I mean this as neither defense of SSC nor an attack on SSC. It is simply an explanation of what it is, and an observation that you may simply not be in the target audience.
People who really want to understand, say, the meta-ethics of modern democracy and debate are much better of reading Plato, Foucault and Rawls. Then you'd understand that sophism cannot be so easily dismissed because it is in fact pee pure sophism to say that certain arguments are "social shaming" and therefore not good arguments. The entire construction here -- the assumption that there is a single right answer to every argument and it can be arrived at if both sides are just reasonable enough and set aside their social biases -- is, as Foucault would show, a highly suspect assertion born of a very privileged position. People who seriously buy in to these sorts of simplistic models are going to have a bad time. Try having a "rational" debate with a Jewish person about whether all Jews should be exterminated. You might dismiss the response as "social shaming" and accuse them off being "triggered" and emotional... but such a victory won't buy you much.
I would be interested to see a survey of the reading speed of people who like/dislike SSC. It could be that the fans tend to skim texts and read more words per minute, so the posts don't feel as long.
And that's a lot of SSC. It's not "based" in science, nor is it based in "good writing." Often times its articles devolve into something that is almost self-fisking and difficult to follow.
I think though that finding ways to succeed at public arguments is an interesting discussion, and it encourages you to define "success" in ways other than "dominate and browbeat people by turning them into ideologically fetishized foils." Much of this discourse is aimed at denigrating this, but that's ultimately a quiet appeal to the status quo and the least rational, most passionate opinions. Often times denormalization of those opinions is it the best way to combat them, if they need combating.
A great example of this is repeating (in a tired voice) "No on cares but you" when someone goes off on a rant about how transexuals are "mentally ill." Repeating that this is a value judgement and not a universal axiom is a very effective tactic, because it refuses to accept the hidden premises that having such a conversation in the first place implies (i.e., that it's open for debate in the first place).
A couple of style changes would have a much larger impact on the reading experience. As is there are about 115 characters per line and a narrow line height. Bumping the paragraph size to 16px and the line height to 1.6 makes the article dramatically less tiresome to read.
If you publish long-form content, typography is incredibly important. For long articles like this 65-80 characters per line is the sweet spot.
Since this is basically the exact opposite from what I remember reading - correct me if I'm wrong - in "On Writing Well", I've started to assume that their core discussion/argumentation technique is actually a kind of attrition warfare - to tire the opponent out.