Social Media, SEO, and the dying of comments
A change of pace this week, as I want to talk about some observed trends in internet usage patterns and the impact that they have on sites like Campaign Mastery. This is not only directly relevant to the value that I can offer our readers, but – since many RPGs are set in the ‘now’ or ‘near-now’ – are also relevant to game backgrounds.
Likes, Tweets, and the dying of comments
Over the last five years, there has been a pronounced drop-off in the number of (non-spam) comments made to sites like mine. The prevalent trend is to Like something via facebook, Tweet that you have read or are reading something via Twitter, or something similar. This essentially informs the public at large and particularly the social circle of the individual (which presumably includes those of similar interests) of the existence of something interesting, with minimum effort by the reader. We’ve become something of a pushbutton internet.
Smartphones and Tablets
Part of the reason may well be the rise in popularity, even to the point of dominance, of internet-capable devices that usually don’t have a hardware keyboard. I don’t consider it a coincidence that these two trends are coinciding. If you don’t have a physical keyboard, composing any sort of text message is a lot more work in comparison to simply pushing a button and letting the site’s social media plugins compose the message for you.
Upsides
There are a number of compelling advantages to the user in this behavior. It’s easier (as noted already), and it’s much faster. Two clicks and you’re done.
It’s anonymous, so far as the site is concerned – they can maintain a nose count of the number of people who have done so, including any retweets or likes of likes, but that’s about it. In modern times, personal data security is a genuine concern for a lot of people (or should be), and the anonymity is therefore a definite advantage to them.
And it’s not bad news for the site, either, because it publicizes the site in a focused manner to what is hopefully a target audience interested in the subject, and can therefore generate immediate traffic to the site. I have already noted a strong correlation between “extra traffic” (over and above the usual minimum) and social media responses to articles. What’s more, this tends to be an immediate hit, within 24 hours at the most (arguably less – much less).
In The Middle
One consequence is a change in the sense of positive reinforcement. In broad, Likes and Tweets can be considered the equivalent of compliments and kudos, at least until you look more closely. All those tweets might be about how unsatisfactory the article is, or how the author failed his spot-the-bleeding-obvious skill check. Likes are a little more significant as an indicator, therefore, because they are only positive statements.
But even there, there’s a problem. What if thee-quarters of an article is brilliant but the author has crashed-and-burned in the final part? What if there’s a problem that readers are willing to overlook because a post is top-quality in every other respect?
There’s no specificity. If an article is popular, the author no longer gets feedback on what they did right to make it so, and where they can improve. All they can do is try to capture the same genie in the same bottle, or take a chance that their next article is not going to be as popular as their last.
And make no mistake, there is a momentum to success. One hit after another has a compounding effect on site popularity, while a string of misses has a dampening effect. “People say X is great, but I was disappointed the last time I went there, so maybe I won’t bother right now, I’ll look at it some other time when I’m not so busy.” It’s very easy to go from a must-read to a maybe-I’ll-read – and the result is that in any given week, half the potential readership don’t show up.
So, while it’s easier to offer general encouragement and positive reinforcement, it’s a lot harder to get specific feedback and therefore to improve.
Downsides
The transition from textual comments has some pronounced downsides. To start with, both Tweets and Likes tend to be transitory, visible for only a brief time (unless one digs for them), while comments remain visible with the article forever (or until deleted). That means that the traffic boost that is received from social media also tends to be transitory; at the very least, you would have to describe it as ‘volatile’. You could also describe this as a deterioration in Site Loyalty relative to Casual Readership.
One capacity that has largely been lost in consequence of the change is the potential for a lasting dialogue. I’ve been looking over a lot of our older articles lately, and time after time I have observed a dialogue in the comments that extends, enhances, or clarifies the content. These days, such discussions seem to take place within social media if at all, and as such, they are also transitory, and not a resource that the casual reader can benefit from in a year or two, and something that the site author may never even hear about.
Finally, one of the things that used to happen in the comments was the provision by readers of links to other relevant articles, blog posts, and resources. The ‘web’ was self-assembling, with crosslinks to other relevant material. These days, the web consists of more centralized hubs without the richness of those crosslinks (except where the author has provided them). Twitter is a hub. Facebook is a hub. Tweet Aggregators are hubs. Google is a hub. The casual visitor comes from one of these hubs to a site that looks interesting, but then has nowhere to go except along paths the author has defined, or back to the hub.
