alt Hacker NewsSingapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments to build reading habits
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The headline makes it seem more monetary than it actually is.
https://www.read.gov.sg/join-the-readsg-challenge
It seems like turning points into money is just a happens to exist sort of mechanic. Enough to write a headline that they are technically "paying you". The real mechanics are much more typical gamification. Like earning xp, streaks, leaderboards, limited edition goodies at events, prize draws, collective goals.
The strict money payout is S$0.02 per 15 minutes at most once a day. Obviously if you were doing this it would be more for the rest of the dopamine then hoping to buy a candy bar after like 50 days.
> to build daily reading habits among a phone-first population
Reading is fundamental.
EDIT: Other skills and habits that you can then build on reading: critical thinking, reasoning, detection and handling own biases, numeracy, financial literacy, and more. All these dimensions are manipulated via phones and the apps on them, so you need a firewall.
Also: writing. Cursive writing.
Singapore libraries are really annoying for foreigners because they don’t let you use the WiFi.
Thailand at least gives you a 1 hour pass.
Not that anyone asked but my ranking of public libraries in Asia
1/ Taiwan
2/ HK
3/ Thailand
4/ Laos (private libraries are cute, but hot…)
4/ Vietnam (Bring your passport!)
5/ Singapore
I haven’t been to a library in Japan or S Korea. I tried working from a community center in Japan but I couldn’t figure how it works.
While books > articles > audiobooks > podcasts > listening to music > TV > short-form content, it's all content consumption in the end, and while that's fine, I think it's a little overhyped.
I prefer to draw the distinction at creating vs doing vs consuming, and focus on balancing the time spent consuming (which is a natural part of enjoying life, but usually people consume way too much) unless it's in the service of one of the other two categories (e.g. consuming articles to learn/inspire the creation of something better or plan a trip to do something, etc.)
I actually kinda like the idea.
The money is so small that I don't think anyone is really reading for the $0.02. But if it gets someone to pick up a book instead of scrolling on their phone, why not?
Maybe they do it for the reward at first, then after a while it just becomes a habit. Kinda like streaks in apps. I don't really care about the streak itself, but sometimes it’s enough to make me do the thing.
If the reward helps get people started, I think that’s pretty cool.
I like reading, and I read a lot. Still, I don't think it's right that a public service encourages reading. People must be free to do what they want in their free time, and this gamification stuff smells of imposing values and habits.
I'm against this idea of indoctrination of the population by a public entity, no matter which is the habit. I'm also against private companies doing this, which governments should focus on regulating instead of copying them.
If reading books is valuable, just as I think it is, people will find its value by trying.
There's some private school in the US doing this to reward children for studying (Alpha school I think?), despite it being one of the most unpopular educational policies imaginable — down there with paddling and forced child labor, to great effect.
If you have a computer system for realtime student performance tracking (replacing stressful tests with frequent auto-checked exercises, spaced repetition etc), you can gamify and incentivize the hell out of it, and to a child, $1 a day is a whole lot of money.
Interesting. Singapore certainly tries many things to nudge their citizens to a better life. I also recall from a documentary I watched that they have a system where you get shopping vouchers for logging certain sports activities and similar things (I think there was also some incentive system for healthy food).
For me it's not the phone that's stopping me from reading books but my computer, on which I play games, and browse, and do private stuff.
Where I live, electricity price is so ridiculous, I leave my PC off for 3 to 5 hours a day.
You get bored after 5 minutes. This is the best time to open your book and read.
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Same idea applies for the phone. Just leave it off.
I’m confused by the mechanics. How do they know you’re reading unless you have a device that records you reading while you read, so is likely the device you’re reading on - encouraging people to stare at devices?
I actually read on my phone and have since ~2005 and a Palm device. I don’t use e ink or paper much simply because my phone fits in every pocket and is always there. I read constantly at every moment I get a chance to. No other form factor works for that. Even in a suit it fits well in the jacket pocket.
