Regular readers will have noted I flag the r/OSR blogroll as a place to look for interesting blogposts. I think even in this time of blog-rings, bluesky feeds and other blog aggregators, the r/OSR blogroll serves a purpose in being a low-threshold start point for folk to throw their blogs out in front of a place where their likely audience comes to look.
Around the start of 2023 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. By the end of the year it was clear one or both of these may have been a mistake and I suspect it was both - pinning killed visibilty on mobiles and the automation subsequently broke/stopped updating in early 2024.
After waiting out the year, on the anniversary of things breaking, I relaunched it in the old way - manually done, this time on a Friday, and mercifully it has seemed to reignite, albeit at a lower intensity than before.
Now in the stewardship of u/Leicester68 of Leicester's Ramble, the blogroll has run since pre-pandemic I believe - I took over posting them every Sunday in mid-2021 from u/Sofinho1980 of Alone in the Labyrinth as they took it over from u/shuttered_room of Shuttered Room.
Taking "comments" as our core indicator of success - these are the people leaving links to blogs, commenting on the blogs of others and generally participating - we see things are steady since we restored the blogroll, but still only half of where it was before the unintended hiatus of the auto-updater breaking. Being optimistic, there is a suggestion that the new stewardship of Leicester68 might be bringing in some more eyeballs, certainly there is proven, recent potential to be doing better.
Looking at upvotes as a more nebulous sign of who is seeing and engaging with the blogroll, it took a hit immediately on automation and seems to have improved since we restarted.
The volume of upvotes coming back to pre-automation levels says to me that reddit itself is not yet dead.
I will castigate myself here for listening to a few loud dogs who argued for automating the blogroll. That killed our visibility in the short term and by turning over control of publishing the blogroll it left us with no recourse beyond repeated unanswered messages to the mods when it started to malfunction. I have the impression one mod with coding chops was the one who did things and it worked for a while until they moved on, the thing broke and noone was able to fix it.
Were we admins on r/OSR with sufficient access to stand-up and maintain our own automation then it might make sense. In this case where we are putting tasks on others, asking the mods to maintain some new bit of coding widgetry, and those others do not have this as a priority, it is putting points of failure onto the bottom of someone elses priority list. I suggest it is better to maintain control in the hands of the people who care most about it and that supersedes the minor inconvenience of a weekly manual update.
We have here a short parable of trusting in the machine being foolhardy. Hopefully with patience and contrition we may one day see participation on the blogroll improve again.
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