#oneaday Day 174: Why am I still doing this?

Why am I still doing this? Or, perhaps to the point, why did I start doing this again? This article from Aftermath does a good job of explaining why.

Since the rise of social media, I feel like it’s significantly less likely for someone to have a “personal website”, because everyone is concerned about their “reach” and “engagement”, and if you want both of those things, you want to be on a well-established social media site.

But if you’re more concerned with self-expression and having a space to truly call your own, having your own website is hard to beat. And I think as people become more and more disillusioned with social media — Twitter and Facebook in particular — I think personal websites are going to become more and more important to a wider range of people.

Times have changed a bit, though. The word “blog” seems to have fallen out of wide usage, to be replaced with “newsletter”, this being a result of the assumption that people will sign up to get your posts delivered to them via email, rather than going out of their way to visit your site. However, most of the “newsletters” out there are actually just blogs: people having a space to call their own, writing whatever they feel like at any given moment.

The best blogs… sorry, newsletters… of course have a distinct focus. One of my favourites is Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At?, which is one of the few sites out there continually taking the garbage of the AI industry and other enshittified parts of the Internet to account for their making life worse for everyone.

And, of course, if you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know about my own MoeGamer, which is my main video game blog. MoeGamer has now outlived all of the professional, commercial sites I have ever written for, which is a nice feeling. Sure, I don’t update it every day or indeed regularly, but there’s a ton of stuff to read on there, and I’ve made sure all of it is hopefully relevant and interesting, regardless of when you come to it. No racing to get “news” out the door; no rushing games to meet embargoes; just in-depth articles about games that, for one reason or another, I have found it worthwhile to spend some time, effort and words talking about.

This site, though, this is mostly for me. This site is my virtual replacement for the personal diaries I used to write as a teenager, only at no point have I become embarrassed enough about something I’ve written to want to throw the whole thing in the outside bin so it would never be found by anyone, except maybe the dustmen, who I hope had a good laugh about how much I fancied Nikki Rose before flinging the book into landfill. This site is my reminder of at least part of my time on this planet which, for sure, has had some hefty ups and downs over the course of the last 15-20 years or so.

Does it have many people reading it? No. But I’m not doing it for them. I’m doing it for myself — and if anyone happens to stumble across this little corner of the Internet and gets something out of something I’ve written, that’s just a happy bonus.

If you’ve never given this sort of thing a try and you find yourself frustrated at social media, I can highly recommend giving it a go. It’s dead easy to get started with a platform like WordPress or its numerous imitators; in many cases, you can get up and running for free, too.

However you choose to do it, I can assure you of one thing: having a space to truly call your own, in which you can express yourself completely freely, is something that I’ve started to find increasingly important with each passing year. It’s a good thing to have an outlet, for both the good feelings and the bad, and banging out 500-1000 words every so often just about whatever’s on your mind is a healthy habit to get into.

That’s why I’m still doing this. Not to be famous, not to make money, not to get engagement and followers. But because it’s just something I want to do, and which I find is of great benefit to my overall wellbeing. Give it a try!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 170: I really don’t care about drama

I’ve been umming and ahhing about whether or not to post this, but if I can’t speak freely on my own fricking website, I think I’ll explode, so I’m going to say it anyway.

I really, really don’t give a damn about any drama surrounding an individual behind a particular project. I’m not saying you have to feel the same way, but I do want to express that I find it continually tiresome and genuinely upsetting when I want to talk about something that I think is cool, but the first response is always “but [individual] worked on it, so it’s bad (and by extension you are bad for having anything positive to say about it)”.

I’m not going to talk about specific cases here, because even doing that has the potential to attract ire towards me, and that’s not what this post is about. What it is about is the sense of frustration I feel that the real people who worked on a project end up getting punished for the actions or behaviour of one individual — and, by extension, the attacks people who express enthusiasm for that project end up suffering also.

It is an unfortunate fact of capitalist life that in order to claw your way up to the top of the heap, you probably have to be a bit of a shithead. The way capitalism works, the way business works; you need to be a bit of a shithead in order to see success. You need to doggedly pursue the things you want to achieve, and you need to defend your commercial interests. This is true for pretty much all industries, whether it’s groceries, tech, publishing or whatever. I defy you to find any company out there with an executive suite that has never done anything you’re not a particular fan of, all in the name of either pursuing their goals or defending their commercial interests.

