Google+ was the best social media site for the kind of role-playing I liked to do. Many years ago, its pull was so big, many people abandoned their blogs and posted on Google+ exclusively.
The main draw was this:
email is is the new snail mail
I think the success of Google+ can tell us something about the blogs. It teaches us to actively share the blogs we follow and link the posts we like. Not just for the one post we like but because in aggregate this is how the network forms. This is how new people realize that there is a network in the first place and feel the urge to join.
Google+ was a true interest based medium. I wasn’t related to anybody on Google+, I didn’t go to school with anybody on Google+. I was there for role-playing games and so was nearly everybody else. That means that there is a lot of churn. People come and go, unlike most of your family and friends from school. This is great because you can meet a lot of people, but it also means that you keep losing people that drop out and you need to replenish that pool with new faces.
Finding new bloggers, and convincing existing people in our hobbies to start blogging – that is what we need to do. That is why we need to link to each other. That’s how they know we’re here.
#Google Plus #Social Media #RPG #Old School
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I’m very sad Google+ is gone. I’m sure I’ll adjust fairly quickly, but it’s also inevitable that some people will escape my attention. Hopefully, it will be somewhat offset by the new people I get into contact with (and the proliferation of blogs, fingers crossed).
– Ynas Midgard 2019-04-03 12:05 UTC
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I was preparing breakfast just now and wondered about G+. But the app is no more.
– Alex Schroeder 2019-04-04 05:56 UTC
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Yeah, after checking my e-mails, I still really want to check the new posts on G+ - even tough checking MeWe and the blogs and forums would naturally come after that, it is really weird to skip that one step.
– Ynas Midgard 2019-04-04 10:42 UTC
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It was really fantastic. I’m not sure anything will take its place for some time. I had always hoped Disqus would take off, but it might also be a vector for evil analytics or something. I wonder if people will centre themselves around big blogs again, the way Grognardia seemed like a message board looking at old posts.
– Ramanan 2019-04-04 13:27 UTC
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I do appreciate that your comments just work, though. I can’t post on many of the blogger blogs, which is basically all of them.
– Ramanan 2019-04-04 13:28 UTC
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Same here! 😭
– Alex Schroeder 2019-04-04 14:14 UTC