Ask HN: How to Nuture a Culture of Reading?

4 points by djlewald 4 years ago | 2 comments

Kinda a follow up to a front page post this week about writing patterns for companies. The biggest (and most valid) concern with it was, that patterns of writing is not the problem, but problems with reading the writing is. This resonated pretty deeply with my experiences as well, so I was wondering if anyone has had any success creating rigging that encouraged team members to read what others had written?

h2odragon 4 years ago |

Had an internal status page that everyone in the office would refresh often; the bosses decided that was a great place to put "message of the day" texts for whatever notices they liked. Of course they started writing 500 word messages every day, din't delete anything, and people stopped refreshing the status page, never having read the "management wisdom" that was being splashed around liberally over the actual important information contained on that page.

What worked was to put a 1 day time limit on management messages, and a 200 word limit. If they wanted to keep a message up two days they had to type it in again the next morning.

Also, we put a random "fortune cookie" text on the status page that changed at every reload, under the "management message" area. That encouraged people to actually read the words under the status numbers.

Everybody but management had a very positive response to running the "management message" bit through `cowsay`; too. Dunno if the effect would have lasted, but consider it for things that are important.

djlewald 4 years ago | |

That's an interesting approach. Piggy backing off of something users were already actively reading to insert useful blips.