Trouble is, when the higher-ups at a company do something that is regarded as “bad” or “indefensible”, the real people who suffer are those who are just doing their job underneath. When one CEO behaves poorly, the people who are actually making the products that CEO’s company is known for end up getting punished for it. They could do an absolutely amazing job on whatever they worked on, but still get punished because their boss once did “A Bad Thing”, often several years ago.

This, unfortunately, spreads outwards. Because “(CEO = Bad) = (Company = Bad)”, anyone who then expresses an interest in or an enthusiasm for the products of Company gets yelled at by people who care more about the CEO than the company or the product. And that leaves people feeling like they simply can’t express their enjoyment of something they like just as a product, because of one thing the CEO did half a decade ago.

CEOs should, ideally, not do shit things. It would be lovely if we lived in a world where CEOs did not feel the need to do shit things, be it in the name of pursuing their goals or defending their interests. But we do not. And frankly, I am, I’m afraid, long past giving a shit.

I’ve seen too many pointless, unnecessary arguments and too many strained, even broken friendships over this sort of thing, and it just doesn’t matter. We live in a joyless enough world as it is; we should not be attacking one another over the things we choose to have fun with, so long as those things are not actively hurting someone. And in the specific instances I’m thinking about here, no-one is getting hurt except the folks who worked on them, and the people being attacked for daring to say something positive about them.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject. I do not want an argument on this, I do not want anyone in the comments trying to tell me I’m wrong for feeling this way. I’m fed up and I’m annoyed, and I am absolutely not in the mood for someone to tell me I’m wrong for feeling that way. So if you’re gearing up to type a comment like that, zip it. I do not want to hear it.

#oneaday Day 160: The death of Twitter

It seems like Twitter’s day in the sun is finally coming to an end. With the deadline looming for the site to start scraping everyone’s posts to train its AI models, Elon being an absolute fucking maniac (not in a fun way) and Trump being in office, a lot of people — including some well-established figures and brands — have been jumping ship and turning to Bluesky. Hell, even the Clifton Suspension Bridge has decided to ditch Twitter. And no, I’m not making that up.

I haven’t been following the progress of all the “Twitter alternatives” that sprang up a while back too closely, but it seems like a lot of people are favouring Bluesky, which I must confess is one that I’ve been on for a little while now. Threads sounds like an absolute dead end of a social network — tech commentator Ed Zitron describes it as “Twitter made of Instagram comments” — and the less said about shit like Gab, Truth Social and Parler (does that one even still exist?) the better.

I’m interested to see where things will go. The vibe on Bluesky right now is very positive; many folks quite rightly describe it as feeling like Twitter from 10+ years ago, and they’re absolutely right in terms of atmosphere. The users have collectively decided to not allow it to fall into negativity and ragebait like Twitter has become in recent years, and there is a shared understanding that “block early and block often” is the best approach to anyone being a dickhead.

This is helped enormously by Bluesky’s “nuclear block” function, which means that if someone quote-replies a post then blocks the person they quoted, the quote will appear as blocked for everyone. That helps prevent dogpiling and discourages people from going around looking for trouble. Couple this with the “detach quote” function, where if you do find yourself quote-replied and you’re getting grief as a result, you can simply unclip your post from the quote and be left the fuck alone. Much better than Twitter’s woefully ineffective mute and block functions — oh yeah, Twitter made block work so that anyone you blocked can still see your posts, which is… great.

At this point, anyone still on Twitter is in absolute denial. The place is infested with bots, scammers, right-wing fucknuts and Elon sycophants who want nothing more than just a crumb of billionaire dick to suck. And with the impending “AI” shit looming, I’m not surprised people have finally had enough. I’m certainly never going back, and I think my boss and I need to have a serious conversation about whether we start focusing our professional social media efforts on Bluesky instead of Twitter. There are a lot of cool retro game peeps over there, and I think Evercade would fit in well there.

