inspired by @TotallyHumanWriter, specifically a comment he made on his well-executed list of writing tips yesterday, i wanted to reach out first and get a sense of how the community responds to an idea i've been cooking up.

many of you are writers. creative or otherwise. all of you are readers, presumably. also, probably, some of you are bitcoiners. as reading and writing bitcoiners, i think it is in all our best interest that we be always seeking to improve ourselves so we can seize the opportunity that our long and prosperous lives hold. you may already do this by reading one another's work and taking mental notes; of course, there are also ai tools, and you can self-edit until the cows come home. But, there's probably no better antidote to your worst writing habits like having a good reader give you an honest critique.

also, just having a reliable person to hear you out, vis-a-vis what was said here, is a great way to refine how you think about things.

i read excellent content here and in ~BooksAndArticles all the time, and unfortunately it feels like people are hesitant to leave very much feedback on the writing, especially feedback that might be constructive or critical. on the one hand, i would consider this a feature of the SN community and i appreciate there haven't really been many trolls dampening our experience here. however, i think a certain dose of sober critique could be productive, or at least interesting.

when i say 'sober critique,' i mean that there is a very fine line that we ought to walk, for that is the skill of editing. do we trash all ideas and works we don't like, take a sledge to the foundations based on our preference/taste? not necessarily, but having the tact to nudge someone else to be 1-10% better, now that might just work.

the idea is to have an SN writing partner whose work you will read, and who will read your work. you and your partner will be focused on helping one another improve their writing and refine their thinking. 'improve' is purposefully ambiguous. but a good writing partner engages with your ideas, your style and your form.

hopefully, if there is considerable handful of you interested, i will try to pair you with another stacker of a similar interest and level of commitment. you subscribe to each other for a given interval of time (i'm thinking 2 weeks?) then, each of you does your thing, writing and posting on SN as usual. your challenge is to try to write a substantial comment on the other person's writing for each of their posts.

what is a substantial comment? there's no strict definition. if you want to follow the one strength and one weakness model you can. the only goal is to help your partner improve without utterly destroying them.

finally, at the end and throughout the interval, i can create an accountability checklist, similar to undisciplined's in ~HealthAndFitness, where participants can voluntarily share what their experience has been. these will function as a check-in of sorts.

so what do you think? is this a good use of SN's pay-to-post model? does this low-time preference community care enough about self-improvement? or am i way off the mark?

please share your feedback below.

and lastly, if you are interested, please feel free indicate so in the comments here, including your what genre it is you are interested in working on (being as specific as possible) and the approximate amount of time you (wish to) spend writing each week.

yours,