More fiddle, less fluff?
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I hope this means more written reviews, but Iām sure thatās a forlorn hope.
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Thatās a good shout. I used to love written Sega reviews when I was a kid.
Iāve only recently got a phone that would allow me to watch video but I never seem to have time.
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Yes and yes. Much more, and I believe we are soon getting our first Ava video review.
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Obviously, it is a matter of the team redirecting their energies into other platforms, so I am pretty sure there will be content for us fans, if in a different format. I think Ava post was pretty inspiring to be honest.
But then we know she can write 
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Im fine with it. I want to stick with the niches that Im into and I actively look for those stuff myself. So when the SUSD team puts my interests in their news, big chance I already have it in the wishlist.
The Tom/Ava dynamic is funny, but I get to see that on their podcasts.
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An understandable choice, but sad nonetheless; I didnāt actually care about the games much, but just having something chill to read was nice. I do feel that the expectation that things always get bigger is kind of problematic; as the total fan base gets bigger, the percentage of viewers goes down, even if the number stays the same. It seems a bit disrespectful of the established fans to weigh them against the twitch crowd, but I understand the reasoning. 
That being said, I do feel somewhat less bad for having discontinued my donation (which I had to do for personal financial reasons, Iām not that mad)
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Yes, articles being read is not something so āaccountableā as viewers on Twitch or YouTube, and that is where the dough is these days. Again, I cannot blame them, and I guess the podcast platform will be suitable for updates, is just that the news articles were and easy weekly fix (normally Tuesday breakfast for me on my desk), and for the podcasts I have more difficulty to find a time and a place to listen to them.
Audiovisual content has it advantages, but it suffers from the same as those game plays being logged, lack of time to watch them/play them and too much on offerā¦
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It was the only thing left on SUSD that I actually kept up with - and even then, fairly infrequently. I pretty much fell right off keeping up with them when Praul left - the Quinns/Paul dynamic was 100% the main draw of the content for me. Oh well. This forum is my home anyways.
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I wonder if they are aware people like me read articles direct from the RSS feed. No pageview tracker that I know of is going to pick up on that. Some sites only post a snippet to the RSS, and require a clickthrough to read the full article. Iām fine with that if they need the traffic.
Anyway, done deal now, but I donāt enjoy video and audio content more than written. Finding the time to catch up on it is awkward.
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And now Tom has forever forfeited the opportunity to say āSend me (the games) nudesā.
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Youāre serious?
I canāt nay-say it, but Iāve been visiting SUSD since the beginning, andā¦ Iām not sure Iāve ever looked at a single twittering from any of them. Iām sure thatās not actually true, but I feel SUSDās Twitter output is so entirely unimportant to what they (to my mind) do that your suggestion sounds surreal.
Do they do anything interesting on Twitter?
(I can tell that Iām biased, mind you ā after writing that, I immediately wondered āDoes anyone do anything interesting on Twitter?ā)
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Yes, they do. But that veers in politics, or Parler
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@Benkyo It is possible to extract reader numbers from rss feeds. However, RSS readers have declined in popularity immensely (which one are you using? I donāt have a good one anymore after Bloglines went away) so I donāt think thatās a huge factor that they somehow missed.
As for Twitter (https://twitter.com/ShutUpShow) thatās not whatās replacing the news. Itās just another channel on which to post links to other content not content in itself as far as I can tell.
I think in general the forum crowd is made up from people who prefer the written word over other, noisier mediaā¦ so I am not surprised to see us complain while the trend of the general internet seems to go to the spoken wordā¦
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Unsurprisingly, posting this change on a Monday in the same location that the news is normally posted has led to all the people who normally read and comment on the news reading and commenting on this. We may be a very small demographic. I donāt know.
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Thatās a shame. Iāll definitely miss Ava and Tomās news articles. I really loved their writing. I wouldnāt mind so much if it wasnāt one of the very few written features that SUSD still produced! They all write so well, so itās so sad to have watched that side of things almost completely dry up over the last few years.
I also thought it took a long time for Avaās writing style to settle (Iām not sure whether that was a gradual stylistic change to better fit with SUSD, or an improvement in writing skills over time, or some combination of the two), but IMO it was through the Games News that Avaās writing reached the delightful level itās at now; and the collaboration with Tom was perfect ā they work so well together (always assuming they were, in fact, writing it together).
I could read through and enjoy the Games News in 10-20 minutes; have a good laugh along the way; and get out of it everything I want. Their podcasts take over an hour, donāt give me anything visual, and honestly arenāt any kind of replacement. I am definitely not listening to an entire one of those as a substitute for a quick read of the games news. I sometimes listen to one or two sections of a podcast, but generally only if itās about a game Iām really interested in already. The games news is where I read about things I know nothing about.
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Twitter is great for comedians and the science community. Iāve had plenty of chats with scientists after reading their papers that I probably wouldnāt have emailed about.
Itās okay for politics when used right, but far too many threads and diatribes. The quality of the discussion has dived in the last few years IMO. What used to be punchy and succinct is now an unnecessarily 20-odd tweet thread, with the first 7 of those being a clickbait faux-NPR conversational.
Other than that, no.
SUSD donāt use Twitter all that much. All Iāve ever seen on their Twitter account is links to their other work - website, news, YouTube video, or twitch. Nothing is ever on twitter alone. On their personal accounts, only Ava uses twitter for boardgame things (Matt & Quinns rarely tweet about anything boardgames other than occasional zeitgeist/industry comments).
They interact with Reddit far more than Twitter - responding to peopleās threads about their videos, a few AMAs. Still not a lot, but itās the only concerted effort Iāve seen of them actively seeking out to interact with the wider community. Itās not like theyāll respond to everyone tweeting about their videos in the same way.
To be honest, Iām quite surprised by their talk of ācommunityā and encouraging comments below the line, considering their comments about internet comment sections over the years. But I guess the money is in the interactions and encouraging that sense of being a part of something. Itās business!
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I guess I should have been more clear. Itās not that SUSD is eschewing web content in favor of publishing content on Twitter. I was merely suggesting that they are aligning the content they do create with the format and presentation of content you find on Twitter.
That said, itās news to me but not surprising that reddit is a focal point for them. It suffers from the same problem as Twitter: the content on it is fleeting and the bulk of things on reddit are low-effort content. Reddit is, in my opinion, a better platform than Twitter, but I still find it lackluster due to the fleeting nature of it.
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This. In one of the daft souls podcasts Mattās nails it perfectly. Forums let you accumulate knowledge, newpapers the same, Reddit and Twitter are all about the next thing.
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The news were one of the few things still popping up in my RSS feed which I took a quick look at.
I wonder what they come up with instead, there has to be some replacement project
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