Monday 5 June 2023

15 Years of Monsters and Manuals and the Future of the Blog

The 17th of May, 2023 was the 15th anniversary of the Monsters & Manuals blog. Yes, I have been writing this thing since 2008, when I was on a break at work one night (I was routinely working 12-14 hour days at that point) and idly surfing rpg.net; suddenly inspired, I opened up a new browser tab, started a Blogger account, and got typing. 1,878 posts, 24,809 comments, and 3,441,525 page-views later (according to Google, which I think underestimates page-view numbers from the era before it bought Blogger), I'm still here. 

But not, I think, for all that much longer.

Now, hold your horses - don't throw yourself out of the window in a pique of despair just yet. No, I am not going to stop writing Monsters & Manuals. And no, I am not going to do a 'Huge Ruined Scott' and delete what I have written so far. However, I am giving serious thought to shifting over to Substack in a slightly rejigged form at some point during the course of this year.

Why would I do such a thing? And, more importantly, why should you inconvenience yourself by having to type in a different web address in your browser a couple of times to visit my new blog until its address comes up first in the auto-fill?

There are three reasons, of which one has a sub-reason.

1) Substack has a nicer interface and is a more direct (dare I say intimate?) way to communicate with one's audience. You subscribe, you get my posts in a pleasantly readable form in your email inbox. No more navigating to a (rather clunky, let's face it) site.

1a) The sub-reason to reason 1 is that I have always had a feeling of foreboding that at some point Google will yank the plug on Blogger - as its occasional wont (and as most of us remember with respect to what happened to G+). I would like to have my exit strategy already executed before that happens.

2) I have recently found that old posts of mine are being reviewed for 'sensitivity' by Google and having warning signs put on them. I'm not sure if this is a step towards a more robust form of regulation on Blogger that will mirror what Google already does on YouTube, but the whole exercise of sensitivity reading just gives me the willies and sours me on the platform. I don't plan to post anything I consider to be 'insensitive', but whether I do so or not is my responsibility, and whether people want to read it or decide to be offended by it is likewise their prerogative. That is the position that appears to have been adopted by Substack and it is one I endorse.

3) Substack provides an opportunity for monetising creative content that is much more interesting and exciting to me than Patreon or its equivalents. Let me make clear: I have no intention to move to a model under which people pay for the type of content I post here and will continue to post when/if I make the switch. I will go on posting much as I currently do - about twice a week on average - and that side of things will remain free. But I like the idea of releasing content (campaign settings and adventures) in portions to paid monthly subscribers as an alternative to the Big But Rare Kickstarter Release Model that has become standard. 

This decision has not been decisively made yet, and if I do ultimately make the switch there will be an extensive swap-over period during which I post both here and at the new place, so you will have plenty of warning. 

I daresay that some of you will have opinions about this - please feel free to tell me what they are in the comments. Let me take the opportunity in closing to say what I rarely (if ever) say, which is that I greatly appreciate my regular readers and commenters here at the blog. I wouldn't have kept on doing this for 15 months, let alone 15 years, if it had felt like howling into the void. That it doesn't is largely because people read my writing, comment on it, and share it. I am grateful.

52 comments:

  1. Plenty of great people on substack, so good luck with that.

    You're right that they're more "free speech" oriented - their initial publicity push involved paying a lot of alt-right shits to come over and write newsletters for them and they've never really backed down from that stance, but they did manage to attract a lot of normal people over time too.

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    1. It's almost as though being in favour of free speech results in a wide range of viewpoints being expressed. ;)

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    2. It's hardly neutral if they start out deliberately funding the real shitty people who all happen to be from one side.

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    3. Which 'real shitty people', from what 'side', and where is the evidence they were 'deliberately funded'? You should very shrill, if you'll forgive me for saying. I don't believe in sides.

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  2. Sounds very sensible.

    I recently jumped from Blogger to Wordpress (which I hate ...for reasons. But which for the same reasons [basically putting blog and shop in the same place] is very handy for me at now), and it's making me realise just how archaic and cranky Blogger can be. I also now have a Substack and, other than the fact that it tries to push you towards charging your readers at every opportunity, it's also very nice to use.

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  3. My only reservation is how that affects aggregation - can a substack feed go into something like Feedly, or does it have to be read on substack or in an email format?

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    1. Good question, and possibly a reason to rethink things.

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    2. Good news - it looks like Substack automatically generates feeds at "https://sub-name.substack.com/feed" where 'sub-name' is the name of your substack.

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  4. Yes, the reduction in functionality this year and last was disheartening. If you still can't edit the blogroll, you now have to do it by editing the gadget in Layout, because they removed the icon from the normal WYS owner display.

