Quantity vs. Quality

In his blog post “Because Reading is Fundamental”, Jeff Atwood presents problems with encouraging online bloggers or writers to increase their number of posts by displaying that number next to their name. The article is directed at high school educated, working-class audiences of any gender, between the ages of 18 and 40. Evident by the simple language and the way it is broken up into smaller paragraphs, as well as point form lists. Important text is accented with italics, bold, or different colours, all of which makes it easier to read through with minimal effort or focus. The audience is expected to have experience with blogging and online culture in order to relate to the content.

The intention of the piece is to present the idea that it should be more strongly encouraged to read other people’s work than it is to have published many posts. His argument is that the quality of content would increase if users spent more time reading than they did writing. The introduction is not as effective as it could be, as the image used in the headline presents a lot of irrelevant information such as a username, location, profession, and join date. The reader must stay engaged until the third paragraph in order to find out exactly what Atwood is trying to discuss.

Atwood’s suggestions for the solution to his presented problem are to remove pagination in articles, to measure and advertise how much time people have spent reading any given article, to incentivize completion of articles with a reward system, and to update comments and revisions within a page in real time. These solutions are interesting and could promote a more dedicated audience, but they don’t ensure that the quality of the content that is being posted is going to improve.

Atwood references experiments such as the Ars Technica “banana experiment” to strengthen his argument. In this example, an article was posted containing instructions for readers to mention bananas in their comments if they had read up to that point. He also refers to Farhad Manjoo’s “slate experiment”, which presents information gathered on how far readers manage to scroll through an article before leaving the page. Though Atwood states that “printing a post count number next to every user's name implies that the more you post, the better things are”, these studies don’t actually present a correlation between the quality and the volume of posts by any given writer.

This piece is interesting and raises good questions, but the evidence doesn’t quite fit the argument. It’s safe to say that quantity and quality don’t work hand in hand, but it’s difficult to tell if that point is really proven by anything that is brought up in this post. Atwood’s message, that people should speak less and listen more, is enough of a takeaway from this post that it’s worth reading.