Of course, there’s always the thing to ponder: do people really want “brands” on a social media site? And I guess it depends what they’re doing. If all they’re doing is engagement bait crap, probably not. But this might be a fun opportunity to experiment with doing something a bit different, in a place with an altogether different vibe.

Something to consider next week, certainly — my boss is off this week, otherwise I’d have a chat with him about it tomorrow. In the meantime, Bluesky seems to be a pleasant enough place to hang out from a personal perspective, and a fair few people I know have showed up there. It’s social media how it used to be before all those sites made us want to kill ourselves every day, and I’m sure that won’t last forever. But while it does, we may as well enjoy it.

#oneaday Day 147: Saturday Night is for Streaming

Well, it is this week, anyway. Andie is going out for a friend’s birthday in the evening, so I thought I might take the opportunity to do a bit of streaming. You, dear reader, are welcome to stop by. Here’s my Twitch channel. I’ll be streaming from about 8pm UK time, all being well, and the duration will depend on how much fun I’m having and whether anyone is actually chatting. I plan to go for at least an hour or two, though.

The game I’ve picked to stream is one I deliberately haven’t started yet. It’s Experience’s dungeon crawler Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters and Gain Strong Weapons and Armor. You May Be Defeated, but Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be a Day When the Heroes Defeat the Devil King. I have picked this for several reasons:

I like Experience games.
I like dungeon crawlers.
It has a silly name.
As I understand it, it’s a fairly light and breezy take on the dungeon crawler, so it should be eminently suitable for chatting while playing.

Now I’m sure anyone who is all about “optimising” their Twitch experience would recommend I play something people have actually heard of. But if you’ve ever paid my YouTube channel a visit you will know that I don’t really give a shit about baiting the algorithm and getting huge viewing figures.

In fact, as I’ve discussed previously, I actually don’t like it when a video does well, because after you crash through a certain number of views, people start to get a bit more mean and I’m not a big fan of that. So I’d rather just host a nice little comfortable stream for friends to drop in on as they see fit — and perhaps a few newcomers can pop along and learn a bit about a game they haven’t seen before alongside me.

Streaming is something that, I know, you have to work hard at in order to get anywhere. To be honest, I’m not so fussed about trying to “make partner” or “go affiliate” or whatever — the thing that appeals to me about streaming more than anything else right now is the prospect of potentially making some human connections with people. I have been so bereft of good company beyond my wife and cats in recent years that I want to try various means of potentially meeting new folks. And streaming would seem like a potentially solid means of discovering people with similar interests that I might get along with.

I know that won’t happen immediately. I’m fine with that. I’ve recorded lots of Let’s Plays for YouTube, so I am intimately familiar with how to talk rubbish entirely to myself while playing a video game. But if some good conversation happens to come about? So much the better. We shall see, I guess.

Anyway, tomorrow evening, 8pm UK time. I’ll let you work out what that is in your region. Let’s hunt some monsters and have a good time!

#oneaday Day 139: Non-specific ramblings

I’ll level with you, dear reader, I don’t really know what to write about tonight, and it’s already twenty past midnight, so I decided I would just start typing and see what came out. I had been looking for inspiration in past blog posts, but ended up just reading them rather than taking any actual ideas from them. It’s times like this that I’m glad I’ve managed to keep this one site up and running for so long — even though it has had a few challenges in the last year in particular.

But anyway. Looking back at the blog posts I wrote more than 10 years ago — I was idly browsing through entries from January 2011 — I found it striking to ponder how some things have very much stayed the same (depression, anxiety, loneliness) and others have changed quite a bit.

In one post, for example, I noted a modest ambition of mine as being able to one day buy a brand-new car. To date, I have done that not once, but twice. Well, kind of. I got roped into one of those hire-purchase schemes because I am not good at talking to salespeople, and when the term on one was concluded, I was faced with either paying up several thousand more pounds to keep the car I’d already paid several thousand pounds into on a month-by-month basis, or switching to another new car and continue paying for that on a month-by-month basis.

Not having several thousand pounds to spare at the time, I chose the latter option, which resulted in me getting a worse car for more money. But at least when that one was up, I did have the money to spare to just finish purchasing it outright. Regrettably, it was due to my inheritance from my last remaining grandparent passing away — thanks, Nan D — but that same car is still sitting comfortably on my driveway and will hopefully last a good few years more yet.

