Sometimes I find a non-peer-reviewed paper on Arxiv and I get dismayed that it wasn't a blog post. Like man, this thing could have been a cool blog post but instead you decided the rhetorical move of formatting it with LaTeX and uploading it to Arxiv was the way to get eyeballs on your idea. And maybe the authors are correct and it is, in fact, a better way to reach an audience than blogging!

idk what even my point is, ultimately I am just a 40 year old man who misses the golden age of blogs 

 @25909bc3 remember the days when people would start their blog with a post about how they were starting blogging... and then they never blogged?

Kids these days are missing out. 

 @25909bc3 I wonder if they're posting on arxiv because it tracks references from other papers and they need to pump up their influence numbers for tenure or advancement. Do academics get rewarded for page views these days? 🤷