They’re Eating the Blogs

What is it like to be a blogger in 2024?

From the Prismatic Wasteland:

First up, I have a substack now. You should know, as you are currently reading it. My actual blog isn’t going anywhere (if I ever stop posting, you must assume I have died), but now there are two places you can read me.

Hopefully you are a fan of blogs, because this is a bit of blogging inside baseball. In the modern era of centralized yet balkanized social media, you must be everywhere. One can, of course, just start a blog and hope people find it, but I am skeptical at how much success you’d find. The pro strat is to hurry about the internet scattering links to your posts like Johnny Bloggingseed. On Twitter (now X), on Bluesky, on Reddit, on ten thousand discord servers of varying size and relevance to your post. It is a bit of a pain in the ass but worth it if you are a nasty little freak who gets a sick kick out of people reading your gaming ideas. Unfortunately, I am that freak. And I want real readers! People who engage with what I write, not just a perennial blog commenter(s) who wants the world, or at least all the bloggers of the world, to know about the priest who used magic to bring back her straying husband.

I want to be cool, and the cool kids these days seem to be operating substacks in addition to their blogs. Take, for instance, Ben L. of Ultan’s Door fame, who runs both his blog Mazirin’s Garden and a substack called Missives from Beyond the Veil of Sleep, or Chris McDowall, father of Into the Odd and therefore grandfather of Cairn, runs the Bastionland blog and its substack companion, the Bastionland Presser. And it would be impossible to not mention Ben Milton’s the Glatisant substack from Questing Beast, which drives a lot of traffic to many a poor blog. These three offer three approaches to running an ancillary substack: for Ben L’s posts on his blog and substack seem to be identical, essentially offering two ways to follow his posts. Chris’ substack includes his blogpost, a snippet from a future blogpost (tune in next week!), and a mini-newsletter type feature where he highlights a few interesting posts from other blogs. Ben Milton’s substack is an entirely different beast from his YouTube channel (which is really like his video-blog now that his text-blog is mostly [but not entirely] fallow since late 2020) and is totally a monthly newsletter with a billion links to adventures, reviews, videos, and blogposts. 

Between these approaches, the one I think I am most likely to emulate going forward is the McBastionland model. Maybe it’s blogger’s guilt, but the idea of using a substack rather than my posts being exclusively on my own blog is more amenable if I can at least use substack to drive more readers to other worthy blogs. One difference from the Bastionland model, however, is that I intend to re-post some of my older blogposts on the substack as well. This is similar to what my colleague Ian at the Benign Brown Beast blog is doing after migrating his blog to a new domain. Even though I started my blog in late 2020 (right around the time Ben Milton stopped text-blogging regularly), there are some posts that feel ancient to me because few people ever read them. When I first started, I was getting maybe half of 1% of my current eyeballs on my posts. This is an opportunity to give those posts, some of which I am quite fond of, a second chance at life!

Other than the desire to be everywhere all at once, the imaginary reader must ask: why add this ancillary substack? It’s just where a lot of the readers are. As Chris advised on my discord server, he currently gets roughly 4x more views on his posts on substack than his blog. “Hot diggity dog,” exclaims the imaginary reader who is apparently from the 1920s. “Why not go all-in on substack with numbers like those?” First, there is the fact that while substack’s algorithm (or whatever method it uses) is very flashy, it is a flash in the pan. Chris added that his most popular blogposts of all time crush his most popular substacks in terms of views. More importantly, when I get eyeballs on my blogpost those eyeballs are mine, not Substack’s. When someone subscribes to my newsletter, it directly helps my efforts to publish more TTRPGs while any substack subscribers are ancillary helpful for me but more directly benefit substack. Because there is no guarantee that an Elon Musk-type figure won’t one day buy substack and make any such subscribers worthless by turning it into flaming garbage (e.g., X). If a billionaire somehow takes over prismaticwasteland.com, something truly terrible has happened or I have become a billionaire. Potentially both things at the same time. 

Blogs are like the OSR itself because people are always claiming both are dead. But, at least in the small TTRPG corner of the internet, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Just look at the prior two Bloggies awards and all the great nominated posts. I’m sure this year’s crop will be just as fulsome. I’ve not done any rigorous analysis but my anecdotal observation is that more people have started a blog this year than in any of the prior three years. This may be in part because what was once a pleasant-enough (compared to today) microblogging, Twitter, has become such  a greasy dungheap that it is frankly impossible to use for anything other than grifting or harassment. But they can never stop you from microblogging on your own blog! 

The interest in blogging is so great that it has become a frequent question on the Prismatic Wasteland discord of what blogging platform people should start with. Based on the discussions we have had, the suggestions of platform included neocities (delightfully appealing in its clunkiness), bearblog (recently quite popular and easy to use), blot.im (be more like Mindstorm, if you know how), blogger/blogspot (the basic bitch [positive connotation] option), wordpress (not recommended), and squarespace (only if, as the podcast advertisements say, you are looking to build a business because it’s not exactly cheap). With that plus the 16 points of advice on how to succeed in blogging from my colleague Dwiz of A Knight at the Opera blog, you are all set to join the blob of TTRPG bloggers. With the increasingly grim social media landscape threatening to swallow up all of human interaction and creativity, we few active blogs stand as points of light against an enveloping darkness. Won’t you stand with us?

Oh, and while I’m doing calls to action, go ahead and subscribe (and like and comment? Is that just YouTube?) to my substack. I’m sure most of you have an account to get The Glatisant in your inboxes already. Though if you really want to be a mensch, you’d sign up for my own mailing lists (one is just rarely used for new RPG projects and the other sends out my blogs not unlike a substack.) The difference is that I own these newsletters, not Substack. I’m not just some faceless social media startup. I have a face. The face of a pink ostrich type creature.  

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From my colleagues:

Uncanny Spheres: A Nest of Vipers: Navigating TTRPG Contracts and Partnerships (a huge and hugely important writeup of the travails of being a smallish TTRPG creator and working with sometimes shady businesses with lots of advice on how to make the most of it and avoid common pitfalls) 

Personable Thoughts (a blog begun in 2024!): Kickstarter FOMO and the Content Firehose (musings on how crowdfunding causes overbuying due to fear of missing out and how this trend leads to stacks of books that go unplayed) 

All Dead Generations: Gygax’s Fortress (analysis of the quirks of Gygaxian dungeon design, namely how they were often siege scenarios inspired by commando films–this post has 2024 Bloggie potential)

Cryptickeyway: Make Ancestries Distinct By Giving Them Mastery of Their Domain (the title does a good job of describing what this one does. Dwarves don’t just mine the earth, they are the only ones who can mine)

Save Vs Total Party Kill: Negative Space Reprise (OSR rules are focused on modeling failure states, causing the OSR playstyle to feels like it’s about engaging with the negative space that exists in between the rules rather than using the rules themselves)