The Reading Room

12:06 AM

After all the edits Hamlet and I have been making to old posts (mainly tag edits), my Eleonora question has moved way down the front page. I hope it won't get completely forgotten about!

Although if it does, at least I might have a shot at the Tumbleweed badge ...

Mithrandir

I got Tumbleweed...

I still don't have it on SFF though...: P

Rand al'Thor

@Mithrandir Congratudolences.

@Mithrandir Read more obscure SFF works ;-)

I got it for a vampirates question, I think.

Or maybe a the-divide question.

I think I'd have quite a few Tumbleweeds on SFF if they could be awarded multiple times.

Mithrandir

@Randal'Thor I told you! Last time I tried that, the author showed up to answer it! :P

Rand al'Thor

@Mithrandir Well, that's a pretty damn good consolation prize for not getting a Tumbleweed badge.

Mithrandir

:P

Rand al'Thor

12:10 AM

Now post a question about one of thaddeus-howze's stories :-P

Mithrandir

I haven't seen Thaddeus in a while.

I'll drop off the WoG answer I got and go to sleep. It's... TWO FIFTEEN AM? O_o

6

A: Does it have to be those two spells, or would any combination of "impossible" spells work?

I'm the author. Here's my original response: Damned if I know. I seem to recall something about "coherence of the fluxions," so that would be the research path to go down. Since I'm not entirely sure what fluxions are, other than the "cords that tie together the universe," I can't really commen...

Rand al'Thor

@Mithrandir You might want to capitalise WoG properly. "Wog" is a racist slang term.

Also, go to bed - even wizards need sleep ;-)

Huh, one of my comment flags here was declined but both the flagged comments were deleted. Mod fat fingers?

Mithrandir

@Randal'Thor yes. Literally. :(

Librarian

1:49 AM

3

Q: Should we kill all the [character]s?

I just noticed that we have a character tag, apparently for questions which are specifically about a particular character or characters in a work of literature. Is this tag useful, or should we burninate it?

Hamlet

2:09 AM

OK, I made the 1984/*Animal Farm* comment somewhat in jest, but it is a serious problem. The content of our homepage is going to/is already driving people away from the site. Personally, if I had no knowledge of this site and saw the homepage, I wouldn't want to join. Our homepage needs to have questions about a broad range of books, of different genres/styles/authors, in order for this site to be successful.

There's not much I can do about this as a moderator. I just have to hope that people see it as a problem and make an effort to change this.

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet I agree that we should have as broad a range as possible, but OTOH we also need to avoid falling into the trap of looking down our noses at 1984 and Lord of the Flies questions, or any other specific literary works.

For instance, we absolutely shouldn't start downvoting good 1984 questions just because we're bored of questions about 1984.

Instead we should try to ask enough questions about OTHER stories that the 1984 and Lord of the Flies questions get drowned out.

I'm on a bit of a Hardy spree at the moment, then maybe moving on to Poe.

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor I'm not being snobbish. No one is being snobbish as far as I can tell. I'll I'm saying is if someone isn't interested in discussing these books, there should be other questions for that person to discuss that are visible on the homepage

Rand al'Thor

And of course the selection of works asked about here is ALWAYS going to be pretty narrow, when compared to the entire field of literature - and there are ALWAYS going to be some works (most likely English-language classics frequently taught in schools) which get a lot more questions than others. All we can hope to do is try to increase our range, not to eliminate bias altogether.

@Hamlet I didn't mean to accuse you of being snobbish. But it can be a fine line to walk, and comments like this made me a bit worried:

Mar 1 at 20:24, by verbose

Between all the ID questions, the Narnia questions, the LoTF questions, the children's book questions, and the 1984 questions, this site does seem to have rather a problem generating questions about, y'know, literature. (he said dismissively)

user15026

@Randal'Thor And this is why I've asked very few questions about the stuff I'm reading

user15026

because so little of it is "literature"

Rand al'Thor

2:22 AM

What kind of stuff?

user15026

Romances, biography/memoir, fantasy, "chick lit" (a term I loathe, but can't find a better one), various other bits of nonfiction

Rand al'Thor

Sounds like literature to me.

user15026

None of it is "literary <category.", it's just like....idk, not quite Harlequins but for someone who doesn't read a lot of romance that's the easiest description, the bios are not of anyone remotely "literary" or even written in a high lit style, it's all low fantasy because high fantasy makes me itchy, and well, chick lit is not lit

user61230

I wouldn't worry too much about whether what you're reading is "literature." The word is problematic, because it implies that something can or cannot count as "literature."

user61230

But in reality, that word doesn't describe anything meaningful about a book - it only describes who happens to approve of it.