In the ‘old days’ of the web, the wealth of cross-connections were able to extend the knowledge of the author as well as the reader, and web-surfing took you from one site to another related site. The result is the increasing isolation of the author, which in turn restricts his growth and hence impacts the quality of the material he is able to offer. It gets harder to write something of quality, and more of the author’s creative time is consumed by research.
This is a self-accelerating phenomenon; the harder it becomes to contribute something of value, the less frequently it will happen, and the more reliant the public become on those centralizing hubs to separate wheat from chaff, making it even harder to contribute something of value.
Long-term impacts
In my original draft of this article, that was about as far as it went. But the penalty for being of an analytic bent, philosophically-inclined, and used to extrapolating from the known or assumed to a bigger picture, is that first drafts are usually only a small fraction of the content; I kept moving the goal-posts of the article as I found more things to say on the subject. I started this downhill slide by asking myself, “What are the long-term implications of this trend and the associated consequences that I have identified?”
Reduction of long-term traffic flows
Here’s how the web used to work: A site would publish a new piece of content. After a day or three of peak traffic brought in by the newness of the content, it would get replaced with something else that was the newest content on the site, and the older piece of content would begin generating residual traffic. That residual traffic stemmed from other websites referring to the content, from search engines referring readers to the content, from internal links contained within newer content by the same author, and by the occasional reader who explored the site’s archives. In general, it would be a fraction of the initial traffic, but it would persist for years, if not forever. The more content that you provided, the more these fractions would accumulate to increase the site’s overall traffic. Comments and pingbacks were significant sources of some of that residual traffic.
I might post an article, and someone else would be inspired to write an article based on something I had written in that article, and that would inspire someone else in turn, and we would all tell each other about those articles in the comments sections. Traffic to any one of those sites would connect through the links within the comments to each of the other pages. Particularly valuable in that respect were sites where an author would aggregate and review links to the content that he had discovered during the last week. There used to be lots of them, but most are now gone, killed by the instant (quicker and easier) push of a like or tweet button and changing priorities.
The result is that residual traffic sources are shrinking, with one exception: search engine results. Even these depreciate over time, but relevance remains a primary factor. This in turn has several flow-on effects.
Reduced economic and social viability of websites
Websites take time to create and maintain. Campaign Mastery is my sole source of income outside a disability pension. That income is proportionate to the traffic that a site generates. Anything that reduces the long-term traffic flow to the site reduces the economic viability of the website and the ability of the site’s authors to justify the time and expense of maintaining that website and adding new content. Dozens of sites devoted to the RPG ‘niche’ have gone dark over the last few years; it used to be that for every site that died, one or more would take their place. That doesn’t seem to happen as often anymore, because they are simply not as viable as they once were.
I remember when almost every internet user seemed to have a personal website. Those days are gone; the web is shrinking in diversity. Does that mean that those users no longer have something to contribute? No. It just means that they are making that contribution through social media, or youTube, or podcasts, instead. Transitory media, generating transitory traffic. (Podcasts are amongst the worst problems in this respect; you can’t embed a hyperlink in them, they aren’t searchable, and there is no direct traffic generation as a result. But it’s easier to talk about something than it is to write about something, and the results have an immediacy, so they aren’t going to go away).
They were replaced by, or have evolved into, subject-oriented specialist sites like Campaign Mastery. Or they have simply stopped, as hard economic realities dictate that a time-consuming hobby becomes less worthwhile than something that is more fun and less expensive.
Greater reliance on SEO and search-engine traffic
As other forms of residual traffic dry up, sites become increasingly reliant on the few that remain. That means an increasing reliance on the relevance of search engine results and search engine placements. And that means that SEO (“Search Engine Optimization”) becomes a critical consideration.
Just what website owners didn’t need – another overhead to worry about. SEO either adds to the administrative burden of the site, or it adds to the economic pressure on the sites viability if a consultant does it for you. Or you can largely ignore it, and continue to focus on generating relevant and interesting content – and watch your site’s residual traffic diminish over time. But if one site does it, everyone has to; those who don’t will fall off the front pages of results.
‘Content-is-king’ replaced by ‘Publish-or-perish’ paradigm
This inevitably leads to a fundamental shift in the operational principles of websites. An increased reliance on the initial surge of readers from the newness of content to maintain viability promotes a change from “Content Is King” to “Publish Or Perish.” The newness value of a post is more important than the depth and long-term value of the content. Hit-and-run articles become the norm – something quick and concise and easily-digested.
