alt Hacker NewsOf course some blog posts are worth citing. Then cite them as blog posts.
My point is that a LaTeX PDF can launder epistemic status. An unreviewed argument starts to look like established research merely because it adopts the visual grammar of a paper.
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At least in economics it can easily be 1-5 years until you go from draft to journal. In the meantime, you want a way for others to easily cite your paper, to make different revisions available, for you to post it in a way that's stable (people's websites change all the time, etc.)
Also, because most folks don't want to deal with paywalls, it's standard practice to put the last version of your draft before conditional acceptance on an online repository. It used to be SSRN for econ/finance, but they sold out to Elsevier, so now arxiv is increasingly being used.
> Then cite them as blog posts
My point is it's still useful to have a somewhat authoritative place to cite (high quality) blog post level content. arXiv has formatting requirements and doesn't go down like random personal sites.
> a LaTeX PDF can launder epistemic status
True to a certain extent, although something people are aware of and they can judge the content themselves (hopefully).