Back in 2011, I don’t think I would have ever contemplated having a nearly-new piano, which I do now. Of course, 2011 was right when I was in the middle of one of the worst periods of my life, having recently separated from my first wife and started enduring what, at the time, I thought was the great indignity of having to move back in with my parents. (My mental state was not good at the time. I mean, it’s not good now, but it was really bad then. I am now, at least, genuinely and honestly grateful for that safety net I had and wouldn’t like to think of what might happened to me had my parents not saved me from a very bad situation. But enough of that for now.)

On the whole, my life in 2024 is in a much better place than it was in 2011. I have a stable job that I like in a field I’m proud to be part of, a decent income, an incredibly supportive and understanding wife whom I love very much, two wonderful cats whom I also love very much, and a game collection that would blow the mind of my teenage self. In terms of general “life situation”, I can’t complain all that much.

But I miss people. As a socially anxious and introverted person, I’m sure that’s not something the me of a decade or two back would have ever thought I’d say, but man. Loneliness fucking blows. And the longer it goes on, the harder it feels like it is to do something about it. There are people I probably could reach out to and attempt to rekindle past friendships, but what does one say in that situation, and via what medium?

I feel like I’ve had about a decade of everyone I know drifting away from me for one reason or another — or perhaps me drifting away from them, or perhaps both — and now I just don’t really know how to handle that. I would like nothing more than to return to the good old days of the “Squadron of Shame” club on 1up.com and our later website and podcast, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin recapturing those good old days — or even if it’s possible to do so.

The one positive thing I’ve found in recent months is that social network BlueSky has a pleasing “early 2010s” Twitter vibe to it right now, and that is gradually helping me to build up a sense of online confidence that has been severely knocked over the course of the last decade or so.

That’s a start, at least, as loathe as I am to rely on a social network website for interacting with people, knowing as I know now that all these services eventually go down the route of enshittification. Real-life, meanwhile, I have a lot more work to do in, as my present physical condition means that I’m afraid and/or ashamed to see anyone I used to know in person because of the amount of weight I gained over the COVID years, so that’s going to be a harder, more long-term project, but, well, I guess I have plenty of time on my hands.

Well, then, how about that. “Nothing to write about,” he says, then goes and rambles on for nearly a thousand words. I guess that’s the approach to take when I can’t think of anything, then. Just sit down and write. That’s what #oneaday has always been about. And that’s what I’ll continue to do.

#oneaday Day 128: Imminent Holiday

As I may have mentioned once or twice recently, we’re going on holiday tomorrow. We’ll be away from Monday to Friday visiting Center Parcs in Elveden Forest, which has been a thoroughly nice place to have some time away on all the previous occasions we’ve visited.

My intentions for this holiday are to unplug almost completely. I will post on this blog daily because of the whole #oneaday thing, but outside of that, I intend to avoid any sort of attachment to the Internet whatsoever, except where absolutely necessary to research things. That means I am making the following promises to myself:

I will not worry about writing anything for MoeGamer or making any sort of video for YouTube.
I will not poke my head in on Discord channels that are likely to annoy me.
I will not look at Twitter at all.
I will minimise my use of Bluesky.

I haven’t really talked about the last one at all, but as you may have surmised from the sidebar, I have been dipping my toe back into social media with Bluesky recently. And for the most part, I’ve found it a thoroughly pleasant environment that feels very much like Twitter did in the early days. It’s very left-leaning, which can at times be a little insufferable, and wherever you look you’re very likely to run into either a particularly horny furry or someone proud of the fact they’re wearing a cage on their cock, but for the most part it has been a remarkably stress-free social media experience so far.

Part of the reason for this is that the platform is built to discourage “dunking”, whereas Twitter outright incentivises it these days. The main way Bluesky differs from Twitter is through its absolutely nuclear block function, which means that if someone quote-posts or replies to someone they have subsequently blocked, if you are following the person who made the quote-post or reply, the original post will appear as blocked to you also. This discourages people from going “looking for trouble” because you can’t even see the username of the blocked post. This can be frustrating at times if you missed the original context, but for the most part I think it’s a positive thing.

