The most popular site on Facebook right now is a… blog? I mean, it’s a Catholic fundamentalist blog, but still one for our side I guess, right?

The dude who writes it must have a big readership… right?

Nope.

Ryan Broderick for Garbage Day:

And, as you might expect, there are hundreds of Catholic Fundamentalism blog posts that would be deeply controversial in most religious circles (“A protestant is a person who willfully disobeys Any Word of Christ” is a doozy). But the way they’re shared on Facebook means that next to no one is actually clicking through to read them. In fact, according to the site’s own traffic counts, that anti-Protestant post only has 23 views, but its Facebook post has over 7,000 reactions and a thousand comments. And it’s those thousand comments that are the key here.

Weird Christian infighting aside, those figures are wild. I mean, if you told me that 23 people accidentally clicked on his post I’d believe you.

This tells me two things:

1. Rage bait is a poor way to generate an audience.
2. People who spend too much time in rushing streams of content are incapable of enjoying anything longer than a headline.

Anyway, I think it’s time to reread The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral.