Books And Articles Newsletter, Issue 9 \ stacker news ~BooksAndArticles

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2835 sats \ 21 comments \ @siggy47 30 Mar BooksAndArticles

zaps forwarded to @elvismercury (50%)

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News Of The Week

Welcome to this week’s issue of the Books And Articles newsletter. Thanks again for all of the quality posts. I am still hoping to start breaking out some of the older content into separate anthologies in April. I also want to come up with other ideas to improve the territory, so suggestions are always welcome.

This week @jbschirtzinger posted the final chapter of his book, The Rogue Scholar, and made a convenient consolidated post. I added that to the “Books” section, so now who can easily access the entire novel.

I want to conduct more writing contests, but first I want to get more feedback and suggestions from the community. I will be talking about those plans separately in a post I will make in the next few days.

I hope everyone has a good week.

Siggy’s Suggestions

Stoic Book Club, Meditations, Part 7 by @Se7enZ

I started thinking about this book club and what seems to be the growing lack of engagement as the weeks go by. I am guilty of contributing to the lack of engagement, although I thoroughly enjoy the posts. @Se7enZ has continued to produce excellent content each week. I wonder if good book club posts suffer because they challenge the reader to invest more time than would be typical of a Stacker News post? For myself, I am often reluctant to comment because I haven’t put in the time to constructively add to the conversation. @elvismercury started the idea of book clubs on Stacker News with his on Lyn Alden’s Broken Money. As you can see, it was highly successful, but I think that, over time, it didn’t get the full engagement it deserved because most stackers (and certainly me) were not up to the challenge. It’s a shame, but perhaps by keeping these posts in front of as many eyeballs as possible for as long as possible might help the situation.

Discuss This Quote-Mahatma Gandhi by @grayruby

I always like these quote posts, and this week’s quote was near and dear to every bitcoiner’s heart.

Writing Contests

Stackers’ Blogs

My Bitcoin Journey

Inspired by Writing Contest #1, this is where stacker’s bitcoin origin stories will be posted for easy reference.

Book Clubs

Stoic Book Club:Meditations by @Se7enZ

Books

The Universal Good Deal by @cleophas
Who Brought The Steak Tartare?, Chapter 1 by @cleophas
Happy The Hippo, an absolutely wonderful children’s book written by @cryotosensei for his son.
The Rogue Scholar by @jbschirtzinger
Submersible by @johnbnevin

Book Reviews

Essays

Nihilism Wants Empire:Camus On Nietzsche by @jurraca

Poetry

Short Stories

Neo’s Adventure In The Digital Realm: Discovering The Treasure Of Bitcoin by @VEINTIUNO

view all related items

269 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury fwd 30 Mar

It’s a shame, but perhaps by keeping these posts in front of as many eyeballs as possible for as long as possible might help the situation.

I've thought about this a lot. It's a challenge that goes deep, imo. In a way, cramming the book club paradigm into the SN (or HN, or Reddit, or ...) interaction model is a giant mismatch. The nature of engagement, and what is required of users, is just so different from the "here's an interesting link" model; and what it requires of an author to oversee such a thing is so different.

I think your territory curation provides some real inspiration for how this could be done better under the existing paradigm, but we can imagine an alternate universe, where the goal of SN was to make book clubs maximally awesome. What would it look like?

To be clear, I am absolutely not endorsing that SN should do that; but it's fun to think through what it would mean -- how would the front page look, would there even be a front page in the way we currently understand it, how would notifications work, etc. It seems super different, but really interesting to think through. Would be so fun to have the time to experiment with this, but alas.

Some similar energy to the question about evergreen-ness, it seems to me; and some of the recent discussion around how rewards work and how different flavors incentivize different stuff.

106 sats \ 3 replies \ @riberet19 30 Mar

This post is so helpful, I think The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi is my first choice here.

30 sats \ 2 replies \ @siggy47 OP 30 Mar

It's a good one.

86 sats \ 1 reply \ @riberet19 30 Mar

Have you read it yet? I was just looking for it right now

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 OP 30 Mar

I meant the post and discussion. No, I have not read it. I would like to.

96 sats \ 1 reply \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 30 Mar

Two in the top 5! Woohoo!

Book clubs in general (real life or other online ones) are hard to maintain momentum for a bunch of reasons (attention, timing, etc). I think the fact that both SN and ~BooksAndArticles are still growing and developing doesn't help (we don't have the network effect of a 10000-member subreddit, for example).

62 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 OP 30 Mar

You're alreqdy a territory all star! Good point re SN. Perhaps these issues will dissipate as the site grows.

96 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 30 Mar

I imagine this comprehensive of a post is going to get cumbersome at some point (for the reader at least, if not the author).

What are you thinking of doing to still keep all this information accessible as the territory continues to grow?

I know I have three more book recommendation posts already planned, that I just need to carve out some time for, and it looks like I'm far from the only one who's enjoying doing these little write ups.

It seems like eventually this will be a great use case for subterritories. You can have all the recommendations/reviews in one place and the original content in another.

262 sats \ 4 replies \ @siggy47 OP 30 Mar

I basically agree with everything you said. Specifically regarding book reviews, which I personally consider some of the best content here, I am planning to create a separate book review index post. Then I will include a link in each newsletter, and also pin the index. Unfortunately, SN still doesn't have a perpetual edit feature, so I may need to put out a revised edition quarterly.

223 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 30 Mar

This territory is highlighting a few valuable features for SN to add. In addition to subterritories and perpetual editing, posts like book reviews would really benefit from putting more emphasis on evergreenness.

I floated the idea past k00b to make "late zapping" heavily rewarded in a similar way to how "early zapping" is rewarded. I'm not sure that's quite right, but we want people to have an incentive to continue zapping these posts as they age.

40 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 OP 30 Mar

Yes. I thought of late zapping too. Maybe once a post is over a month old?

76 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 30 Mar

I imagine they have plenty of data to know when zaps essentially drop to zero. It might even be as little as a week, but the reward could gradually grow overtime.

96 sats \ 0 replies \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 30 Mar

Having perpetual edits on admin-pinned posts in territories seems like a great idea (though no idea how hard it is to implement). I do hope to add more reviews to that index myself.

96 sats \ 0 replies \ @jakoyoh629 30 Mar

Thanks for putting this together. I'll dive into one of the top five now.

76 sats \ 3 replies \ @grayruby 30 Mar

Where is your bitcoin buddha story @siggy47? Definitely a highlight of the week.

I have an idea for a bitfiction story. Hopefully I will work on it in the next couple weeks and then release it into the wild.

70 sats \ 2 replies \ @siggy47 OP 30 Mar

I want to finish it first. I like that term-bitfiction! Looking forward to reading it. You can spin a good yarn, as evidenced by your bitcoin origin story.

76 sats \ 1 reply \ @grayruby 30 Mar

We will see. Telling a true story in a creative way is certainly different that creating a fiction story but I think I have a reasonably good idea.