So anyway, as a result of all that, and the fact I have a few friendly faces there, I have been using Bluesky a bit recently, and thus, if I’m going to share anything about the holiday that isn’t on this blog, I’ll likely do so there. If you’re a Bluesky user and want to follow me, here.

But yes. Anyway, the main point of this post is to note that I will be disconnecting from the greater part of the Internet as much as humanly possible while I am away, because I need it. I need some time away where I just don’t put any unnecessary pressure on myself, or potentially put myself in situations where I might end up getting annoyed. I’m tempted to outright leave a few Discord servers to remove the temptation altogether, but probably won’t go that far.

This holiday is to rest, relax and genuinely get away from it all. My mental health has been in the toilet of late, and the Internet has played a big part in creating that situation. So instead I’m going to be among the trees, play some video games, go swimming and look at friendly deer. We might go and fire a crossbow (not at the deer) and play some pool, too. We haven’t decided yet. But it’s going to be nice.

Today, meanwhile, it’s last-minute packing and tidying up ahead of my mother-in-law coming to look after the cats — sorry burglars, the house will still be occupied while we’re away — and perhaps finishing off Silent Hill 2 later.

#oneaday Day 122: “We Need” and the cult of perpetual dissatisfaction

As someone who works in marketing, there are two little words I’m bloody sick of seeing. Because they always show up beneath announcements of cool things, prompts for discussion… anything, really.

“We Need”.

It doesn’t matter what you’re posting online, someone somewhere will decide that the thing you just posted about is completely irrelevant, and that they have decided to take on the heavy burden of representing the entire audience of Thing.

“We Need”.

Sometimes it’s a thing you know is coming anyway, so you can’t say anything. Sometimes it’s a thing that has been previously requested, but which isn’t practical right this second. And sometimes it’s a completely outlandish, unreasonable suggestion that no-one who knows the slightest thing about the business you’re working in would declare with such confidence that “We Need”. Always, though, it’s something other than the thing you have just posted about.

I know I’m not alone in this, because when I look at marketing posts from other companies, I inevitably see at least one “We Need” in the wild, fulfilling the exact same function outlined above. Talking about anything other than the thing that has just been announced or promoted, and instead speaking on everyone else’s behalf that “we” are absolutely, completely and utterly entitled to a thing that hasn’t even come up in conversation once.

Back around the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle — remember that? — I took umbrage at games journalists calling gaming enthusiasts “entitled” for whining at developers and publishers. I still don’t think productive discussions were had back around then. But honestly, some 10+ years later, I 100% get it. It’s downright exhausting to want to share things you’re personally genuinely excited about that you’ve been working on, only to be hit with the inevitable “We Need”s.

I’m pretty sure this all stems from a broader issue online: the cult of perpetual dissatisfaction, where a certain, loud-mouthed proportion of people on the Internet are never satisfied with the thing that has just been put in front of them, no matter how excellent it is. Cool new thing just announced? Yesterday’s news. “We need” the next thing, immediately, preferably sooner. Long-awaited and much-requested upgrade to something confirmed? Pish. “We need” something completely unrelated. Product getting excellent reviews from press and public alike? Balls. “We need” something that no-one else has asked for, ever.

This ties in with another theory I have about modern online discourse: the fact that there are people out there who don’t feel like they have anything to say if they’re not criticising. Saying “this is good” is anathema to them, because then they can’t “offer feedback” or “give constructive criticism”, even where none was asked for.

By contrast, I’ve often found that these people tend to do a better job of shutting down conversation than actually starting a worthwhile discussion. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve expressed my appreciation and enjoyment of something, only for someone to come along and feel the need to list everything they think is wrong with it, everything “We Need” to see fixed about it. When that happens, I just lose all interest in attempting to have a discussion, because that person isn’t interested in knowing what I liked about the thing. They just want the opportunity to “offer feedback”.

Feedback can be a helpful, useful thing under the right circumstances. But it needs to be asked for, or, in extreme cases, obviously needed. And by “needed” I mean “there is something demonstrably wrong with the thing”, not “this one dude doesn’t like the way the thing does something”.