Economics-driven publishing
What this amounts to is more cutthroat economics-driven publishing designed to appeal to a wider audience and less hobbyist/special-interest niche content. Reduced Feedback equals less encouragement for mavericks and individualization and more ‘lowest common denominator’ editorial direction. This trend can be summed up as “The homogenization of the web.”
I don’t yet know of any website owners who choose what to publish in any given week based on what will give them the biggest hit in the search engine results, but the increased emphasis on SEO leads to an increased awareness of what is popular, and an increased temptation to pander to that popularity. There is an analogy to be made, comparing this with the transition of television from 1950s and 60s – when it was easier for individual visions to make it to the screen, and networks would take chances and see what worked – to the television of the 1970s onwards, where networks lived and died by the ratings. It might seem a long step to go from the shift to social media expressions of approval to viewing SEO as ‘pandering to the ratings’ and ‘publishing by the numbers for mass appeal’, but the path seems clear.
Worst-case prognostication
Extrapolating a little further leads to the death of the web as we know it today, reduced to function-driven websites or ‘virtual apps’ linked by search engines and other traffic hubs.
What do I mean by “virtual apps”? I mean that content is function-driven. Visitors only go to that site when they want to employ that specific ‘function’. The transitory traffic becomes all-important.
Do I think that this is what’s going to happen”? Yes and no. Let’s consider an alternative long-term view.
An alternative future
Sites become forced to optimize their subject matter to rely on ever-more-targeted search engine results. SEO therefore forces websites to specialize in increasingly-narrow niches within even a specialist subject (excluding e-commerce sites, of course): a site that specializes only in maps, a site that specializes only in Science-Fiction gaming, a site that specializes in world-creation, a site that only deals in encounters.
It can be argued that the reduction in ‘link review’ sites/series that has taken place is a sign of this narrowing of focus on the part of those sites. ‘Content is king’ thus becomes ‘publish-or-perish’ without sites changing anything that they are doing other than narrowing their definition of ‘content’.
But this future holds more scope for synergies amongst web conglomerates resulting in site mergers. Megasites that, like a shopping mall, consist of sub-sites dedicated to each specialty subject within the general. There’s an analogy here to what happened to business in the 1980s and 90s – corporate takeovers and mergers, with shared overheads reducing the economic burden and increasing the economic viability of the sub-sites. I would also point to the rise of book and media merchants who rely on Amazon for point-of-sale services. These have nothing but “back ends” and use a third party for the showrooms of their products. There’s a clear similarity between this business model and this projected future of the internet.
The narrowing of focus will mean that the content gap, where articles bridge one part of a hobby or interest to another, becomes wider. Gaps will open up, creating opportunities for new sites. However, the reduced economic viability of individual sites means only the real anoraks of a sub-industry, driven by personal interest and not by economics, will be willing to take a chance on exploiting them. This will produce a model more reminiscent of the glory days of the web, where start-ups could produce rags-to-riches stories – but for every over-the-top survivor gone-viral success story, 100 others will fail and vanish, or be absorbed into the conglomerate sites.
Ultimately this leads to the same worst-case prognostications by a different road.
A Personal view
I sure hope I’m wrong. I like the way the web was, even 3 or 4 years ago. People contributed more. The blogosphere and internet in general feel colder and its components more isolated, these days. There’s less of a sense of community, and less of an opportunity to explore; the better the SEO-and-search-engine marriage becomes at filtering out the not-quite-relevant, the less scope there is for the accidental discovery.
Avoiding the worst-case
By nature, another of my personal attributes is that I’m a problem-solver. Having identified what I perceive as a growing problem, I had to turn my attention to possible solutions.
The reduction in comments simply makes each comment received, each favorable review of a piece of your content, that much more valuable to a site owner. Right now, a tweet or like is worth roughly the same as a comment, but this ratio is dropping.
So the most immediate action you can take to avoid the worst-case and to combat this trend is this: If you have something to say, don’t just commit it to a perishable visible-today-gone-tomorrow social media mention, post it to the website as well.
Tell someone you like what they have done. Tell someone if you have a different idea. Ask a question. Criticize if that’s warranted.
And get into the habit of doing so, before rising spam levels lead sites to stop accepting comments at all.
But that’s a short-term behavioral solution, and the problem is really a technological one. What we really need is a technological solution.
A search engine for old social media mentions that works
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to search for something on twitter. The results are the worst, most literal, that it is possible to conceive. There’s no relevance ranking, there’s no context, there’s not even a sorting so that items with multiple keyword matches are at the top of the results. The search functions are primitive at best.
