In practice, now with ~5 substantive texts written in the medium, it's pretty consistent that ~2-5% of readers engage with the prompts; 25-50% answer ~all (very length dependent); around half of those do any reviews.
What are the implications for authors and their incentives?
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If you have thousands of readers, only a few tens might actually review your material over time. Writing those prompts takes a lot of effort—is it "worth it"?
It's an easier case to make for "platform knowledge" like Quantum Country, which can draw 100k's of readers.
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But of course "visitor" numbers are misleading. For every 100 unique visitors an article's analytics count, it wouldn't surprise me if 80 bounce without reading much and 10+ read shallowly. So maybe this is actually reaching most of the serious readers.
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I suspect it's hard for authors to think this way. It's unsettling to spend hundreds of hours writing something which only a few hundred people might engage with deeply. It's easier and more pleasant to think in terms of (inflated) visitor counts, copies sold, etc.
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Citation counts make this obvious in academic publishing. I suppose the mnemonic medium is just making the phenomenon clearer for non-academics. But this doesn't have to be sad! There's something very intimate about spending many many hours writing something for a few people.
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On another note: analytics from the mnemonic medium may be very interesting to authors. They can highlight when prompts are badly-written, but patterns show where people might be struggling to grasp material—and where they're getting bored.
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I'm also excited about the prospect of adding feedback mechanisms to prompts. The obvious benefit is for catching errors or confusions. But maybe useful to see what readers skip (if that mechanism is added) or how they remix prompts (if privacy settings permit).
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A different way to look at all this is to say: people forage when they read. Most people won't and shouldn't collect ~all prompts (except for platform learning), and the medium should offer an affordance to let people effortlessly indicate "I want to remember this bit."
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Yes, it’s a good point. Technology risk is real! At least the mnemonic medium degrades gracefully.
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One issue is that doing reviews for just one article worth of prompts is unsatisfying. The follow up sessions contain just one or two cards. The overhead of waiting for the site to load isn't worth it.
This would change when lots of authors use the same system
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The ideal situation would be when the prompts system integrates with my *local* anki installation. I hold out hope that this will happen in 3-4 years I hope to see much earlier more and more blogs/articles include prompts that aggregate at
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