“We Need.”

We need to learn to be satisfied and happy with things, because perpetual dissatisfaction is no way to live. Just stop for a moment and enjoy the thing. It’s much more fun than never reaching a point where you can do that.

#oneaday Day 121: Tedious Nostalgia

I’m all for nostalgia — hell, most of my online presence is built around it these days — but I’m becoming increasingly tired of social media accounts that are nothing but what I’m going to call “nostalgia fluff”. What I mean by this is that they post something that effectively says “This is a thing that existed.” and then don’t provide any sort of additional commentary or context. To put it another way, they are indulging in the exact behaviour depicted in this excellent video from the one and only Mr Biffo of Digitiser:

There’s a simple explanation for this, of course: it’s engagement bait, as is 90% of anything on any social media platform these days. By posting “Count Duckula is a cartoon series that was once on television”, the poster is counting on people showing up in the replies by the score to say “Wow! I remember this!” and “SO NOSTALGIC!” and suchlike.

Trouble is, all of that is completely fucking meaningless. It rarely starts a meaningful discussion, and the person who posted the thing in the first place certainly isn’t interested in leading a discussion, otherwise they would have posted something more substantial in the first place. So why do it at all?

Number go up, of course. Those sweet likes and shares. The cynical would note that many engagement bait accounts aim to attract large numbers of views, comments and shares so they can then sell on the account to someone else, but this doesn’t always happen. Some people really are convinced that their context and commentary-free acknowledgements that something indeed existed at some indeterminate point in the past are “good content”. Some of these people will even get snippy if someone “steals” their “content”, by which I mean posting something about the same thing they posted.

There’s a difference between this sort of thing and what I do. When I write an article or make a video about something, I’m not doing so just to go “this existed, look how knowledgeable I am for knowing this thing existed”. Rather, I do so for one of two reasons: one, to introduce the thing to other people, and that requires some additional context and commentary to explain why the thing is noteworthy; and two, to share my personal recollections of the thing in question, which often ties in with the first point.

That takes effort, though. That requires researching beyond a simple glance at Wikipedia to make sure you got the date right. That requires actual knowledge and experience, and a willingness to do something beyond the bare minimum to cater to the lowest common denominator online.

I often find myself annoyed at the perception that you “shouldn’t” post anything too long or in-depth online, “because people won’t bother to read/watch it”. This, to me, just leads to a situation where you are encouraging something undesirable. By assuming everyone is as stupid as an attention-deficit social media addict who can’t read more than a paragraph without wanting to Alt-Tab into Roblox, we just make that the norm. And that’s what these low-effort nostalgia engagement bait accounts are doing: making the bare minimum the norm.

I find the idea that you should make things as short as possible “because people will click off within 3 seconds” or whatever kind of insulting. It’s insulting to the people who don’t click off within 3 seconds to assume that everyone’s attention span is as addled as the worst people on the Internet, and it’s insulting to me to suggest that if the thing I’ve done isn’t “interesting” within 3 seconds it has no value. So far as I’m concerned, if someone is incapable of reading more than a paragraph of text or digesting a video that is more than 30 seconds long, I don’t really want them looking at my stuff anyway. It’s not for them.

That may sound gatekeepery but honestly I don’t give a shit any more. I hate how much the Internet has become a race to the bottom, and I fear it’s reached a point where it is actively harmful to both community and culture.

So I will keep going into things in as much depth as I damn well please, and if you don’t have the attention span to deal with it, that is 100% your problem.

(I know none of you reading this fall into this category, of course. Keep being excellent.)

#oneaday Day 98: Feature Creep

One of the things that really annoys me about modern websites is the obsession with feature creep, and nowhere is that more apparent than on social media and adjacent sites, with YouTube being a particularly prime example.

As if the scourge that is YouTube Shorts wasn’t enough, the latest feature that it’s impossible to dismiss permanently — telling it to go away only makes it disappear for a month at most — is “YouTube Playables”, a range of bottom-of-the barrel mobile game crap designed to placate the ever more attention-deficit body of users who can’t possibly just do one thing at a time.

