As soon as I saw that his article has an introduction and the first line of it mentions that he wrote a long essay (as though long == good) I closed it

Yup. Soon as I read:

> I am going to focus on the putative political impacts of social media

I closed the tab.

Yeah I closed it when I saw the size of the scroll bar. If you need 100k words to make your point write a book.

Huh, I often have the reverse sentiment with a lot of books: this should have been a blog post. There's often a good intro which lays out the thesis, but each chapter is way too long, spelling out details that are obvious or superfluous.

The author could have made the same points without using words like “polemicizing”, “putative”, and “epistemic”.