    I'm not sure what extent the sensitive content is generally applied either - it hasn't been applied to me and people elsewhere are giving very ham-fisted examples that seem altogether in the Facebook vein.

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    1. Yes, I was genuinely baffled by the posts which have been flagged, and why they were selected. But I suspect this is the beginning of something bigger.

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  5. I will follow your blog to a new platform should that be your future posting site. I have found much to ponder on this blog and totally understand the reasons why you contemplate moving.
    Cheers!

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  6. I still hope a group of bloggers will join together at one site the way many political bloggers did at one point. Then the site feels more like a magazine instead of one person shouting into the wind and theoretically the numbers might lead to more recognition and larger numbers than the individual blogs combined. Lastly each individual doesn't have the same pressure to produce as much. I can dream.

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    1. That's a nice idea but very hard to arrange logistically.

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    2. I feel like you could make this work with a blot.im page and a shared Dropbox or Google Drive folder. Contributing authors just write things as they have time, drop them into the shared folder, and blot automatically publishes it. I believe it has support for RSS as well.

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  7. Have been using Substack for a while. Hate it with a passion. Same as Blogger tbh. But Substack in...
    - The interface is too sanitized when writing, doesn't work well with known format files.
    - They pester readers with subscribe buttons, adding them to random email lists, and just being in the way of reading.
    - They are operating on borrowed VC money, with no clue on how to operate if their 5-10 whale writers leave the platform. See their recent twitter clone, etc.

    Can you give some examples of your point 2), the sanitizaiton by Alphabet?

    I can give you the Substack monetization, point 3), and if that's the avenue you want to move towards, kudos to you.

    You could host a blog with Cloudfare Pages, or your own VPS, and people should just use RSS to receive your new content posts.

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    1. Thanks for that. Regarding point 2, see this post: https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2016/01/star-wars-force-awakens-grumpy-review.html?zx=1d1cfcbe604cf3fc

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    2. Jesus Christ, that's an awful experience - it won't let me view that post because it's "over 18 only", nor will it tell me how to prove that I'm over 18 (you'd think the fact that I've had a Google account for 16 years might be a clue). If I - somebody with a fair bit of tech nous - am struggling to work out how to view it, I imagine the same will be the case for most people.

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    3. Well that's unfortunate. Is it just because you said "fuck" in the review?

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  8. Substack is really good. In fact I read your blog on the app. You can add RSS feeds to your account.

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  9. I follow your blog via the RSS feed and read the posts in my RSS reader. As far as I can tell, substack does not support RSS (and I don’t want blogs in my email). If you move, I will probably just stop reading.

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    1. I'm happy to say that Substack does actually support RSS feeds! For example, mine would be...

      https://blog.cyclopeancompact.com/feed/

      I believe the email thing is pushed harder, though, because it's much harder to track RSS subscriptions than it is email subscriptions.

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    2. Let's be honest here, they push the email subscription because it gives them an identifiable piece of data that they can collect, track, aggregate, and sell to advertisers.

      With an RSS feed all they know is an IP address pulled the feed. In my case it is the IP address of the hosting provider where I host my RSS client, so they get nothing identifiable or monetizable from me.

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    3. I don't know if that's it - I don't think there is advertising on substack as they make money from taking a cut of paid subscriptions. (I could be wrong - I use a very effective adblocker.) I think pushing email is something that works for substack authors because it allows you to very accurately track data about who is reading.

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    4. Yeah, I think it's the tracking. It's quite handy being able to see how many people opened the email (as opposed to just receiving it, or downloading the RSS, neither of which guarantees that it's being read). Also seeing how many people click on each of the links in the post.

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    5. Given their recent noises about defunct accounts, I suspect the "sensitivity" has more to do with cost-saving than wokism. And as everyone in the OSR knows, Google have abruptly killed once-major services before. Due to a server screw-up, I lost months of a blog in my youth, and it still hurts. I would backup and move your archive to a site you control while it is still relatively easy to do so.

      With Substack, you have an email contact list for your audience. Ben Milton made this point in a recent interview. If you're a creator running Kickstarters etc, that's tremendously useful. I'm a big fan of Substack generally, and would interact with the whole internet via email if they let me.

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    6. I don't deny the metrics are useful for the content creators. But those metrics are also worth a lot to adverisers.

      They might not advertise directly (yet), but they could still be selling the data to interested parties.

      Maybe they aren't doing that yet either, but they will eventually. The siren call of "additional revenue streams" is too strong, advertising and selling user data is always the next step. Those VCs are going to want return on their investment and there is no doubt the guys running the show are dreaming of that big fat IPO payday.

      I think most of us grognards are old enough to have seen this play out multiple times since the original dot com boom and bust.