Rand al'Thor

2:27 AM

^^ This.

We've had questions here about Rick Riordan's books which have been well-received.

user15026

The problem is I've seen a few conversations in here that make it kinda sound like those sorts of things aren't so much welcomed here

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor if there are people being "snobbish", then they're clearly in the minority, and you and I both know that if someone proposed downvoting 1984 questions because 1984 "isn't real literature", then they would be expressing an opinion shared by almost no one else.

user61230

@Ash There's only one way to find out ;)

user61230

In truth, though, I'd be curious to know what led you to that impression. If so, if it's systematic, it's something worth considering/addressing.

Rand al'Thor

@Ash Don't let a few off-colour remarks in chat affect you too much. Go ahead and post questions about them - if those questions are DVed or VTCed because "that's not proper literature", then we have a problem which can be discussed on meta.

user61230

2:31 AM

I'd rather people not feel like certain books are or aren't on topic here. We shouldn't be giving the impression that the nature of a book determines its topicality, and if we are, that's important to discuss.

Hamlet

@Ash go ahead and ask them

user15026

I keep noodling on something about the common tropes in romances but I've yet to have anything gel into a solid non-discussion-y question thing

Hamlet

The more we have questions about different types of literature, the better off we will be

@Randal'Thor I am a little worried that people on this site are using "snobbish literature professors" (BTW there are no literature professors on this site) as a boogyman to avoid addressing issues on the site, like the fact that most of our questions are about three or four books.

2

Rand al'Thor

Well, @Emrakul, you wanted stars earlier - all you had to do was make some damn good points about site policy ;-)

user61230

@Randal'Thor No need to get all starry-eyed ;)

user61230

2:36 AM

(I'm sorry, I couldn't resist the pun.)

Hamlet

I don't know how to change that -- I can't force people to read different books -- but it's a problem we need to address if we want to be successful.

user61230

Literature may very well benefit from something akin to topic challenges. Imagining it like a Literature reading list, where we intentionally vote for books that are different than what we normally read.

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet Snobbery doesn't have to come from literature professors. Ash's comments show that people are getting scared off from asking questions (and not about those three or four most popular books, either) by a perception of literature snobbery. I'm not trying to diminish the problem you raise, just saying that there's a converse problem to be considered as well.

@Emrakul YES.

I was about to make some vague suggestion about maybe awarding bounties to the most "out there" post, in order to encourage new questions about literary works far from anything else that's been asked about so far.

But in practice, topic challenges would probably be the way to do that.

user61230

Mulling it over, I might propose it, actually.

user61230

Maybe a month-long turnover, so that people have adequate time to read at their own pace and mull things over.

user61230

2:43 AM

With the suggestion that people upvote books that are the most distinct from what they normally read, so that we can expand the bailiwick of the site to incorporate new books, genres, and cultures.

Rand al'Thor

@Emrakul Hopefully it won't get the same reaction that this post did.

I wonder what precedent there is for starting topic challenges this early in a site's lifetime.

On Puzzling we didn't start them until the site was over a year old.

user61230

Bah, precedent. All we need are people who are interested!

user61230

And heck, if you want to look at user retention analytics, this could be a driving factor in retaining major participants.

user15026

Pets, when it had activity, did them pretty early

user15026

(although the site isn't very active in terms of people actually sticking around, for various reasons)

Rand al'Thor

2:46 AM

Looks like M&TV started them about six months into beta, but then they died out and were revived a couple of years later.

user61230

@Randal'Thor The same thing happened on Puzzling, actually.

user61230

We had them for a while, people lost interest, then someone kicked it off again with the top-voted answer, and it sort of just snowballed from there. I'm not sure why, but I'd be willing to believe that cycle is normal.

Rand al'Thor

@Emrakul Yeah, they weren't done in a strict every-2-weeks pattern until I came back and kickstarted them again.

user61230

@Ash Huh. Passively wonders how that worked.

user61230

"This week's topic challenge is gerbils. Our most dedicated users will go out and buy... gerbils."

Rand al'Thor

2:50 AM

You can see from the list that they were sporadic until late August 2016, when I started posting a new topic challenge post every other Monday.

@Emrakul cc @BeastlyGerbil

user61230

3:10 AM

@Randal'Thor A suggestion, from me to you all.

Hamlet

3:54 AM

Paging @BESW @Standback since you have experience doing similar things, we would really appreciate your suggestions/help running our site's topic challenge.

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