Thanks to everyone who responded on my previous post about G+, and to Alex for blogging. (And other Alex.) There were a pretty wide range of responses from "Let it burn!!!" to actual grieving for something lost. It's interesting to see the very different experiences that people had with that damn Social Media Thing.
I suppose that since everyone else was willing to speak, I should be too.
I miss it but I don't.
G-Plus was dying for me for a long time, from hundreds of small cuts that most of you didn't see. For me G-Plus is tied up with the blog and the books and everything else and my attitude towards it is a mirror of my attitude towards them.
That attitude is; tired, alienated, ambivalent and caked over with bitter secrets. I've had so many bad/weird/troubling interactions with that system and that community, most of which you will never, ever hear about. Being very-mildly successful in a small 'community', or being perceived as such, is awful. I've gotten a very clear look at the disturbing mixture of insane drama and extremely narrow but intense perceived power that slowly drove Zak insane, or just cracked open the narcissism and rage that was already there.
So for me, watching the towers of G+ burn was like hearing about the destruction of a city that I fled months, or even years ago. I'm a little sad for the 'good times', Flailsnails, Constantcon and the period of relative stability and sanity leading up the the first big Summer of Hate in 2015. After that it slowly decayed. Then the Trump election in late 2016 really started to drive almost all the Americans online fucking nuts in one way or another. That dark energy seeped slowly into every interaction. Then came the initially-slow but then-precipitous collapse, and finally the Ultimate Doom in early 2019.
It was a hell of a thing really.
I think I just felt relief for it being gone to be honest.
The world is changing, or fracturing into sub-worlds, and I don't really feel any deep kinship or what Brendan might call 'Communal Sharing' relationships with any of them. I find myself just as placeless and other as I was before blogging and G+, though not quite as directionless.
I try to keep comparing my state of being to how I felt just before I left my last major call-centre job, when my suicidal ideation was vivid, intense and daily. My life now is certainly better than it was then. I'm not happy, but I don't feel as bad as that.
David thinks any idea of online community is a category error. Perhaps, but I have no talent for speaking to my neighbours and am way too far along the scale for some kind of cognitive oddness to easily make friends with actual people. I like making things, its my primary means of being around other people really, so I will probably keep doing it. I have very little choice. It's this or the call-centre.
Fuck the call center. I'll keep buying your game stuff. It's good.
ReplyDeleteand I met you and I liked you, so thanks for shaking my hand. Jez Gordon as well. You gentlemen met and exceeded expectations.
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot that I find familiar here.
ReplyDeleteKinda agree, here. Definitely agree with the "don't miss it" part, because I sort of drifted away from G+. It was too hard to keep up, even during the times I was blogging actively.
ReplyDeleteSomewhat agree with simultaneously sort of missing it anyways. I mainly signed up for G+ because I was thinking of the online gaming opportunities, and now that's gone. But at the same time, I was waiting until I had a mic or headset and my life included a nice chunk of uninterrupted time every week before I did online gaming, and that never happened. So, I don't really miss it, I just miss the lost opportunity.
I actually phased out so early I missed most of the bad stuff on G+, so that doesn't affect me so much.
I'd like to see sub-groups among all the OSR bloggers like the glog-osphere (https://diyanddragons.blogspot.com/2019/03/who-is-glogosphere.html). Although this creates factionalism it also means that there are smaller, closer, communities which I think would be beneficial. I'm not sure if such groups shoudl align by game (the way the glogosphere did) or along some other lines, I'm not sure that distinction even needs to matter.
ReplyDeleteWhat's interesting is that I don't think there *was* a GLOGosphere until Anne made that post. I'm not even sure if there is 1 *now*.
DeleteThe OSR discord has one. Maybe *the* one, if I'm not mistaken.
DeleteI’m sorry you’re tired, alienated, and ambivalent about the books and the blog. They’re both (books and blog) very, very good, so I wish you could feel pride. I’m also sorry about the caked over secrets and hope that the social world that produced them is becoming different and (maybe?) better in this new fragmented post g+ reality.
ReplyDelete