Experiment #4

[Ed]

Experiment 4 took place last weekend. I’m largely pleased with the result but it certainly didn’t all go to plan (some went badly). I haven’t written it up yet so my question is, should I bother to write it up?

Experiment #3 has not been popular (so far anyway), so I’m not convinced it’s worth my time to publish #4. The whole idea of writing them up was to raise money to run the community, but if it doesn’t sell, I’m just wasting my time.

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[Steve]

Experiment #3 was an interesting read, it looks like you did a good job there.

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[Auxilia]

From reading the reports, the first 3 experiments were a massive success – I guess a bump on the road was due; where did the difficulties start, Ed (or would you rather not say)?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Auxilia.

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[Ed]

I was probably getting over confident, @auxilia. It’s hard to balance attracting people to take part in the experiments and thoroughly checking people beforehand to make sure they are okay with the whole thing. I didn’t do much in the way of checks for Experiment #3 and it was fine. For #4, I did pretty minimal checks and it came back and bit me.

I was genuinely thrilled that we got four couples together for it but one of the couples had quite different ideas about what happens in experiments. Things got unpleasant for a while and then they left, barely halfway through. It reinforced why I absolutely must interview everyone thoroughly beforehand, make sure they have read about previous experiments and the details given on the experiment pages on this site.

The experiment wasn’t ruined as such, but it would have been better if the problem had been avoided.

My actual concern with the write up is that it takes hours of work to produce. If the report is going to make money for the community, it’s worth it (and I quite like transcribing and typesetting but I don’t have lots of free time) but Report #3 has only sold a couple of copies. I’ve been looking at reducing the price a little but if that doesn’t lead to increased sales, it just makes things worse.

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[Anonymous]

As a commercial activity, it’s not catching on yet but how quickly do new ideas normally become profitable? I don’t know but I imagine it could be quite a while.

As an experiment, surely we can learn at least as much from experiments that don’t go to plan as we can from ones that do.

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[NudeNik]

Its a basic fact of life that we all learn from our mistakes, even if we have to repeat the mistake a number of times to realise! Its part of the growing up process, which continues through life. The medium that we’re communicating on here has gone through myriad changes, lessons learned from experiments that failed.

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[Ed]

True, @nudenik. I wouldn’t rate experiment #4 as a failure (not yet anyway). We lost one out of four couples before the end but the other three completed the whole thing.

It’s experiment #3 that worries me. It’s first week sales have been most disappointing. The experiments themselves are run very close to zero profit so the community needs the revenue from the reports. Obviously, I can increase the fee for taking part but it’s already crazily hard to get people to take part. Raising the price won’t help that.

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[Martin]

Having read one and two, I’d say you should write up four. It will show how real the experiments are because of the walk aways.

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[Ed]

I hadn’t thought of it like that.

I began writing it up yesterday but I don’t have much free time at present so it’s going to take a while.

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[Ed]

I forgot that I said I was going to do this. I got about a third of the way through transcribing and then gave up. The experiment reports aren’t selling anymore and the Kindle Unlimited reads are rarely more than 10-20 pages per month (about 3p-5p).

Maybe when the lockdown finally ends and we can get the experiments running again, I’ll feel more inspired to put the work in.

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