Ask HN: How do most dry theory writers struggle to get started?
1 zywoo 4 8/22/2025, 3:12:18 AM
I’m an independent researcher working on political modeling and some philosophical theory. Every essay I publish disappears without notice. I’ve decided not to chase current events just to get clicks.
The problem isn’t quality of discussion, it’s that nobody even opens the articles. What else can someone in my position do?
> nobody even opens the articles
Speaking for myself, if your article was (say) "Why [do] [the] UK and Japan still keep their monarch", you need to put your thesis in the title or tagline or first paragraph. If I don't see a coherent premise that at least sounds interesting or informative or novel (or contrarian, or satirical), I'll bounce. (Do you have analytics on which channels incoming readers come from? Experiment.)
And you could personalize the article with some anecdote/ historical reference/ quote/ illustration so it isn't all dry theory, which few will read. (Not to the degree popularizers like Freakonomics did, but somewhat.)
Anyway the reason the UK still keep their monarch is centuries of political inertia; if they abolished that they'd have to abolish peerages, the social order, honors lists, end the CoE being established state church (that issue alone is a hand-grenade), then they'd have to decide if they wanted an elected or appointed President etc etc. The fact that they never had a (long-lived) revolution means they don't have a (written) Constitution. It would also cause shock waves on their status wrt Canada, Australia, NZ, the Caribbean. So it's too anachronistic to persist, yet it's too complicated to change. Realistically they only get to make changes whenever the monarchy e.g. passes from Charles to William.
Japan is different: it was what the US permitted them to retain after WWII, to maintain continuity as they reshaped postwar Japan. If the US had forced too much change too fast, there could have been resistance.