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Assorted Links II
Assorted Links II
first post continued
Because Cowen has been sharing links for so long, it seems reasonable to ask if we can discover changes in his content consumption through changes in the frequency with which certain websites are linked to.Scraping link data through to December 31st, 2023, the most common websites fall into three categories — mainstream news and media, such as The New York Times, the BBC, The New Yorker, and The Economist; blogging platforms, such as Medium and Substack; and micro-blogging platforms, which really only comprises X/Twitter.The relative frequencies over time of these three categories is shown in the chart above, with the ten most commonly linked mainstream news and media websites grouped as ‘MSM’, and blogging disaggregated by the main platforms.It’s easy to spot the steady decline of blogging as a whole from 2009 to 2013. From 2013 the original platforms die away, Medium comes and goes, and eventually everything ends up on Substack; but the proportion of Cowen’s attention directed towards blogs over the last ten years seems to remain mostly unchanged.During this same period, linking to Twitter grew significantly, and linking to mainstream news sources declined. It’s not clear if Musk’s acquisition has had an impact, with growth in shared Twitter content continuing after the deal closed, and the first large drop in years occurring in the second half of 2023.To chart links over time to a wider range of destinations, URLs were processed to extract domain names below the top-level domain, together with any subdomains. Each instance of a link to a popular domain or subdomain is shown below. For example, a link to dynomight.substack.com would give rise to a mark on both the row for ‘dynomight’ and the row for ‘substack’. In any clear-cut cases where the domain of a website changed over the period shown, such as guardian.co.uk moving to theguardian.co.uk, the entries have been merged. There are however instances where an author moving around isn’t captured, for example Matt Yglesias moving his writing from ylgesias.thinkprogress.org to www.slate.com shows up as a sudden break in the row for ‘yglesias’. The most popular Twitter accounts are also included, and the subdomain of the page you’re currently on was thrown in for good measure.
·benen.notion.site·
Assorted Links II
Assorted Links I
Assorted Links I

analyzing why tyler cowen has been doing assorted links for a while // most interesting bit in the last 3 paras: What if he wished to similarly shape his audience? Most public commentators, if they want to bring their audience to a certain point of view, will make arguments in favour of that view. But Cowen is open about the fact that he is a ‘Straussian’, and that he frequently disguises his true views (producing an esoteric reading of something is another good way of ending up on the daily links page). A Straussian is often happy to simply get an argument in front of their readers, even if they have to actively distance themselves from it in order to do so.

If Cowen has a desire to expose his unusually powerful audience to certain content they wouldn’t otherwise see, without implicating himself as endorsing such content, then the daily links post seems like the perfect way to achieve this. With around 50 links shared each week, there’s a regular opportunity to direct attention to unusual places, while the bulk of the linked material remains free for satisfying a reader like maybe Rishi Sunak.

So is link curation underrated? For the particular sort of person Cowen is, it may have some more subtle benefits beyond just complementing the main blog offering. If you’re thinking about doing it yourself, it seems worth considering what you could achieve with curatorial powers of your own.

·benen.notion.site·
Assorted Links I