Reflections on the Revolution in Social Media

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but, no, this is not that kind of post. I'm not here to rant nor to make reference to current events. Rather, I'm here to express some mild frustration with the fact that I'm obviously old and out of touch and have expectations about the way people engage with social media that are woefully out of date. And, by "social media," I mostly long form, online writing of the sort I produce on a regular basis rather than all those other sites where I have no presence whatsoever.

I recently wrote about the origins of Grognardia. While doing so, I was reminded of the early days of not just this blog but many others from the early days of the Old School Renaissance, many of which no longer exist. One of the things I most enjoyed about those early days – and that I miss nowadays – are the conversations that were engendered. On almost every blog, hardly a post went by without some comments, often many. These comments were a big part of what made reading blogs so compelling to me. Readers were actively engaged with what was being written and that regularly led to unexpectedly thoughtful and insightful discussions. 

Similarly, blogs engaged with one another. There was a lot of cross-pollination in those days – as well as spirited argument. One of the reasons I look back so fondly on those early days is that there really was a sense that the OSR was a genuine community. That's a word I don't use lightly and indeed usually get suspicious anytime some makes use of it, but, in this case, I think it's apt. Even though we didn't always agree with one on specifics and occasionally got sidetracked by ultimately pointless disagreements, there was still a sense that we were all pulling in a similar, if not necessarily, the same direction.

Since I returned to blogging a little over five years ago, I feel like Rip Van Winkle. Granted, I was away nearly eight years, twice the length of time I had been blogging before I stopped. A lot had happened in the meantime, most significantly the rise of all manner of other platforms for online discussion. They all, in various ways, seem to have played a role in taking the focus away from blogs. That community feeling I once had seems largely to have evaporated, or at least to have shifted elsewhere. The vibrant engagement and thoughtful discussion that I so loved seem to be gone.

I bring all this up, because, as you know, I'm now posting regularly on three different platforms: this one, Substack, and Patreon. Each one has its own merits and flaws; each one allows me to do something slightly different. However, what's lacking in all three of them is much engagement with readers. I frequently feel as if it's the same four or five people who have anything to say and, while I'm grateful for such feedback, it's a far cry from what used to be commonplace on even the smallest of blogs. Has the center of gravity just shifted elsewhere, to sites and platforms I don't use? Is that what's happened?

Blogger, to be frank, is old and creaky. The only reason I still use it is that Grognardia has been on Blogger for seventeen years and the thought of transferring it, in whole or in part, to another site fills me with dread. I'm approaching 5000 posts and 80,000 comments, not to mention untold numbers of links into the site from places Wikipedia. Trying to move Grognardia to a more modern blogging platform is more than I can imagine doing. The task would be monumental and probably not worth the effort in the end.

At the same time, my experience with Substack has laid bare just how awful Blogger is. I used to be able to look at Grognardia's stats through Blogger and get a good sense of how many people were reading what posts and where they were coming from. I could also see what other sites were linking to Grognardia. All of this helped me to better engage with readers here and elsewhere and contributed to that sense of being part of a larger conversation about topics of mutual interest. In the last few months, that's proven even more difficult, as the stats seem implausible, thanks to being overwhelmed by bots.

Substack is, in this regard, so much better. I know exactly how many people are reading my posts and who's sharing them and where. Plus, the software is so much more user friendly and attractive than Blogger. I still get very little in the way of comments on my posts, but at least I know that people are reading what I write, which is something. Part of me just wants to shift over to Substack entirely, but I'm too wedded to Grognardia as it currently exists to do that. Plus, I have no more faith that it'll still exist in five years than I do that Blogger will. 

That leaves Patreon, whose primary virtue, if I'm being honest, is that I make a little money from my writing. Whether people read what I write is only a little clearer than on Blogger but I assume that, if people are willing to pay for it, they must be enjoying it. That's gratifying, of course, and I'd be lying if I didn't say I wished more fans of my work weren't patrons, but it's still nothing like what I remember from the height of the OSR during Grognardia's First Age. Sure, I'd love to have so many patrons I could make an actual living solely off blogging, but, barring that, I'd settle for a better sense that people enjoy what I'm doing and make use of it in some fashion. No writer wants to feel as if he's shouting into the void.

This post came out a little more serious than I’d planned, but I want to be clear: I have no intention of shutting down Grognardia nor of giving up writing. If you’ve been following along on Substack or Patreon, you already know I’ve got plenty of irons in the fire and even here on Grognardia I feel like I’ve been producing more (and better) posts than I have in a long while. Writing is something I do because I need to and I’d keep at it even if no one else were paying attention. That said, it’s always more rewarding when the words I put out into the world spark conversation, reflection, or even just a bit of appreciation. I won’t pretend I don’t sometimes wish I saw more of that.

Such is life, I suppose. Back to the salt mines!