>Paying People to Put Down Their Phones and Read Books
Of course what people are doing when staring at there phones is also reading about 80% of the time. It's more about the quality of the reading I guess.
I feel fortunate that today's distractions didn't exist when I was younger (or I probably wouldn't read many books).
Nowadays I "turn off" all the distractions that I can before bed to get a few pages in. Reading during the day is still pretty challenging if the book has dull bits (I recently finished the 3 body problem series. At it's peak, its some of the best sci-fi I've ever read. But some parts of the books were such a slog to get through. During those sections I often found myself reaching for my phone, just out of habit)
duolingo seems to have figured out how to get people to drop what they're doing to perform a task
is there like a duolingo for books
like a bookmark that annoys you if you havent moved it in too long
Cool idea, leveraging microtransactions for literacy. Curious how they prevent abuse or just "gaming the system" without actually reading.
Micropayments for reading? Curious if this actually fosters intrinsic love for books, or just turns it into a chore for cash.
My kids would be all over this. Maybe I should start paying myself for reading documentation.
I read books on the computer, with the help of llm that I can ask questions about the book. That's the best reading I have found working for me.
My kid would totally game this system. Smart way to get reluctant readers started, though.
They're going to have to try a lot harder than $1 for 50 days worth of reading, in a world where any time taken off from work is a risk.
It’s worth S$0.02 for 15-min read.
Yes, but without Pizza Hut involved, do they even stand a chance?
Better to just give people more free time: Reduce workweeks to 4 days.
Make working from home/anywhere the norm instead of the exception.
Build more third places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
Give people more safety nets including UBI so they don't feel like they constantly need to be "earning" the right to live in basic comfort.
When I was a kid, my local small-town library used to have a "reading competition" each summer. They would set up about 10 small interactive dioramas each with a different theme -- a ski hill, a dragon's cave, etc. You'd get a little paper cut-out figure that represented you on your journey through the competition.
At each stage, you'd do some activity on the diorama to determine what sort of book you had to read next -- i.e. a little spinner, or a launcher that would launch your paper dude into a bunch of cups each with a different topic written on the side. You then had to find a book at the library on the topic, and the librarian would gauge whether it was appropriately "difficult" for your reading level, or whether you were trying to read something easy just to progress faster.
Each time you finished a book, they'd ask you a few questions to ensure you read it, and then you could progress to the next diorama. If you completed the circuit, you got a star on the board and could restart from the beginning. Some kids would do 10 or more circuits in a single summer.
I had a blast with it. I lived pretty far away so couldn't participate as much as I would have liked, but kids in walking distance would sometimes read a book every day or two just to keep going. All those librarians are gone and the library has moved on to a different location, and I never did find out who was responsible for building all those dioramas every summer.
Such a classic societal fail most people can't seem to recognize. The point isn't to read, it's to read because you want to, not because of a stick/carrot.
RMS makes the same mistake in thinking that disallowing proprietary software in repos is better than giving the tools to avoid it and education about what is compromised in the process.
A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy
― John Milton, Areopagitica[flagged]
They should be paying them to meditate. That would be the more healthful and revolutionary course.
Regular daily intellectual concentration is much the same be it game, book or reddit. And it makes you crazy. You withdraw from reality.
I read a lot, and I own a lot of physical books, but I almost never actually read physical books anymore. I'm one of the happy few that used my Kindle for more than a week after getting it as a gift.
I find that reading on an ereader is many times easier for me, primarily because I can make the text gigantic and I don't lose track of my place on the page nearly as often. I'm not dyslexic (I've been tested), but I do think that there's some issue with my brain where if the text is small I really can't follow it. On all my computers the text is gigantic and even then I will click and highlight text as I'm reading so don't lose place. I would love to be paid to read but I don't think I'd love to be paid to read physical books.
I remember my grandmother was wholly unconvinced that my Kindle was a different thing than an iPad or a Game Boy, and that it was not "real" reading, for whatever reason.