      Anyways, don't mean to derail the discussion any further, I'll just wrap it up by saying things might be sunshine and rainbows right now while they are still in "startup mode" but once the bean counters take over it's all down hill.

      P.S. I'm not advocating sticking with blogger either given Google's data harvesting and track record for cancelling products.

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    7. Yeah - that problem, sadly, is everywhere.

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  10. Yeah, probably a sound idea.

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  11. Just discovered this blog, really (though bought Yoon Suin pdf 3-4 years ago), but yes that autofill thing is a huge hurdle!

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  12. I've been following your blog for many years. I normally don't comment, but since this is a big decision for you I thought I would add my two cents.

    Like the other Anonymous poster, I follow and read all my news and blogs in my RSS/Atom client and have no desire to get blog posts in my email.

    I've never heard of Substack until this post so I haven't looked into it myself yet but if, as the other poster suggested, it doesn't support RSS/Atom feeds then sadly I would not follow to the new platform either.

    If it does support RSS/Atom feeds, but they clutter up the reading experience with random subscribe buttons as another poster suggested, then I would probably stop following quickly.

    I wish you the best no matter what you choose, and I hope that I can continue to follow you.

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    1. Thanks. Interesting that RSS feeds are still used so extensively.

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    2. I have since tracked down a blogger of interest on substack and subscribed to them via RSS and the reading experience has been fine in my reader. If you were to move there I would be glad to follow you.

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  13. I also read this blog via RSS. I have several Substacks in my RSS feed, so it can be done, but not all Substack sites offer a feed.

    If you didn’t have a feed, I’d probably still read via email, but I’d greatly prefer the RSS feed.

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    1. See above - if I do it I will make sure I have a feed.

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  14. Thanks for the heads-up on 2), this is the first time I have read about it. Not surprised at all, the dystopian dragnet keeps on tightening. Sometimes it is loosened a little when the fish start thrashing around, but the open seas the fish could once enjoy is long gone. Plus 1a) is just as relevant. Altogether, placing a portion of your life - even if it is a passion - in the hands of these untrustworthy entities looks increasingly foolish. (Says the poster who enthusiastically adopted Gmail early on because it seemed like the most generous deal there was. That was my own contribution to the scheme that now entraps us all.)

    I will be interested in how Substack works out, if you make the move.

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    1. We'll see. I can certainly see myself experimenting with releasing gameable content via that method as an alternative to Patreon.

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  15. Sounds like a sensible move. I'll certainly follow you to substack

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  16. Why not add a blog to your Noisms Games website? You'd have ultimate control over your content and all your stuff would be in one place. It looks like you run that website through Squarespace and they offer blog functionality.
    https://www.squarespace.com/websites/create-a-blog

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    1. That's actually an interesting idea, although I'm not sure about the functionality of it. I'll have to investigate.

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  17. From a reader's experience, if you're just serving up text, Substack is great. Frictionless, shows up in the app and I read it if the headline is interesting. Automatically converts to audio in a voice that's way smoother and less tinny than the default programs I have on my computer. The endless monetization buttons aren't worse than any other kind of ad.

    Currently I'm on blogspot (logging in is a pain in the ass, but this is Matthias from Liche's Libram) and I don't post often enough to reinvest in anything, but if I was restarting I'd probably go with Substack, blot.im, or neocities.

    As noted upthread it's unclear if substack has a viable business model but they let you download and own all your material, so I wouldn't call it too much of a risk. They also seem pretty genuinely committed to free speech, and not just the phrase "free speech" as an anti-woke applause light.

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    1. Never even heard of those other ones! I am out of the loop.

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  18. Wow— that Blogger thing, retroactively flagging your posts, is disgusting. Outrageous frankly. I can’t blame you, if I were you I would get the hell out of here (or switch to another blogging service, but I assume it’s impossible to transfer everything). Good luck with the switch, will look forward to reading you wherever you go! - Jason Thompson

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    1. Thanks Jason! The weird thing is how inoffensive I think the posts that got flagged are. Makes me think they may have some crappy AI doing it.

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  19. I get quite a bit from the discussions in the comments. Does Substack allow that, as it is an email type-thing?

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    1. Same here - and yes, you can comment on entries.

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  20. Another RSS user here, just wanna chime in. I read your blog through a feed on Inoreader, along with many other blogs. If RSS support was dropped, it would fall out of my daily reading routine and I might forget to manually check it.

    Also

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  21. Posed previously, looks like it swallows my comment. Just wanted to chime in as another RSS reader, it would be a shame to lose this blog form my feed :) Also, running the blog on your own site as someone suggested would be my recommendation, as that leaves you completely in control of your own data.

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