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.
I only use G+ for your Yoon Suin crowdsourced content. Any thoughts on whether or not you will move that stuff to another locale?
ReplyDeleteProbably - not sure where yet though.
DeleteI’m looking forward to this rebalancing, but as part of it, I think we need more signal boosting and curation. We need well known OSR bloggers to link off to great posts from newer or less well known bloggers.
ReplyDeleteGreat suggestion, Wes. I don't have a G+ presence, and my feed really slowed down the past few years. I'd love to get some new blood.
DeleteAbsolutely agree. It's time to bring back the decentralised blogging community
DeleteYou might want to look into either Ramanan's OPML file to subscribe to ALL of the blogs (http://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/blog/osr-opml/) or pick and choose from the Google Sheet that's going around (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10qvE1s62UA55pleTW54RAZZw-oJQV8yYGZb_UtYo9TE/edit#gid=0).
DeleteI can't say I ever used G+, myself. I generally either follow certain regular blogging announcements like GURPSday over at GamingBallistic or directly visit blogs, as I do yours. I might be missing out, but OSR bloggers generally seem to support each other with cross links on sidebars and such. All of that said, I can't see G+'s retirement as a detriment to the community. If anything, it may shift discussions toward the more thoughtful.
ReplyDeleteI tried out Google + a little bit, but found it somewhat lacking. I prefer blogs for the vary reason you stated, well thought out articles.
ReplyDeleteI'm working on http://osrtavern.com/
ReplyDeleteIt was supposed to be a content aggregator for OSR content :)
It's a WIP right now but it's already usable