As anyone who cares will know by now, Google+ will shut down in August of 2019. I have many feelings and thoughts about this. I need to say something. I do not know what I need to say, but it needs to be said none the less. The best place to begin would seem to be explaining why the death of an obscure and much maligned social media site is relevant to a blog about tabletop adventure games.
Google+ has been the nexus around which RPG people of every type have gathered for years. In 2011 the service was launched concurrently with Hangouts, which folks quickly realized was the most powerful game facilitating tool since polyhedral dice. It was only natural that Google+ (which Hangouts was then inextricably connected with) become a tool for finding new people to play and discuss games with. The fact that g+ lacked the social baggage of sites like Facebook, as well as the tools it had for organizing a person’s interactions by topic, gave people a freedom they lacked elsewhere. Nobody’s grandma is on Google+. Nobody had to worry about bothering people by posting too frequently about weird nerd shit. Google’s failure to convince everyone in the world to use the service made it an ideal space for hobbyists who wanted to spend a lot of time talking about something esoteric.
The OSR as I know it gradually shifted its weight onto the new platform. What began as a network of interlinking blogs just made more sense on g+. It was easier to keep up with everyone since everybody’s threads could show up in a single stream. The barrier to entry was also much lower since nobody felt obligated to “produce content.” G+ didn’t kill the OSR blogging scene, but it did absorb a lot of the verve that had driven the scene up to that point.
I can’t speak for others, but at some point I started to think of my blog as an extension of my presence on g+ rather than the other way around. Tons of posts here had their roots in conversations over there. Its been years since I paid any attention to my site’s analytics. For me, a post is a success or a failure based on the reaction it gets on Google+.
Even more personally, Google+ has been my primary social outlet since 2012. I know that probably sounds strange or pathetic, but Internet relationships have always been my bedrock. My parents kept me isolated for most of my adolescence. They intentionally sabotaged my friendships. The only reason I was able to sneak a social life past them at all was because I understood computers and they did not. Those years made me comfortable with people online in a way I’ll never be with people in meatspace. I have offline friends whose company I enjoy very much, but for my day-to-day, I need the rhythm of online correspondence to feel like my whole self. For 7 years Google+ has been the best social space I’ve ever experienced. I sincerely don’t know what I’m going to do when it’s gone.
Though, sad as it is, we can’t pretend the death of Google+ is a surprise. The writing was on the wall in 2015 when Hangouts got spun out into its own separate service. It was clear the moneymen weren’t happy even before that, but ever since the decay has been obvious. Each “update” has removed or obscured more of the features that made the site so useful. Bugs have been left to pile up for years without even a token effort at resolving them. Truly I think the only reason g+ survived as long as it did is because Google was embarrassed to admit they’d given up.
It all speaks to the inherent futility of profit motivated social media. Either a service will fail to be profitable and be “Sunsetted” like Google+; OR a service will become mutilated and warped in pursuit of ever greater profits, like Facebook and Twitter have been.
Various luminaries have made the point that everything will turn out fine in the end. After all, the OSR predates Google+. It exists on Blogs, Reddit, Discord, and on the shelves of your friendly local game store. No doubt all of that is true. Noble stoicism aside, though, it is the end of an era. No other platform has ever hosted the same collaborative spirit that we achieved on g+. No future platform will have the same concentration of creative energies. I’m comfortable calling this a tragedy, even if that brands me a melodramatic ninny. The one sad consolation is that I think the OSR is a dead movement anyway.
Mors vincit omnia. Vale.
Papers & Pencils will persist, as will Blogs on Tape. You can always find me here, and I will remain active on Google+ until the very last moment it exists. I will absolutely weep bitter tears when the pages stop loading. August 2019 is going to be ugly for me.
I’ll still be “Beloch Shrike” on google hangouts once g+ goes away. I don’t check it terribly often, but it will still exist, and you should feel free to contact me there.
I’m relatively active on Facebook, and always post publicly. However, I don’t often talk about games, and I curate my follow-list like a museum administrator possessed by the devil. Don’t feel bad if I don’t follow back.
Mastadon is delightful, and you should absolutely find an instance to join so we can be friends over there. I mostly use it to discuss politics and make “humorous” observations about the minutia of my life. I’d be happy to talk about games if there was anyone to talk about games with.
On Discord I’m linkskywalker#1679. I do not like Discord. It’s just neoclassical IRC, and I didn’t like IRC much the first time around. It’s too fast paced and chaotic for my comfort. None the less, please feel free to friend me, message me, and invite me to your server. It seems to be the way the wind is blowing, so I may yet learn to love it.
Philosophically, I believe federated social media is the wave of the future. The software and the infrastructure isn’t quite “there” yet, but I think it has a better chance to stand the test of time that any of the other options. I want to support its future development by bringing people onto federated platforms, so I intend to shift much of my g+ activity onto Pluspora and Friendica once g+ is gone.
To my frustration, within 17 seconds of the announcement that g+ was shutting down, everyone jumped onto the MeWe bandwagon. It’s the most popular lifeboat, so I do have an account there, and you should get in touch if you’re there as well. That said, MeWe is a shitty website which lacks basically all the features that made g+ so useful to begin with. Moreover, it’s run by a wacko whose entire strategy for promoting his platform seems to be based around catering to people who were awful enough to get kicked out of places like Facebook and Twitter. I really hope a better option comes along in the next 9 months, but until then something is better than nothing.
Of course I’m always available by email, most conveniently at my LS@PapersPencils.com address.
Stay in touch, friends.