guess it looks OK on the actual site, just not in Gmail. I'll try more techniques when I'm not using a touchpad sometime.
I have a similar sense of “links break flow”, even if I’m interested in a topic. I want to read an article the way the author meant it, and often the claim being supported by the link isn’t the main point of the article. The type of link I’m most likely to follow is “here’s a related interesting thing, in particular a blog post by the same author”.
If your goal is to get people to follow those, you might want to put those in footnotes. That way, clicking the link doesn’t break the flow of the article - I’m at the end anyway.
I enjoyed your post and only clicked one link. I have come to view links similar to footnotes or endnotes. They are there for the author to justify or add or for those who want to go deeper. Not for the majority of people.
Also, a 25% clickthrough rate would blow e-mail marketers away. Most clickthrough rates for e-mail campaigns are below 5%.
First, I want to say that the way that a lot of people use hyperlinks makes for a really bad reading experience that taxes working memory more than is necessary. I read so that I can understand what's written, not to have an adventure tracking facts, papers, and memes through the internet.
Also, I wonder if, on average, only a third or so of Zvi's readers even read much of Zvi's posts. Substack can tell you who opens the email (if they download images, I've no idea how many people are like me and don't download them by default), or who opens the post in the app or browser, but I don't think they tell you if the readers made it to the bottom of the page or how many minutes they spent reading.
Just for fun, I thought I'd look at what sort of links Zvi has on his posts. I chose his car seat article. The links are just the sort of thing I wouldn't click. Things like a random Youtube clip that as a reader I'd (correctly) suspect isn't relevant to the article, links to papers that Zvi quotes or paraphrases (I'd skimmed the main paper at least a year ago and if I were truly interested in arguments around whether car seats act as contraceptive maybe I'd read the others), links to webpages with random facts that Zvi quotes, tweets that he quotes and that I'm not interested in learning more about, a LessWrong post that's pretty much just a picture of car seats.
If you want people to click links (for whatever reason), you shouldn't be summarizing the linked material as this is either redundant or implying that the reader shouldn't be clicking the link!
I wouldn't be surprised if Zvi mostly uses links to help him keep straight what is going on when he goes back to review old posts (sources he used, what he had just heard about at the time, etc.) If so you are probably right that many users are OK to skip most of the time. [And I know that I personally don't read all of Zvi's posts...]
But on the other hand, how do you know Zvi is a reliable source if you never click a link? Should you trust his covid and child safety advice (pretty high stakes) if you haven't clicked even a single source to evaluate, whether it is redundant or not?
As an aside, I really appreciate hearing about the user experience with links here and I have already made various changes based on feedback in this comments section. Anything I could be doing better? :)
I actually don't trust Zvi as a reliable source for anything important, and it's not just because I've clicked some of his links. There's context beyond just links, of course.
Also, I don't have any feedback. I've not read enough by you.
Fair enough! Appreciate your insights :)
Proposition: if they use the links like they are making a "Second Brain" (e.g. Logseq, Roam, Obsidian, Athens), most of the time people will treat it as a Wikipedia article and proceed as such. The con is that people WILL treat the whole thing as an expert opinion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten
The main reason I don't click on links is a lack of time. I've had a problem in the past of subscribing to too many newsletters and blogs and noticed that when I read every additional link in the main piece I tend to get lost in the sauce and can never keep up. However, I always tap+hold on links (I read exclusively on mobile) to determine if the link seems interesting where in which I might end up visiting the link, after all.
TL;DR I always feel crunched for time and would rather read the author's actual piece than the links.
Hmm. The one link I clicked (looking for an explanation of Gell-Man amnesia) didn’t help at all. Maybe the reference is somewhere on that Wikipedia page? But I don’t want to lose my train of thought looking for it. So now I feel like I click too many links.
Also, commenter Maxwell E gave a good summary on a recent post you may find helpful:
"The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is not uncommonly cited among rationalist-adjacent circles. It states that readers tend to be able to easily identify mistakes about their own field of research in popular news coverage or essays, while simultaneously abstaining from reasonable skepticism about the accuracy of news coverage for fields the reader is unfamiliar with.
That is, we tend to assume that anyone who can write engagingly and who comes off as confident and knowledgeable is correct, even though our priors on accuracy ought to be largely informed by how accurately the writer represents the field in which the reader has firsthand experience."
https://infovores.substack.com/p/is-the-book-of-mormon-straussian/comments
I love getting so much feedback on the links in this post! When I click on the link it goes to this,
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. … You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. …
You read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Is that what you see?
I'm glad my reply didn't come across as too snarky! I tried the link the first time on my phone and the "#" part of the link didn't work, so I ended up at the top of the page. But it works on the laptop.
This mini-experience did make it clear to me that the biggest reason I don't click links is because it makes me lose my train of thought. The rabbit hole is infinite.
Didn't feel snarky at all! I really appreciated the candid way you described your experience, and I could tell that you were genuinely curious :)
I will be more careful with # wikipedia links from now on!
I am, at least momentarily, now very attuned to the links in posts and to my choices of whether or not to click. Also, TIL that the author of a post actually notices whether clicks links or not. Had no idea.
Haven't decided yet how useful it is as a metric to seriously track for platform growth, but it seems to be one of the more accurate pieces of data Substack provides. Go figure!
I want to see links and references—it gives me a sense of confidence that what you’re saying is correct. But I don’t necessarily want to verify. To be honest I’m surprised the numbers are as high as they are.
Also outbound links to reputable sites help with SEO. As do inbound links
I suspect they are much lower for many blogs, I basically think of Zvi as a rough upper bound.