Searching for something on facebook is worse.
I know of absolutely no way to find out what people on facebook are saying about a site that they like. I know of no way to even find out who liked it.
This seems strange to me; if we both like the same thing, it seems likely that we have at least a chance of wanting to become followers of each other’s accounts. If I like an article, I have something in common with others who also like that article. Failing to provide a way to identify those people with whom I have a common interest seems a fundamental hole in the services provided by Facebook.
I’m not talking about a Google web search, which can include tweets and facebook mentions. I’m talking about a dedicated and optimized search engine dedicated to showing “what people are saying about [search subject]”, with a full range of tools for narrowing the results.
Automatic Feedback
Next, as part of this solution, we need a way for those mention results to connect related posts and replies within that search engine, so that site owners (and the general internet user) can see the whole conversation – the whole iceberg – and not just the mention (the tip of the iceberg).
It then becomes a simple matter for site owners to include a pushbutton “see what others are saying” on the content page.
The Lasting Conversation
Finally, we need a plug-in for websites that permanently and automatically attaches those search results to the comments section of the site via the original “tweet” or “like”. This represents a genuine coming-together of the social-media pushbutton and the comment so that sites can automatically capture, store, and display those social media conversations AS comments on the content – essentially, self-generating forums powered by social media as part of the site platform.
Right now, the internet and social media are like a couple on their first date, only barely connecting with each other, a little shy and awkward, and a little clumsy in their connection. They need to become more tightly married together, to integrate into a more seamless whole.
Put all three of these developments together, and social media comments can become a true replacement for old-style “manual” comments. All those negative and gloomy prognostications go away.
To make this happen
Part of the problem is that social media platforms change the way they do things all the time. Twitter Apps need to be constantly rewritten and revised to deal with changes in the way Twitter works “under the hood”, and that is difficult and time-consuming. To make these solutions viable, what’s really needed is a way to monetize this platform integration feature, so that investing the time and effort into maintaining the service becomes profitable. Alas, that’s where I get stuck.
So it’s over to those more qualified in the relevant technologies than I am. Experts in the configuration of blogging platforms. Experts in SEO and search-engine software. Experts in Social Media Apps and Add-ons. The future of the internet is in your hands. Don’t break it.
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August 16th, 2013 at 2:53 am
SO, a few things.
(About me: I’m a web developer and dungeon master. I read every post here on a feed reader – Feedly – and never, ever comment. I am one of the silent numbers on your analytics graph.)
1. Asking readership to comment twice, once on Facebook and once on the website won’t work. That’s tedious, especially since some readers are using mobile devices to read articles. Instead, consider replacing the comment system with Facebook Comments [ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/ ].
2. If you’re getting swamped by spam, make sure you’ve got the AKISMET plugin running, and that it’s up to date. If you’re still rocking an older version of WordPress, it’s time for a little spit and polish. It wouldn’t kill to get a theme that’s mobile-friendly, but a fresh coat of paint won’t solve problems by itself.
3. The comments section isn’t the place to have discussions that last over time. That’s a forum’s job. And not just an old BBS-style forum like Giant in the Playgrounds’, but a Facebook page or a Google+ Community. I’ve been blown away by how intelligent, helpful, and nice the “Map-Making in Games” and “Pathfinder RPG” communities on Google+ are. It’s a ghost town for everything else, but a hotbed for D&D.
4. Don’t be afraid of shameless self promotion by liking, +1’ing, and tweeting about your posts. (Don’t be a spambot, though.) If you want a conversation with your readership, go find them.
5. Does it still make sense to live in a bubble? You mentioned how other sites are going dark, why not join together and collaborate instead of die slowly? Get under one roof and agree to a production schedule.
August 16th, 2013 at 4:17 am
Great to hear from you, Dom, and thanks for making the effort to comment.
1. I agree that it’s tedious, especially given the rise in usage of mobile devices, which I flagged as a contributing factor. And at best it would be a short-term solution. I don’t think it’s a great answer, just the best short-term one that I could come up with.
1a. Facebook comments: heck, no! The whole point is for comments to stay with the article, where they can be referanced by future readers and make an ongoing contribution to both content and to traffic. Further, I have serious privacy concerns with facebook and its policies; they are just about the LAST group I would trust to host the discussions.
