My goal here is to encourage a bit more engagement to encourage more people to improve their financial situation. Here are some options that I think I could contribute:

relatively regular, blog-style posts going over some aspect of FIRE - "simulation Saturday/Sunday" or something; community encouraged to provide their own
news articles with poor/mainstream financial advice - gives the community a chance to offer alternative perspectives, so may be more engaging
"back to basics" series - post links or generate OC to discuss the fundamentals of FIRE - savings rate, withdrawal strategies, etc

Or I could not bother. It seems a lot of the popular FIRE blogs are getting much less attention now, probably because they're retired and stopped caring about the blog, but mainstream media seems to be taking this as "FIRE is dead because it doesn't work."

Anyway, thoughts?

[–] sevan 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I would definitely like to see this community grow, but agree with the others about the challenges of increasing engagement for a niche topic when there isn't much action for each of us to take from day to day. Most of the active portion of FIRE seems to be at the start and end of each person's journey, the part in between is just slowly moving forward. It might help if we had more highly upvoted posts to catch people's attention on the main screen. Maybe we need to start cranking out FIRE memes like the Star Trek communities? 😄

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Ah, engagement for the sake of engagement. 😀

I totally appreciate people settling into a groove. I think it's kind of weird when I see people claim the FIRE movement is slowing down, when I think people just ran out of stuff to say about it, and the big spokespeople are largely happily retired.

I'm kind of that way myself. I've lost my initial excitement, so I'm interested in seeing others get excited. I see a lot of negativity both here and elsewhere, and I see the FIRE movement as being largely optimistic, so I'd like to do my part and spread that optimism.

I'm still learning things related to FIRE, but most if it isn't really actionable (e.g. I just learned details about the Social Security spousal benefit). So maybe a "back to basics" series would be more interesting, idk.

Anyway, I'm largely just thinking out loud, but I do want to see more engagement here so it can be a resource to FIRE-minded people who don't want to use Reddit for whatever reason.

[–] sevan 4 points 6 months ago

I think you might be right that FIRE, as a movement, has sort of crested that initial wave of public enthusiasm and is not the topic of conversation that it had been, but is still flowing quietly in the background for a large number of people.

I think what the Reddit sub had going was lots of new or curious people asking questions and people providing feedback. It seems like we only have a small group of people that are already on the path, so we don't have much to talk about. If the back to basics approach drew in new people, that might help to get things started here. But I've always tended to be more of a lurker, so I don't have many ideas about how to increase engagement.

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