Whither Grognardia?

Over the past holiday weekend, Grognardia celebrated its sixteenth anniversary – or, rather, the sixteenth anniversary of the first post to appear here. Now, in truth, I've only posted at this blog for about half that time, owing to my hiatus between December 2012 and August 2020. On the other hand, I never took the blog down and it continued to have a fairly steady, if significantly decreased, readership even during those nearly eight years when I wasn't posting. Take a look at what I mean:

That's a screenshot of Blogger's own Stats page, illustrating Grognardia's pageviews over time, during the period between June 2011 and July 2020. I don't know why the stats only go back to 2011 rather than earlier, but that's all I've got to work with. As you can see, during the 2011 to 2012 period, the two-year period I was posting regularly before my long break, the blog was averaging about 160,000 pageviews per month, with a high of 186,933 for February 2012. After the break, that dropped to about 45,000 per month, with a high of 65,409 in November 2016.

Here's what's happened since I returned to the blog in August 2020:

During that first month back, the blog received 120,063 pageviews, which is about triple what it'd been receiving during my absence, though still quite a bit below what it'd been getting at its height eight years prior. Since then, as you can see, pageviews have fluctuated from month to month, but generally stayed around the 130,000 range. Then, in May 2023, views inexplicably spiked to 221,901 before dropping down to 144,281 the next month and then spiking upward again, eventually reaching an all-time high of 286,230 in August of that year. While I've never again seen anything close to that number of pageviews, the overall number seems to be slowly on the rise, averaging around 140,000 for most months (though March 2024 was just shy of 200,000).

I bring all this up not merely to boast, but as background to the real point of this post, namely, what to do with this blog. When I began it in March 2008, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or where it'd go. Owing as much to fortunate happenstance as to any skill on my part, Grognardia took off, becoming one of the major blogs of the burgeoning Old School Renaissance. Indeed, the blog received so much attention that I often felt as if I'd lost control of it, which, like a runaway freight train, was soon careening wildly under its own momentum. 

I often joke – not without some degree of truth – that the fist iteration of Grognardia was my mid-life crisis. The blog sprang from an unthinking impulse on my part, one born of my increasing dissatisfaction with the direction of Dungeons & Dragons in the dying days of the 3e era. Giving in to that impulse yielded great joy but also great disappointment, failure, and embarrassment. The present iteration of Grognardia came about when, in the depths of the pandemic lockdowns, I felt I needed a public outlet for expressing myself again. After considering all manner of other alternatives, I finally settled on posting here again, though not without some trepidation.

Though born of different motive, this second version of Grognardia is every bit as directionless as the first. Most days, I write about whatever happens to come to mind rather than proceeding according to some definite plan. The downside of this is that "whatever happens to come to mind" is often a topic I've already covered before. After about 4200 posts and more than 70,000 comments, what haven't I already written about? Indeed, what more do I have to say about anything? I sometimes feel as if I'm competing against an earlier version of myself, a younger more energetic version whose combination of enthusiasm and naivete provides him with more interesting fodder for thoughtful posts.

And yet, for all my frustrations, people keep reading, as the stats above demonstrate. They don't comment as much as they used to, nor do my posts seem to generate nearly as much discussion elsewhere (or as much controversy, thank goodness), but they do nevertheless read, for which I am grateful. Still, I sometimes can't help but wish that I got a better sense of engagement with my posts from my readers. This lack, in turn, feeds my feeling that I don't really have anything interesting to say anymore, so why even try? 

Some of that perception may be the result of the larger hobby's (not merely its old school sub-grouping) having changed a great deal between 2012 and 2020. When I started Grognardia sixteen years ago, blogs were very important parts of the online ecosystem of discussion. That's not true anymore, or at least it's less true than it once was. Social media and video seem much more significant, neither of which I really use. If so, is there still a place for Grognardia? Or is it, like old school RPGs themselves, a relic of the past? 

[ADDENDUM: To be clear: I have no intention of shutting down the blog again, at least not anytime soon. I simply find writing engaging posts a lot harder now than I did years ago and I wonder if the problem lies with me or with changes in the wider world of online RPG discussion.]