Interesting point. Could we see part of the contrast as the extremely low friction involved in the equivalent of "reblogging"?
On a blog, there is always the possibility that a post would "go viral", but the odds of that happening (and the potential reach) seem dramatically lower than for something like Twitter and Facebook. Maybe, to borrow a possible-not-quite-applicable concept we've been hearing about from epidemiology, the R₀ for popular posts on blogs is intrinsically going to be much lower than that for popular posts on these kinds of social media?
After all, Twitter and Facebook (eventually) added a standardized means for reposting something without changing it, typically with a very rapid and easy user interface flow. There's probably never been anything as quick, easy, or standardized for reblogging, including because reblogging always has potential to remove or change the format, context, and content of what gets reblogged (and in the case of reblogging as a link, to require blog readers to follow the link in order to see the content, which could also be seen as reducing the blog's R₀-equivalent, since fewer people will follow a link than would read something in a feed that gets pre-rendered for them).
On a blog, there is always the possibility that a post would "go viral", but the odds of that happening (and the potential reach) seem dramatically lower than for something like Twitter and Facebook. Maybe, to borrow a possible-not-quite-applicable concept we've been hearing about from epidemiology, the R₀ for popular posts on blogs is intrinsically going to be much lower than that for popular posts on these kinds of social media?
After all, Twitter and Facebook (eventually) added a standardized means for reposting something without changing it, typically with a very rapid and easy user interface flow. There's probably never been anything as quick, easy, or standardized for reblogging, including because reblogging always has potential to remove or change the format, context, and content of what gets reblogged (and in the case of reblogging as a link, to require blog readers to follow the link in order to see the content, which could also be seen as reducing the blog's R₀-equivalent, since fewer people will follow a link than would read something in a feed that gets pre-rendered for them).