Every week I flag the r/OSR blogroll as a place to look for interesting blogposts - I took over posting them every Sunday from u/Sofinho1980 of Alone in the Labyrinth as they took it over from u/shuttered_room of Shuttered Room. Around the start of the year there was a question about getting the blog-roll pinned to the top of the r/OSR subreddit and at the same time the mods offered to automate its creation which I took them up on. One or both of these may have been a mistake and I suspect it was pinning.
Taking 'upvotes' as a proxy of who is seeing and engaging with the blogroll, it took a hit immediately and has so far not recovered and is trending further down.
Looking at comments as a sign of engagement by bloggers those have held up longer but are now trending down as well.
All this is happening against the background of some pretty unfriendly decisions by Reddit Corp so perhaps some of this is a general disillusionment with Reddit as a whole, but certainly it does not look like pinning it helped. Together with the other folk who stewarded it manually back in the day I'm going to try getting it unpinned and letting it float in the subreddit to enhance visibility to people viewing on mobile and a publicity push to other channels like the OSR discord. I am open to suggestions about what else could work if anyone has any.
We know it can be bigger than it is right now and I think trying to maintain central spots people can find things they may have missed out there is helpful given the continued scattering of folk out to various other systems and sites as the bluebird spirals and no clear alternative emerges. I try to do my bit here with the Shiny Weekly Links on the same principle but even I need a place to go find stuff myself.
Interesting stats - and analysis. I would have thought pinning was better for visibility not worse, so that's an interesting factor.
ReplyDeleteAre you controlling for the number of posts and has this also reduced since there was a change so blog posts didn't have to go on the blog roll?
The shiny weekly links are great by the way; I did used to try to do something similar myself but I never seem to have the time these days, so the effort is appreciated.
Pinned posts are not seen by mobile users apparently - that would make a big difference.
DeleteI don't follow the 'control for number of posts' - I had the sense the blogroll was fading off, ran back through time to spot the trend and just saw that strong break which says something went wrong. The previous two handovers (I marked in mine) had no impact on the general trend but this time we saw a strong, immediate break.
Glad to hear you're finding the shiny links useful!
Aha I didn't know that, sounds like a pretty bad oversight. I don't use apps for anything I can access via mobile browser so wouldn't have known.
DeleteApologies, I was meaning whether the drop-off in engagement was possibly linked to a drop off in the number of posts. I think from May we were allowed to put blog posts in the main r/osr so I wondered if fewer people were posting to the blog roll since then, and if that was also a factor in fewer upvotes and comments as there are fewer posts to put them on?
I did not count the number of blog posts per month - with no common tag it would mean scrolling back across years to get enough of a timespan. If someone wants to do that and give me the numbers, awesome.
DeleteBased on timing alone we see upvotes drop immediately in January and then you could maybe say the start of the recent down-trend in comments started in May or you could say it was as late as mid-June.
I am not sure how much of a difference the granting of permission in May made. The mods weren't enforcing the 'rule' of posting to the blogroll - nobody asked for it and reaction against that requirement was pretty salty when it was first put up.
I looked at "this week" for the last few years and the number of base posts looks to be pretty constant, the difference in the comments on those posts is definitely noticeable.
DeleteIt does seem automation (or pinning) is a I looked at "this week" for the last few years and the number of base posts looks to be pretty constant, the difference in the comments on those posts is definitely noticeable.
It does seem automation (or pinning) is a factor, I wonder does pinning stop a post "bubbling up" in people's feeds? I spend more time looking in my feed and to be honest I only visit r/osr directly to find the blog roll!, I wonder does pinning stop a post "bubbling up" in people's feeds? I spend more time looking in my feed and to be honest I only visit r/osr directly to find the blog roll!
For what it's worth, here's my experience with it: I read r/OSR regularly, but I never open the blogroll.
ReplyDeleteFirst, pinning means nothing to me, because I usually read reddit sorted by "new", and on top of that r/OSR is just one of several subreddits that I bundled into a private multi. (But this is a minor issue: if I were interested in the blog roll, I could simply save it.)
Then, I use a feed reader for blogs and YouTube, and I've already put in it the "RPG Planet" feed from campaignwiki.org – plus several other extra blogs – so it's unlikely I'd see something new in the blogroll, and it's much less convenient.
Lastly, a dedicated single thread about a blog article _may_ get my attention before I see it in the feed reader (or if it's from a blog that's not in my feeds). I may even save it to see if it sparks an interesting discussion. But if it's buried in the blogroll? No way. Scrolling through that to take a look at the top level comments, or to see if there's some new link since my last visit, is just too inconvenient.
Thanks for that - if you are drawing the RPG planet feed you're already going to catch almost everyone who posts to the blogroll regularly. I guess you weren't clicking through to the old hand-operated blogroll either - I am not surprised there would be a block of r/OSR users that did not interact with the blogroll before (and probably won't going forward) - but it seems there were ~40% more upvotes before we pinned it and it would be great to get those folk back.
DeleteIdeally we would have meaty conversations in the comments too but I think that is unlikely, I'll settle for just getting back to where we were.
Personal opinion: blogs are 100% the best resource for TTRPGs but people's interest in them is waning. Seems more people want to watch videos of people shouting info at them rather than read the info for themselves these days?
ReplyDelete(my word I sound old)
Videos are easier to consume on the go but I find it much harder to get useable info from them. Even with the best it is a lot more work - I used Dael Kingsmills 'Hunting Shadowcats' video for a couple of sessions; the ideas were great but actually going through it and noting down all the ideas to be able to run the concept took an age of replaying and replaying to get it all down.
DeleteWith a blog it is all just there for you to use.
Grumpy Wizard wrote just now about how blogs are the places where wisdom is preserved - everything else vanishes and becomes inaccessible with time. Your great ideas on discord, twitter, youtube are going to be much, much harder to access if at all after not a great deal of time, I fear.