2. I couldn’t run this site without Akismet. 736,536 pieces of spam zapped, and counting. For about 3,800 legitimate comments, most of them from 2 years or more ago. There are a few posts that generate exceptions, but a quick scan through the expanded archives page (which shows the number of comments on each post in brackets on the list of posts) makes the decline in comments obvious.
3. Not having a mobile computing device myself, I wasn’t aware that this theme wasn’t mobile-friendly. But, quite frankly, changing it would require a massive amount of overhead on my time that would essentially shut the site down for a couple of months if not longer, so it’s not something that I am all that willing to contemplate.
4. I do this, but not to excess :)
5. That’s exactly the sort of merger that I posit in my alternative view of the future. I’d be happy for someone to partner up with, the same as I had done with Johnn; if nothing else, cutting the responsibilities of posting in half would enable me to get back to writing gaming ebooks, something that’s getting squeezed out at the moment. Such publications would not only add an additional revenue source, but would help raise awareness for the site and drive traffic. If I knew a site was about to shut down, I’d certainly make an offer for consideration. But, right now, the revenue pie isn’t big enough to split two ways (heck, it isn’t really big enough to split one way) which would make it hard to put together a fair deal. For better or worse, I’m probably stuck living in that bubble until site longevity makes it worth someone making an offer on the site, and my services, as a package deal. And the logistics of the merger could be a nightmare.
No easy answers, but conversations that are definitely worth having. Again, thanks for the input.
August 16th, 2013 at 8:29 am
One issue that really torques me is that some sites make it harder to comment without being on X network. I don’t want to join Google Plus to comment on you site. You join X and it works on some sites, but then this other site requires Y. It’s a pain and by the time you connect to where you can make a comment, you’ve lost your train ot thought.
August 16th, 2013 at 12:40 pm
Good to hear from you again, Philo! (Philo is one of those commentators who still leaves a note when he has something to contribute, an old-school reader as it were).
I absolutely agree, site owners have to do their part by not putting roadblocks between the end-user and would-be commenter and execution of the comment. I have a special bee in my bonnet reserved for sites that require some sort of authentication after you hit the submit button and which then lose the comment you’ve made after completing that authentication process by reloading the original page. :(
August 16th, 2013 at 2:04 pm
First, I would like to say I really enjoy reading your articles when I get them in my email. I normally do not comment because I am a shy person. After reading this article I felt I should tell you I think you are doing a good job. I just don’t feel like I have anything relevant to say usually. I have a smartphone and for long typing I use the speech to text function. Saves time and typos.
August 16th, 2013 at 7:29 pm
Thank you for commenting, Michelle. It’s always a pleasure to know that people are enjoying the fruits of your labors, and while I love hearing from ‘old friends’ it’s always especially fantastic to hear from people for the first time. Having been a shy child myself, I appreciate how inhibiting it can be, so special thanks are merited for making the effort to rise above it. The absence of feedback can lead to people making all sorts of wrong decisions about what they are doing and whether or not to continue doing it, so it’s great to know when people think you’re getting it right; not just for me and my site, but for others you use and enjoy regularly. This week I learned that several of my favorite product lines had been withdrawn from sale in my local supermarket and were being replaced with new lines that I didn’t know; my first thought was whether or not a lack of positive feedback had led the producers to underappreciate the products they had. Of course, in a commercial retail environment, they would have had the direct feedback of sales, but nevertheless, it took a certain mixture of courage and foolishness to remove a product with a known customer base and replace it with one that might not be as well recieved. The action of telling someone that you like what they are doing helps encourage them to keep doing it, which enables you to continue to recieve the product that they are providing, and that’s one of the key notions behind this particular article; and that means that what you have had to say is directly relevant to the subject at hand.
Ahh, speech to text. Not long ago that was pie-in-the-sky fantasy and people were wondering (based on how abysmaly early attempts had failed) whether or not it was ever going to be possible. It’s fascinating that it has now achieved a standard of success that you can describe it as “saving time and typos”. The first I can understand, but the second was somewhat surprising :)
It’s also relevant. One point that I was constantly looking for a way to make in the article is the potential for a new technology to change the entire landscape of the problem, just as the fundamental technologies at the heart of social media are now impacting internet usage. I was sure that there was something out there that could potentially reshape the entire problem, but couldn’t think of what it might be – a rare failing on my part, given that I already knew that speech-to-text existed. By making it so much easier to (quite literally) comment, smartphone tech may provide the solution to the problems I foresee – so (although you may not have realized it at the time), your comment is doubly relevant to the subject. And it’s exactly that sort of comment-triggering-a-response, my seeing something extra in what you have had to say than you may have realized was there, that used to happen all the time, and now happens so rarely. So a sincere thanks for contributing :)
August 16th, 2013 at 11:46 pm
I can’t speak to industry trends etc, but I have noticed a significant drop in comments at Campaign Mastery this year. I don’t tend to make many comments on sites that I go to – say something worthwhile or shut up is my motto.
