Old Blog Renaissance

As you may well be aware, Google+ is disappearing next year (at least as a public social media platform). It will be a shame to see it go - but there are undoubtedly benefits. Life is all about trade-offs. G+ had its good points: it made networking easier, and was more informal - there's no question a lot of products have come into being that would not have done without its existence, because of the ease with which it facilitated creative partnerships. And it was a great way to get players for online games - the biggest advantage of all.

But there were opportunity costs. A lot of my G+ feed seemed to be perpetually clogged up by political discussions, vaguebooking, and other "noise" (the polite way of referring to it). More importantly, I think a lot of online discussion about traditional D&D and other old games migrated to G+ around 2012-2014, and blogs suffered as a result. We lost a lot as a consequence - blog entries may be slightly more detached and staid than G+ discussions, but they are also longer and more carefully written, and more thoughtful. Social media saps nuance and rewards pithiness at the expense of real engagement.

I also think G+ had to a certain extent run its course for me anyway; I had started to visit it less and less, because discussion there was it seemed to me becoming less and less about games and more and more about peripheral subjects. I also think - although I don't have much evidence of this, just a vague sense from looking at traffic sources for my blog - that the platform may have been slowly dying off as a place for "OSR"-types to congregate anyway; there recently seems to have been more vitriol and more shameless plugging of product and rather less interesting chat, and I have certainly been getting fewer hits from it than I would have done in, say, 2013.

So I'll be sorry to see G+ disappear, but I think there will be a welcome rebalancing, now, in the favour of the blogosphere. The beginnings of this are I think already developing, and I must say I feel like my blogging habits have been slightly reinvigorated this week. Onwards and upwards: the future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.