Last October, my friend Maricris and I decided to start an article club. The idea isn’t brand new — people have started and talked about article clubs all over the Internet; but, Mari and I hadn’t seen anything like it in the web3 space.
Twitter, Farcaster, and Discord are full of links to genuinely interesting articles, but it’s hard to have deeper conversations about the articles on these platforms. I’d find myself collecting articles, only to end up never getting around to reading them. Or, if I managed to read them, I’d have tons of questions and thoughts and no one to talk to.
The idea for Article Club was to bring together people on a regular basis to talk about web3 articles, with the understanding that reading a single article for each discussion would make it as easy as possible to participate.
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The first season of Article Club was my first time hosting events and building a community in web3, and I learned a lot from that experience that I’m taking into our second season.
From October to December of 2022, we hosted 4 article clubs covering the following articles:
Session 1 - Decentralized Media In web3 Is Not What You Think It Is by Steph (cryptohun3y)
Session 2 - Weirdly, Taylor Swift Is Extremely Close to Creating a True Metaverse by Caroline Mimbs Nyce
Session 3 - Why Web3 Needs Mindfulness NFTs Now More Than Ever by Eric James Beyer
Session 4 - The Day The AGI Was Born by swyx
During season 1, we tried out various approaches to fostering discussion and encouraging community building, and here were my biggest takeaways:
We had way more initial sign ups through posting on Twitter and Farcaster, but many of our Article Club regulars are people who I’ve met in web3 through various channels. I invited a few people to join after having awesome intro chats with them, and I think connecting with people on a personal level made the discussion group setting feel more comfortable.
Our members responded better to less formal ways of suggesting and voting on articles to read for each session. Our current flow is a Telegram group where people can send links and react to them to vote. This seems in line with Article Club being a fairly low maintenance but high value community, although I’d be interested in exploring other kinds of voting methods in the future.
Consistency is more important than intensity for our community. Article Club is a biweekly, one hour session, which I think helped maximize the ability for people to participate without taking away from other commitments.
There is so much to learn in web3, and hearing other’s firsthand experiences gave me new perspectives on the space. I also appreciated hearing opposing ideas and having healthy debates; it made our conversations infinitely more interesting.
Season 2 of Article Club has already started! We read The New Creator Playbook: Jumpstarting Communities Through Tokens recently, and we’ll be discussing a new article tomorrow, February 4 and Tuesday, February 7! If you’re interested in joining Article Club, send me a message on Twitter.