I hadn’t realized that outbound links affected SEO, maybe I should point to NYT more often!
Enjoyed reading your post. Good ideas in it.
A quick comment/question:
I was interested in acquiring more context for the “Bryan Caplan strategy” of linking to one’s prior work as a means of self-promotion.
So I clicked the link in your article.
I was sent to an Econlib essay titled “A Package of Populist Deregulation”. This article does not describe in any direct way the “Bryan Caplan strategy”. Hmmm...interesting.
It seems you may have never intended to provide context for the “Bryan Caplan strategy”. After-all, the strategy seems simple enough and you described it well in your post. But if that’s true, why did you create the link?
Possible theories:
1) You wanted to boost awareness of Bryan Caplan the person.
But wouldn’t a Twitter profile or personal website be more fitting for this purpose?
2) You wanted to boost awareness of Bryan Caplan’s work.
Makes sense. It seems Bryan Caplan has written a fair amount on Econlib. But isn’t that a limited sample size? For ex, what about his books, Substack, etc. So this doesn’t seem likely.
3) You employed a sort of intermediated Bryan Caplan strategy for Bryan Caplan by posting some of his prior work (rather than your own work).
I somehow think this is the most likely reason other than #4. Although it’s still a bit of a jump, and is out of context.
4) It was a mistake.
The boring, but maybe most likely reason.
I’m really not sure. It could be any of these 4 reasons, or other reasons I’m not listing here.
Perhaps this is an explanation, if I may suggest, that one often does not click on links.
Really appreciate this feedback! I think this falls most under implication #6 (my own personal edification) since I liked the way Bryan linked to four of his own works right at the beginning of the blog post I linked and want to learn from that example later.
That said, I may have been better off not linking to it since the more general tendency I was referring to for Caplan to link to his own work frequently is well known to people who follow him and not directly explained anywhere to my knowledge so the link could easily be expected to be something it is not as you experienced.
It is also very hard to get feedback on how good of a job I am doing at providing links so I really appreciate all the feedback on this from you and others in this comments section :)
I'll just save that Caplan link here instead:
https://www.econlib.org/a-package-of-populist-deregulation/
i thought i was the only one! although the links in my posts are less substantiating background info, more me just adding another layer to my quips
still, most of the emails i get make a point of saying how much they all liked the links. maybe people who like links REALLY like links, and everyone else is kinda indifferent
Love this comment, and I agree! I often use links to layer things and I think that does mean a lot for the superfans.
I clicked a link to Zvi. Also, I too do "links" posts and am surprised at how few readers actually click on any of them. Now allow me to proposition your readers with a link: https://jasonmanning.substack.com/p/links-for-may
I found your thoughts on assisted suicide quite insightful (which makes sense, seeing as you've written a book on the subject!). A short excerpt for those passing through here, noting there is much more at the link :)
"I suspect that as demographic decline accelerates support for assisted suicide will increase. A large population of the elderly and infirm, supported by an increasingly small population of working-age people, produces lots of pressure to normalize it."
Why do you think so few people click on links?
In the case of my links posts it might be because I give summaries and quotations, so people figure they're already seeing the highlights. And often they are, as its more of a digest post than a pure link listing like at Marginal Revolution or Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex 10.
Arnold Kling does the same snippet and commentary thing and I think I'm more inclined to dive deeper if he specifically adds that the whole thing is worth a read (which I too should start doing for pieces that I think deserve it). Making the link more mysterious and tantalizing might do more to motivate the curious. I notice Marginal Revolution keeps them down to a list of single sentences. Alexander gives a little more. I'd be curious to compare relative rates of click through for each.
Zvi’s posts are long. I wll print it if I want to read it (later). Obviously the links are then dead.
interesting observation. on my newsletter Five Things (https://getfivethings.substack.com/) about 20% click on links, which I find extemely low, as I only share 5 things and why would someone subscribe to my newsletter who is not interested in clicking on the links?
People read the description of the link and decide. That's why some links are called click-bait.
Perliminary curation. VSauce DONGs, FAKs, and BiDiPis, and its successor "Daily Dose of Internet" shows this phenomena. They will throw in 20ish links for people to actively select the most palatable content. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEC0A5E71DE1EDFCE https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2391259B3E2211F7 https://www.youtube.com/@DailyDoseOfInternet
The problem with this paradigm is that you cannot control the direction of user self-curation, and that it demonstrate revealed preference. This is basically the 80/20 rule remixed with Sturgeon's Law, that most things you find interesting might be banal for the general population as your personal life experiences are better-than-average. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://www.celent.com/insights/467280569
The counter-rule for this is to do the barbell-strategy of information: 85% of content would be adjacent to public preference, 15% would be off-the-walls curiosities. But avoid contrarianism for retaining sanity. Maybe this could work? https://themindcollection.com/the-tenth-man-rule-devils-advocacy/
One has to note that MR posts sometimes or entirely just links. I would add these links are not just "links" but curated information foremost. If they were coffee table books, MR would simply have better images.
I think that by providing links with so little context, Tyler probably induces much more link clicking than if he were to include commentary the way other link-centric posters do. A lot of the fun for me is trying to figure out why he chose to link to what he did.
He also has built a really strong reputation for sharing interesting things, which people are willing to trust with their clicks.
All of the above. but the one that seems most dubious is actually Tyler's because who can post every day? I think he's success has to do with the content what he does post. I don't read his stuff everyday and may only go to my IRS and find that there are 25 or 30 posts on which to catch up.
You have more discipline than me! I would save so much time if I waited to read them only once or twice a week…