I honestly don’t get it. Who looked at YouTube and went “you know what this needs? Shitty mobile games!” Who looked at Netflix and decided that needed to be a gaming platform? For that matter, who looked at fricking Facebook and thought games on there would be a good idea?

The argument that usually gets trotted out with this sort of thing is that it “gets more people into gaming”. Frankly, I’ve always thought this to be bollocks. Gaming has never been more accessible and affordable on platforms that are specifically built for it, and there is only one possible reason it is being shoehorned in everywhere that it doesn’t belong: to monetise the crap out of it, be it through ads, in-app purchases or subscription price hikes.

At this point I’d almost pay YouTube a fee to not have to see garbage like Shorts and Playables ever again. There are fundamental features of their platform that still don’t work properly and they waste time with this shit? Someone wants firing.

But I guess someone, somewhere has decided this junk “adds value”, so here we are, stuck with it, in yet another example of the Web being enshittified. At least there’s no “AI” features in YouTube… yet. Don’t you love our cyberpunk dystopian future?

#oneaday Day 89: Under the influence

I’m not entirely sure when exactly “influencer” became a widely accepted job title, but I do vividly remember when I first heard it that I felt “…we probably shouldn’t make that a thing”. And in 2024, I stand by that. I find it horrifyingly dystopian that we live in a world where people are unironically referred to as “influencers” — and, perhaps even worse, there are people out there who see “influencers” as somehow inherently more trustworthy than traditional media.

The traditional media has its problems, of course, and it always has done. But there has always been a certain separation between editorial and commercial content — and when there isn’t, it is clearly demarcated. There are no such demarcations when it comes to “influencer marketing” — and, from where I’m sitting, there appears to be absolutely zero scrutiny or oversight of how “influencers” are doing business, with minimal obligations for them to share the fact that they’re being paid to say things.

The scourge of “influencers” is a universal one, but obviously my most direct experience with it is in the world of gaming. One of the most common criticisms thrown at old-school games journalists is that they’ve been “paid off” by publishers to do things a certain way — either to inflate a product’s review scores above what it is perceived to “deserve”, or perhaps to disparage rival products.

Having spent several years in the industry, I don’t doubt that there have been occasions where that goes on. And there have been plenty of related incidents, too, with probably the most famous being “Gerstmanngate”, where a writer was let go from Gamespot for giving a bad review to a game whose publisher had spent a considerable amount on advertising said game.

Most people would agree that a games journalist being in the pocket of a publisher is a bad thing. I don’t believe it goes on nearly as often as the most insufferable people on the Internet think it does, but I think we can all agree that if money changes hands in this way, the “journalism” on the thing in question is compromised.

And yet the same people who would take a games journalist to task for accepting money from a publisher to cover a game are all over the world of “influencers”, believing that having your face on YouTube makes you inherently more “real” and “trustworthy” than those people who hid behind all those pesky written words. And “influencers” (no, I’m not going to stop with the scare quotes, I fucking hate the term) are openly accepting paid promotional deals, then covering the products in question. Some of them remember to disclose this; not all do. But regardless of whether or not any disclosure is going on, how is that any fucking different?

I find it absolutely unfathomable that “influencers” accepting money for coverage of things is apparently just tickity-boo, whereas the exact same thing was one of the worst accusations you could throw at a games journalist. How does that make any sense whatsoever?

I feel mostly immune to influencer marketing, but it’s very clear that the younger generation in particular are very susceptible to it. And it’s dystopian. It’s horrible. And it’s one of those things that we can’t just “walk back” any more, because the influencer “industry” has become so massive over the course of the last decade or so.

I saw someone argue earlier that we’re probably overdue for a brand new “segment” of the Internet, like how we once had stuff like Telnet and Gopher alongside the World Wide Web. If the Web has become this utterly devastated late-stage capitalism wasteland, perhaps it’s time for people to move on to something else? And no, not the fucking Metaverse. Honestly, at this point, I’d welcome the ability to engage with a fully text-based Internet that wasn’t 99% controlled by advertisers. Then we can leave all the “influencers” and their mindless zombie followers to it, and build something better elsewhere.

And then wait for that to be ruined. Still, it might be fun for a few years at least, before the Brands find it.