August 17th, 2013 at 3:08 am
@James H: I guess the point to be made is that any comment can be worthwhile, if only as an indication of support.
Also: For some reason, commentluv seemed to think you were the author of the article.
August 16th, 2013 at 11:50 pm
I too am one of your silent followers. I also enjoy your articles and look forward to their arrival in my inbox. I believe that future tech may solve the comment issue as far as making commentary easier to do but the other side of that is as you have stated is to get that feedback you require to continue to deliver the great product you have. Keep up the great work you’re doing and I for one will make a greater effort to return the favor in feedback. GAME ON!
August 17th, 2013 at 3:13 am
@Matt Lawrence: Thanks Matt, much appreciated, and glad to ‘meet’ you. Future tech may solve the problem ‘accidentally’, but it’s far more likely if those creating it are actually aware of the issue, I think you’ld agree. My solution is doable, but it needs some way of becoming worth doing by the people who create such things. There’s not a lot of money in selling to site owners, and trying to sell to end-users defeats the purpose. Solving that is the real challenge, I think. But easier commenting may help.
August 17th, 2013 at 7:51 am
I’ve noticed many of the same trends you’ve mentioned. When I started my blog nearly a year ago, I expected the same sort of discourse I remembered from years before. Not so. While I could see repeated traffic, I saw no response and little following. I thought perhaps I simply had a passive audience. Now I believe above arguments are essentially correct. I too miss the collaborative, intelligent discussions of the internet past.
Perhaps it’s not simply social media, but this single-serving, disposable, consumerist culture still so prevalent in the first world that drives this change in the interwebs (which formerly was home to mostly the initiated, tech-savvy nerd and now is open to essentially everyone).
Thank you, sir, for another compelling and timely article. You are an erudite (if long-winded) fellow.
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August 17th, 2013 at 3:46 pm
@Edward Lockhart: Certainly, the society in which we live has it’s contributing factors. These pushbutton technologies would not be successful if that were not the case. But by pandering to a trend in society, they also amplify and encourage that behaviour, producing a positive feedback loop – or, if you prefer, a chicken-and-the-egg paradox.
I have to say, also, that site owners have to share a portion of the blame for this trend. Many of them don’t take the time and trouble to engage with the comments their audiance may make, which discourages further comment and gets people into the habit of minimalism in their interactions with sites. That’s why I try to respond to every legitimate (ie non-spam) comment, and work hard to ensure that the comments are not contaminated by spam; I don’t want readers to have to winnow through mountains of rubbish to get to ‘the good stuff’ and I would rather a post had no comments at all than to stuff the comments with spam.
The long-windedness comes naturally. The erudition I strive for. Thanks :)
August 17th, 2013 at 12:12 pm
I’ve read the vast majority of this site and have commented a time or two. (Gotten behind in the last few months–sorry). While using the subway, like many others, I use my phone to read my favorite blogs. Trying to even write this would be, at best, troublesome.
I am the least html-savvy person in the world and don’t even try programming-speak (I melt in 30 seconds). But I do know that some sites can pick up if you are using a mobile and it transfers you to an ‘identical’ site that’s more friendly to the device. Is that possible? You wouldn’t have to overhaul this one, then. If this is a vast and inaccurate suggestion, feel free to laugh. I’m used to it. ;)
That said, one of my growing peeves is how the Google search engine functions. It builds a sort of reference in what you’ve searched for and extrapolates what I’m looking for next. It’s sort of handy. When researching for my book, that function helped me to seek out relevant information that was useful.
But I wish I could turn it off.
I miss the days when I’d type in any random thing into the engine and never knew where it could take me. Now, I have to make a real concerted effort to get outside the search parameters that Google has made for me. It’s annoying because I really didn’t want that box to begin with. I find it’s more adventuresome the other way.
And, to circle back to the point of my entry…Google’s extrapolations will also narrow traffic if the results wouldn’t normally drive a person ‘off the beaten path’.
August 17th, 2013 at 4:01 pm
@galenty: Good to hear from you again.
