The Wongery

As of yesterday, the Wongery now has a presence (albeit a tenuous one) on the same number of active social media sites as it has since last August.

This is less of a foregone conclusion than it may seem, given that one of the social media sites on which the Wongery had had a presence since last August is no longer active. Cohost, alas, is shutting down. At the beginning of October, it went into read-only mode, and at the end of 2024 it will go offline and the domain name will redirect to an archive of the site on the Wayback Machine. Unfortunately, it seems Cohost just wasn't making enough profit to be sustainable, so this decision was unavoidable; the people behind Cohost have bills to pay like everyone else and can't work full-time for free. It's a pity; I liked Cohost, and thought it had a lot of potential, and I'm sorry to see it go; I wish things had gone differently. I know I wasn't very active there, just posting the occasional update, but then I wasn't very active anywhere; I'd always kind of intended on Cohost and elsewhere to do more than just post the Wongery updates, to browse more and reply to other posts, but... well, it was always hard to find the time; I can never find time for most of what I want to do, and spending more time on social media, while on my (nonphysical) to-do list, wasn't very high on it. Regardless, I wish Cohost had been successful and were able to keep its figurative doors open, but... lamentably, it hadn't, and it wasn't.

So if Cohost is no longer an active social media site, in order for what was said in the first sentence of this blog post to be true, the Wongery must now have a presence on some other social media site. And it does. Not because Cohost was shutting down; this was something I'd planned to do anyway, and the fact that I finally got around to it at about the same time as Cohost went read-only was coincidental. But anyway, there is now a Wongery subreddit.

As I said, this was something I'd kind of been planning on doing for a while, although... not without some trepidation. I know Reddit is one of the biggest social media sites around today, and I figured it might be a good idea to have a subreddit there for the Wongery, but I'd resisted or put off doing so for three reasons, all of them stupid.

First, well, Reddit existed for almost two decades; I've never posted on Reddit or had much to do with Reddit before; I felt like I didn't want to break that streak by starting to post there now. Yes, I know this reason doesn't make any sense; just because I haven't done something before is not in itself a reason to not start doing it now, and there's no virtue displayed by just continuing to abstain from something there's no other particular reason to abstain from. Still, my mind works in ways mysterious even to me, and for some reason this was a motivating factor for me. But not an insuperable one, and I did finally resolve to reject my reluctance and go ahead and make a Reddit account. But there were two other (stupid) reasons I didn't so immediately. (Well, I guess three other reasons counting my general tendency toward procrastination, but I mean at this point that's just a given.)

Second, I'd also decided to go ahead and create a Wongery Discord server... or rather to go ahead and do something with the Discord server I'd already set up. I've Discord posted before about my antipathy for Discord, but that's pretty much just because too many communities seem to use Discord as a replacement for fora, a role to which it is monumentally ill-suited. On a forum, posts are preserved for later perusal and can easily be searched, browsed, and linked; on Discord, while older content isn't completely inaccessible, it's certainly much less convenient to find and read through, and it's all but useless for archival purposes. Discord is fine as a chatroom, but it's not, or at least it definitely shouldn't be, a replacement for a forum. Still, setting up a Wongery Discord server certainly didn't need to mean replacing the Wongery forum (unvisited though it currently is), and Discord is popular enough that, well, it wouldn't hurt to give people that extra way to interact.

The (other) problem is, though, that from my limited experience with Discord, it looked like setting up a Discord server, with all the necessary channels and roles and whatnot, would be a formidable task, and I had no idea how to go about it. There are, I'm sure, many guides and tutorials online that could help me through the process, but it still seemed like it could take a lot of time to figure out, and I wasn't sure when I'd have the necessary time to devote to it. So it might be a while before I got around to setting up the Discord server... and I figured I may as well wait to set up the subreddit till I had the Discord server set up too, and get the Wongery's two new social media outlets up and running at the same time so I could make a joint announcement. (I had no idea how to set up a subreddit, either, but it seemed likely to be much less complicated than setting up a Discord server.) But eventually I decided there was no reason the two had to happen at the same time, and I may as well go ahead and set up the subreddit even if I wasn't ready to tackle the Discord server yet.

Third, despite the Wongery's much-heralded "hard launch" having finally taken place(and inevitably landed with a wet thud)... the Wongery still isn't really ready for prime time, so to speak. There still are far too few articles; many old articles are still badly in need of rewrites; and while the various subspaces now exist, they still don't have any content. (We're working on it. We're working on a lot of things.) If a Wongery subreddit could draw new viewers to the site, then, well, wouldn't it make more sense to wait until there was more to see and do there, and more to make those new visitors stick around and spread the word? But, well, first, by its very nature the Wongery's never going to be finished and have everything I want it to have, and second, it's extremely unlikely the Wongery subreddit is going to start drawing new visitors to the site anytime soon anyway, because there's nothing to draw visitors to the Wongery subreddit.

