Social Media - Choosing a Path

The more observant of you will have noticed that I haven’t posted here in ages. That’s because I’ve been in a bit of a limbo state when it comes to social media lately, and it feels like it’s finally starting to settle down again, which in turn means my brain settles down too. I can start concentrating on saying the things I want to say, and not trying to decide where I say them.

When I started out with Punchboard nearly five years ago, I made a conscious decision that Twitter would be my main social outlet. Most of the publishers, the designers, and the other content creators were all using it, and Twitter was pretty good back then too.

I mean, it still had more than its fair share of horrible people too, but compared to the trajectory it’s taken in the last couple of years, it was like bimbling around a pleasant English garden in comparison.

Posting about board games on social media is tricky. Which platforms should you choose, and why? Instagram was, and maybe still is the go-to for a lot of people. It’s a kaleidoscope of pretty pictures whizzing past your eyes in a never-ending stream of “Ooh, look at how amazing this game looks!”. I started trying to post things there, but truth be told I can’t really stand Instagram. Without singling any particular people out, the posts there were so vapid, hollow, and ultimately pointless.

I saw so many photos of pretty young things of all genders holding aloft game boxes without really saying anything at all. There are people who post ‘reviews’ there too, but I have issues with that too. Mostly because I’m middle-aged and grumpy I expect. 2,200 characters equates to around 350-400 words, and there’s not much you can say about a game in that many words. I know this from struggling to get a review down to 600 words when I write for Tabletop Gaming Magazine.

The two biggest issues I have with Instagram are the evaporating content and the lack of being able to point someone somewhere else. The first issue is self-explanatory. If you saw a post on Instagram you really liked last week, could you a) easily remember who made it, and b) find it again? The whole platform is built to be like water dripping on a hot plate. A short fizz and it’s gone, waiting for the next fizzing drip to grab your attention.

The other big problem for me, as someone who publishes his work on a website, is that I can’t make a clickable link in an Instagram post. So I can spend hours and hours writing and editing a review of a game, publish it, then when I want to spread the word to feed my vanity and get some reads, I can’t have someone on Instagram tap the link and go to it. “Head to my bio” is the norm, but people are lazy and won’t do that.

When the first wave of Twitter abandonment hit, Mastodon was touted as a suitable replacement. I tried using it for a while, and while I can see its value, it’s useless for me. Communities and networks are self-contained, and while it’s possible to pass people and things from one server to another, it’s a ball-ache and feels clunky to me.

I admire it for what it does, the way it creates these safe havens of like-minded people and gives them somewhere to be, it just doesn’t work for me.

So what next?

I don’t remember the exact order of these things springing into existence, so bear with me here. Meta came along with Threads, which sounded cool at first. Like Instagram, but more focused on conversation. Ideal! Except for the life of me I can’t tell them apart. Other than being able to post links for people to click and tap on, I struggle so much with why I would ever want to post to Threads instead of Instagram, or vice-versa. They seem to me to be near-identical platforms both operated by the same company. What’s the point?

BeReal came along, Hive, and one that I remember as being purple, I think. All dead in the water to me. I joined Bluesky when I had an invite sent my way, and while I used it a little at first, it just kind of sat there, slowly simmering in the background. Until that moron decided to re-brand Twitter as X and to let anyone and everyone back onto it.

Millions of Twitter users fled, many of them deleting their accounts at the same time. I worked hard at growing my following there, having around 1,500 by the end, but I too fled and deleted my account, losing the lot. Some things are just more important, like not supporting anything that generates money for someone who happily throws ‘Roman salutes’ around, normalising it for far too many people for my liking.

So where does that leave me, the balding, overweight, middle-aged, white male, trying to stay in some way relevant in the board game world? I’m glad you asked. Here are the places that I use and the reasons why.

Bluesky. Bluesky is great. It’s like Twitter used to be before idiots decided that being overtly racist and offensive == ‘exercising my freedom of speech’. There’s a nice crowd of users posting genuinely interesting content, and for the time being at least, hatred doesn’t seem to have a home there. I have half as many followers there than I did at Twitter, but I’m much happier posting there.

Facebook. Yes, Facebook. Yes, I know your mum uses it, no, I don’t care. Facebook might well be the home of AI-generated pictures of Jesus made of plastic bottles, and local groups of curtain-twitchers, but it’s also a place where pretty much every publisher, convention, and content creator posts, and there are some great niche groups to get involved with.

Substack. When my previous newsletter provider disappeared - Revue - I wanted a way to get posts out that were more board game adjacent than most of the articles and reviews I post on Punchboard. I bounced around a few different places, but then found Substack. I understand that I’m not using it in the way it’s meant to be used in an ideal world, but it works for me.

I’ll be honest, I was toying with the idea of abandoning Substack, but it seems to be finding its feet again now, and with the recent influx of followers my page has seen - even without fresh content - it was enough of a kick up the arse to start using it again and to start getting some more thoughts out of my head and subjecting you, the world, to them.

What about you?

Have you struggled with trying to put down roots in social media over the last few years? What did you settle on? Am I missing out on something good. Do let me know, and in the meantime I’ll try to make sure I post more often here again.

Adam