It’s possible, but the way the majority seem to do it is by detecting the version of the browser that you are using. Whenever I go to twitter in my preferred browser (IE) I keep getting shunted to the (less user-friendly) “mobile” version of the site because it detects that my browser version is an older one, and twitter assume that this is because I’m on a mobile device. In fact, it’s because I am still using an older OS and this is the most advanced version of the browser that works with it.
That means that I could probably set up a mobile-friendly version – that would hinder all site admin, make it harder to post new articles, and double both the workload and the likelyhood of something going wrong. I struggle finding enough time to maintain the site as it is, doubling that overhead would be crippling. So it’s not going to happen anytime soon, I’m afraid.
But at least I can offer you a partial solution to the Google woes you are experiencing.
I use multiple browsers for different purposes – IE for this, Chrome for that, Firefox for the other. Google only knows your browsing history if you tell it who you are and retain the cookies that it places on your computer – cookies that are also browser-specific.
That means you can ‘turn off’ their search narrowing simply by using another browser and not logging into Google with it. It won’t solve the narrowing-toward-the-mainstream issue, though it will help with that, but it will definitely solve the ‘extrapolation’ issue, especially if coupled with a cookie-cleaner solution like CCleaner.
It won’t help with a smartphone (I don’t think) but an iPad, laptop, or desktop computer? Problem solved.
August 19th, 2013 at 5:29 pm
True, the Internet may not be what it was 5-10 years ago. The same will certainly be said 5-10 years from now, and so on.
Something to consider is (IMO) that pretty much everything we humans do or create does *not* progress on a nice neat orderly line. Whether laws or fashion or games or finance or movie-making or whatever, they all tend to run in cycles between various extremesm and any interaction is not always predictable. Again, IMO.
Guess it all really comes down to …. you never know for sure.
August 20th, 2013 at 12:22 am
@Ian M: All true. But an understanding of the current trends can at least give us the opportunity to fight potential outcomes that are undesirable, or at least to prepare for them, or at the very least know what might result “if this continues”. Your point, of course, is that no-one knows if it will continue or not. It would be great if this marked the beginning of a turnaround in site interaction :)
August 20th, 2013 at 12:27 am
Mike recently posted..Social Media, SEO, and the dying of comments
August 21st, 2013 at 1:59 am
August 21st, 2013 at 3:17 pm
August 22nd, 2013 at 10:47 am
This is a topic that’s close to my heart. Since I started blogging 3 years ago I’ve had to fight to get comments. This has left me wondering if I’m just a bad writer or if I’m missing my audience completely. If comments are dying out, then there’s some hope that it’s not just me, which is a relief. The thing though is that many new bloggers, who particularly need the feedback, aren’t getting it.
One piece of advice that has helped me though, comes from “Steal Like An Artist”, a great little book on creativity and creative process. Understand that people are busy. If someone surfed to your blog you’ve already won a small victory. If people are unsubscribing from your blog in droves, then you need to worry. Now just create and keep at it. Make and sell books, write blog posts and focus on the important things. Read the book, I promise it’s worth a read.
Rodney Sloan recently posted..Daggers at Dusk
August 22nd, 2013 at 6:25 pm
@Rodney: No, it’s not just you :) But you’re quite right, new bloggers may not get the encouragement that they need to gain the confidence they need to sustain their commitment in the modern climate, especially if – like you – they havn’t noticed the change in the social climate or put all the pieces together. That’s not something that had occurred to me when writing the article, thanks for pointing it out. Social Media becomes a self-perpetuating necessity for blog owners if that’s the only place that people are commenting on what you’ve written.
You’re also quite right, traffic can be an indicator that you’re doing everything right, but here you run into another problem: there is nowhere that you can go to get a standard against which to measure your performance. Rising traffic numbers are always good, but when they stabilize – and they will, eventually – you don’t really know how good they are. Feedback is vital for placing those numbers in context.
August 22nd, 2013 at 4:58 pm
Ok, didn’t read the whole article, and only some of the comments, but I want to let you know, that I regularly check your site.
I posted a couple of times, but didn’t for a long time, as I don’t read the Orcs and Elves series.
This is no critique to write something else, it’s just a fact, nothing more…
And one thing I’ve learned over the years – If you don’t hear back from others via internet, everything’s fine!
People tend to write more if they are not liking something.
So, if you don’t hear back from “us”, everythings’ cool! :)
August 22nd, 2013 at 7:12 pm
Thanks for commenting, Tom. No article is ever going to be of interest to everyone who visits a website, and every blog author needs to be aware of that; you can only ever be dissapointed if you have unrealistic expectations.
