Eeyore's Ideas on How to Excite People

In responding to Brendan's Bluesky post here, I can't help but write in the voice of Eeyore. Brendan is asking how to get people excited about blogging on the Leaflet app he is working on.

People get excited into action when they perceive possible rewards for their actions. Most can be motivated by even tiny prospects of fame or fortune. People love playing lotteries, but if Brendan doesn't have $100 million to dish out to the winner of a writing contest, just a slice of fame might do.

My suggestion is to try and partner with some bigger Bluesky accounts and hold a writing contest on one or more topics. Set a word count limit to something reasonable like in the range of 800-2000 words. Pick a topic that is sufficiently narrow so that people don't have to wonder how to type meaningfully about something that would require a book to investigate.

For example, a bad topic would be Mamdani, a good topic would be the NYT coverage of his college application. Another possible topic would be his proposed city-owned grocery stores. You could even post a list of possible topics on Bluesky and whichever one (or top 5) got the most likes would be the topic to write about.

To decide the winner, Leaflet would need a way for users to vote or show their support for the submissions, and the contest would need to follow a timeline. The winner could be declared ATmosphere blogger of the summer! Or something, and links to the winning articles would be posted by the big accounts you partnered with.

I feel like Eeyore typing this because I've become so jaded about the internet as a medium for constructive information exchange. I'm not a fan of unstructured yap fests where people waste their time typing something that will mostly be forgotten the next day. There needs to be rules and structure and a goal we're working towards to make it meaningful. Another totally different idea is hosting a longform debate on a topic that many people could participate in... There's a lot of ways you could go with this eventually.

Anyway, I'll stop typing that's all I wanted to say.