> No one is going to say, “I love lots of footnotes in writing.”

I will. Sometimes the footnotes[0] are even the best part.

> Otherwise, it would save a lot of time to write in a more informal tone or to not have to use citations.

It may save authorial time, but it saves reader time even more by driving it to zero. As a reader (even as a reader primarily for entertainment), I'm aiming to spend my limited attention on things that someone else has thought about for a lot[1] longer than it'll take me to absorb, not just brain-dumps on a whim: ideas, not vibes.

[0] eg, those in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc

[1] see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40147526

The tweet that TFA was reacting to specifically called out soft social science citations, where it's often someone else's "vibes" being presented as incontrovertible fact because it's a citation.

Aha, that explains the framing of citations as support instead of as a low-tech hyperlink* for people who want to know more.

(and come to think of it, it also explains why they'd even suggest an article full of hyperlinks could be a bad thing?)

* bear skins and stone knives were all we had, pre-1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web#:~:text=CERN%20...

EDIT: and let's not forget that the whole scientific edifice arose out of scholarly apparatus the doctors of divinity had been using in order to keep track of arguments about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin; we can let the eloi do eloi things if we're confident we can always eventually rederive morlock things from that protoculture.

Exercise: how does always eventually differ from eventually always?

I generally disregard web articles written with many links posing as citations. I’ve clicked through only to find too often that the linked text does not support the linker’s claims, and often contradicts them, in fact. This seems especially common when the article links to a scientific journal or other document with real academic rigor.

Using a lot of citations is fine, so long as it is not the type of academic writing where you repeat the same point in different ways for 30 pages when you could have taken 5 or less.