When the need to write the material that has appeared as the Orcs & Elves series became critical, I was faced with three choices, all difficult. Option 1: I could shut the campaign down for a long period of time – years, maybe even a decade – and squeeze the work into spare moments here and there, at greatly reduced efficiency. Option 2: I could reduce the frequency of posts to one a week to gain the time I needed. Option 3: I could publish the game prep work as articles on the site, where they might give other GMs ideas, or demonstrate techniques. Even if only one in twenty of my readers were interested in the series, that would be more than none (which is what Option 2 represented). So it was a choice between sacrificing the hobby itself, from which I derive much of my content and inspiration, or using it directly to generate content. So it wasn’t all that difficult a choice when properly analyzed, after all. But I also made the choice to put extra effort into my Thursday posts in the hopes that this would be some compensation for readers used to two articles per week. So I hold no rancor towards anyone who tells me that they aren’t reading that series; it just means that I have to hope that my other efforts satisfy my readers.
And that in turn means that your mentioning that you check the site regularly, even if you don’t read all of any one article, is received very warmly – thank you!
Yes, people are more prone to criticise in writing than they are to praise, and so criticism should always be taken with a grain of salt. But a lack of critical responses doesn’t automatically mean everything’s fine; it might mean that people simply don’t care. The comment by Rodney Sloan is directly relevant to this point. So while I appreciate the sentiment and the attempt to offer some reassurance, I can’t entirely agree with your point.
I must also say that I’ve been extremely gratified by the response to this article. I’ve had more comments and feedback on this one issue than on everything else published in the last year or so, combined. Thanks, everyone!
August 23rd, 2013 at 12:21 am
Surely, I check at least twice a week!
A lot of your articles helped me out, or got me to think about stuff and get new ideas.
Usually, I c/p an article to OneNote, to read it later.
I think, a lot of people care about CampaignMastery, and I really hope you have enough time, strenght and drive to continue this blog, it’s awesome!
August 23rd, 2013 at 1:09 am
I’m not going anywhere, Tom – at least not voluntarily. They’ll have to drag me away from the keyboard kicking and screaming! At the moment, I probably have the next six months worth of articles already in the creative pipeline…
Thanks for the thumbs-up. It’s always nice to be appreciated :)
September 5th, 2013 at 12:06 pm
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November 21st, 2014 at 12:30 pm
I feel like I have a unique view on this. I started an RPG blog several years ago. In a very short time it became very successful (in my eyes). It was not uncommon for every new article I posted to have between ten to twenty-five comments within a month or so. Viewership was high (daily hits of thousands, and sometimes 10,000+) and connection between other RPG blogs was very high. I had numerous other blogs that I commented with back and forth on a very consistent basis.
Then I had a disaster with the hosting service I was using and lost the blog. I did have a backup, but it was old and would require a painstaking amount of work to rebuild. I was going through a significant amount in “real life” and just did not have the time to devote to it. I continued to roleplay, but my interaction with that group on the internet vanished.
I return to the community several years later. My life has stabilized and I still have the strong desire to write and connect, but the landscape has changed drastically.
The best thing I can compare it to is the differences between watching a child grow up. If you watch them grow on a daily basis, the changes really don’t surprise you much because you see it happen in small steps over time. But if you see the child at two, and then don’t come back till they’re a teenager, the changes can be shocking. That’s how I feel about RPG blogging.
I left for several years and have returned and everything is drastically different. RPG bloggers don’t connect in the same way they used to. Social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc) is highly used but it is easy to be drowned out in minutes (even seconds).
I like it. I view it as a challenge. It definitely provides more barriers to entry for true competitors. But I would be lying if I didn’t say that I missed the old connections that were more easily made in the past.
Samuel Van Der Wall recently posted..Breathing Life Into Goblin Civilization â Part 2/3
November 21st, 2014 at 3:12 pm
I think you can tell from the tone that I also lament the old days, Samuel. It’s my fear that the current generation of bloggers have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, lost the positive aspects of what was in their headlong rush to embrace the latest means of connecting an audience to their content. It’s not undoable, and in time I think a more reasonable balance will be struck; acting in isolation may make the blogger a big fish in a small pond, but eventually that won’t be enough, as I have said elsewhere. When they reach that point, blogs will either die or discover new – and rediscover old – avenues of promotion. When that happens, the industry will start to feel a little more like a community again – because that’s what is largely missing at the moment.