Why Not Read Old Articles?
Hard to know
I have lots of articles that have been read by virtually zero people. My new articles get hundreds of reads, but many of my old articles are very obscure. These articles were mostly produced when my blog was much smaller — before it had hundreds of free subscribers.
This isn’t original to me. Compare Huemer’s old articles with his new articles. This article has 11 reads and interesting comments — and it’s probably not the most interesting of Huemer’s articles. Thus, we should expect it, all else equal, to be less well-received than average — as far as Huemer’s articles go.
Compare this to this article, which got only 2 likes.
This one has no likes.
This one has 1 like.
Now, maybe one explanation of this is that people who transferred from Huemer’s old blog to his new one had already read his old articles. But this is insufficient to explain the enormous differences in readerships, and why my newer articles get so many more reads — often a dozen times more.
And this pattern happens over and over again. See Sam Atis’ blog, for example.
Some of Richard Hanania’s old articles have gotten only 1 like.
This is really puzzling. Most substacks — certainly mine and Sam’s and Richard’s — are not like the news; they’re not about current events, at least much of the time. Whether one should feed the utility monster has not changed in the past year. So why do readers primarily read my articles that have been produced more recently? And why do they replicate this pattern over and over again, for blog after blog?
When a new article comes out, people read it. But there are old articles, just like the new ones, that one doesn’t read.
One might think that the new ones are more interesting. But this is probably not true most of the time. Maybe my new blogs are more interesting, because I’m sufficiently young that I’m actively improving as a writer quite a lot — but presumably Hanania hasn’t become a dramatically better writer in the month. So why is it that people ignore his old articles.
I think that this is mostly just irrationality. When an article pops up in people’s inboxes, they read it. But they don’t take the minute or so needed to find old articles. So the solution is simple — scroll through the archives and read old articles. On my blog, if you don’t know where to start, I’ve compiled my early articles about utilitarianism, starting when my blog began.
My recent posts have ~3,000 views, even technical, academic posts. My old posts have around 100-200 views.
One reason is that there are many more old posts. People have limited appetite for Huemer each week. They get my most recent post in their inbox, so they read that first. If they want more, they might go to the list of past posts, starting from the first ones listed (which are the most recent). Since there are hundreds of old posts, it's unlikely that they'll get very far down the list before getting tired of my blabbing.
When I start to read a blog or listen to a podcast or play a video game series or watch a TV show, I usually start at the beginning. I guess it‘s partly my OCD and completionism lol.