So the Wongery subreddit is there. There's nothing there yet except an introductory post (the text of which is mostly copied from the current welcome box on the Wongery site), but I'll post there when there's a significant new article ("significant" meaning basically not a stub or something else that would have the Unlisted template) or a new blog post (except this one, because making a post on reddit about a blog post about making the subreddit seems kind of unnecessarily self-referential).

I was going to start establishing more of a presence on Reddit by participating in other communities, too, but that is apparently more difficult than I thought. It seems on Reddit each account has a quantity associated with it called "karma", and many, perhaps most, communities require you to have a certain amount of "karma" before you can post or comment there. (There is, perhaps oddly, apparently no minimum karma requirement to create a subreddit, because I was able to do that right away.) How do you accumulate karma? You get karma when other users "upvote" your post or comments. But wait, if you don't have enough karma to post or comment, how can you make posts or comments for people to upvote so you get karma? Yes, there's the rub.

Obviously this is not an insurmountable problem, because Reddit has hundreds of millions of users who have somehow managed to accumulate enough karma to participate on the site. But it is a problem I have yet to surmount. The r/NewToReddit subreddit has a guide called "Reddit and Karma Explained" that offers some advice, including a list of new-user friendly subreddits that have low or no karma requirements so new users can post there (and therefore accumulate karma)... but of course none of those "new-user friendly subreddits" are subreddits I would otherwise have much interest in posting in, and making a few random comments on posts about artwork of anime-style clouds or the last thing someone bought only to never visit those subreddits again once I had enough karma for the subreddits I really wanted to participate in seems... kind of shady.

That doesn't mean that every subreddit not on that list has high karma requirements; I gather that that list contains only the most popular subreddits that don't. But unless it's stated in the subreddit's rules, which is sometimes but not always is, there doesn't seem to be any way of knowing a priori what a particular subreddit's karma requirements are. Apparently the smaller and nicher a subreddit is the more likely it is to have low or no karma requirements, but the smallest and nichest subreddit I've found so far that I'm interested in is r/EABArpg, with only seventeen members (including me)^[1] and no posts for the last three months, is so small and so low-traffic that it seems unlikely that any posts or comments there would get much interaction... even if I had anything to say there, which I currently don't (though maybe I will once I finally get some content up in the EABA gamespace).

So anyway, so far I've made, or tried to make, three comments, in three (3) different subreddits. Of those, one was deleted by the subreddit's automoderator because I didn't have enough karma. (The subreddit in question was listed in the new-user friendly subreddits with the note "low restrictions", but low restrictions isn't the same thing as no restrictions, and in this case the restriction apparently was a minimum of 10 comment karma, which I don't have.) Another comment doesn't show up if I look at the relevant post when I'm not logged in, so either it was somehow hidden (probably because of my low karma) or it was also deleted and the automoderator of that forum just didn't bother notifying me about it. The third went through just fine but nobody's interacted with it, so it didn't get any karma. So right now I'm sitting on a grand total of 1 karma, from the introductory post I made in the Wongery subreddit.

So what now? Eh... I could make an effort to comment on some of those no-restriction subreddits to build up karma, but again, I'm not really comfortable with commenting just to build karma on subreddits I'm not really interested in and don't plan to join—plus, even if I didn't have those compunctions about doing so, it just seems like it would get awfully tedious. I guess I'll keep occasionally commenting in some of the fora I am interested in and see if any of my comments get through and get interaction, but I'm not going to comment just to comment and just to build karma; I'll only comment if I really think I have something to say... which, given my incompetence at social media and the very small amount of time I'm likely to devote to this, I don't think I often will. Still, maybe eventually I'll build enough comment karma that way to be able to participate in more subreddits. Or maybe eventually I will have made enough posts in the Wongery subreddit to give me the sufficient amount of karma, except that maybe that won't count because that's post karma which is apparently a different thing from comment karma and maybe it's actually a certain amount of comment karma that's required. I don't know.

But yeah. The Wongery has a subreddit now. It doesn't have any members other than me, and I don't know when or if it ever will, but it's there, and I'll keep posting there... well, about as often as I post on Tumblr or Mastodon, which admittedly isn't very often, but it's something, I guess. Whether I participate much on any other subreddits depends on how much time I find for that and whether I'm able to somehow accumulate the necessary karma, although given my low participation levels on other social media venues the prospects admittedly do not look great.

Still sad about Cohost.