High upvote low reply is less bad, but still feels like it is fundamentally broken in some way. Failing to leave a mark maybe? I think I would mostly be confused given such a reaction. There might be specific types of posts that would generate that, but I feel those qualities do not generalize to the set of “authoritative, well researched and obviously correct” posts.
I think posts will produce engagement if they leave the reader with open questions and ways to apply it. But generally, the more comprehensive and correct a post is, the more I expect less engagement. (This has been my experience anyway)
I agree we don’t want to optimize against engagement, but I do think it’s a longstanding problem that good, comprehensive high quality posts often get less engagement – the more comprehensive and high quality, generally the more you need to actually have skills and domain expertise to figure out how to apply it to other things.
Note that I said discussion, not engagement. Would your conclusion be the same if a post got relatively few replies, but was upvoted to +100?
High upvote low reply is less bad, but still feels like it is fundamentally broken in some way. Failing to leave a mark maybe? I think I would mostly be confused given such a reaction. There might be specific types of posts that would generate that, but I feel those qualities do not generalize to the set of “authoritative, well researched and obviously correct” posts.
I think posts will produce engagement if they leave the reader with open questions and ways to apply it. But generally, the more comprehensive and correct a post is, the more I expect less engagement. (This has been my experience anyway)
I agree we don’t want to optimize against engagement, but I do think it’s a longstanding problem that good, comprehensive high quality posts often get less engagement – the more comprehensive and high quality, generally the more you need to actually have skills and domain expertise to figure out how to apply it to other things.
See Writing That Provokes Comments