Overview
In @siggy47's Golden Oldies post #29, he unearthed the book club series for Lyn Alden's magnum opus Broken Money. He also suggested that I collect the disparate pieces so they'd be easier to find, and since Siggy is a gentleman and scholar, I agreed.
Organization
The Broken Money Book Club consisted of four larger / macro parts, corresponding to sections of the book.
These posts cover a lot of ground because each part is so full of thought-provoking ideas; but I worried that we weren't getting as much discussion on any particular topic as we might, so I broke part 5 into a bunch of separate posts.
You can judge for yourself which worked better (see below).
Reflection
I don't think I ever did a reflection post on all this, so here's a mini-one.
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Overall, I thought we showed that SN can be a fruitful forum for this kind of thing.
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However, doing a good job requires a lot of babysitting. At some points I was like if I keep this up I'm going to get fired because of how much of my time and attention it took to keep stirring the pot.
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The right amount of topic material to bite off isn't clear. Should you respect the larger division of the book? Should you do different topics?
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To say nothing of the timing. Given how items appear on the front page, and people's time and attention, how often should you make new installments?
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My motivation was "I'd really like to talk about {x} with someone" so I tried to prompt discussions of {x}, but that's not the only approach. Sometimes I think I led the witness too much, looking to scratch my own itch at the expense of what others might have engaged with. (But since it's hard to know what others would engage with, scratching your own itch might be optimal.)
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It also raised interesting questions about the larger SN explore-vs-exploit paradigm -- the posts would eventually fall off the front page, and once stuff falls off the front page, activity is restricted to whoever is already in the discussion.
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There's treasure in the comments, but that treasure is hard to notice from the outside. Somewhere or other @k00b and I have discussed comments vs posts, and where the center of gravity is on SN. These posts/comments might be good examples to motivate experiments to tweak that gravity.
Appeal to evergreen-ness
I consider this series to be perfect evergreen material -- the topics are of enduring interest, so if you come to Broken Money in the future, and the context in these posts / comments provokes an idea, let it rip. I will respond, and I bet most of the other participants would also respond (if they get the notification.)
In other words, the past is not dead. It's not even past, if you don't want it to be.