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Readers come and go. There was a time when I refreshed Lileks.com<\/a> obsessively. I’m a sucker for nostalgia and ruminations on the first half of the 20th century, and if you want to cruelly mock while also secretly appreciating the quaint, kitschy, corny styles of middle America then he’s the best in the business. I’d read everything the guy wrote, and when he didn’t post new content I’d go back and re-read some of my favoritesThis retrospective on the 70s<\/a> is pretty cathartic, for my money. I think that was my introduction to his work, actually.<\/span>. His blog was pretty influential on my own writing and is probably why I drop into autobiographical mode<\/a> once in a while.<\/p>\n
Then one day I just… stopped. I have no idea why. James Lileks didn’t lose his mojo, sell out, offend me, or or anything else that usually causes a rift between fan and artist. I just finally got enough of whatever I was looking for, and I stopped going. I know the same thing happens to people who read this site. They eventually get enough of my crap and move on. It happens. <\/p>\n
So part of this job is entertaining the existing audience, and part of the job is replacing people who wander off. This was really easy in 2012 when I was spamming The Escapist<\/a> with content three or four times a week. I was putting up a lot of media-richThe polite way of saying “has lots of pictures”.<\/span> content and all those bylines led people back here. But those days are gone.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’m not looking to become a superstar. In fact, I think I’ve pretty much carved out my niche. Long-form essays on games, plain-language discussions of programming, my collaborations with the Spoiler Warning crew, and the very occasional video content. I’m not going to be the next TotalBiscuit, Angry Joe, Boogie2988, or any of the other big names with millions of fans and followers. And that’s fine. I’m not equipped for that kind of gig anyway, and I think we have a good thing going hereJust doubling my audience might make it impossible for me to do the moderation thing. Yes, I could delegate things to volunteer mods, but right now I read every single comment, and I’d be really unhappy if that were no longer the case.<\/span>.<\/p>\n
But like I said above, I do worry about replacing the people that leave. It’s a natural part of the circle of content. Social media buttons are the best way to accomplish this. They’re so effective that the alternatives (advertising, various methods of self-promotion) are barely worth mentioning. I say this from experience. <\/p>\n
I had share buttons on the site a couple of years ago, but they were flaky and unreliable. Facebook was in the middle of one of their API overhauls, so there were a bunch of different versions of share button plugins for WordPressThe software that runs this site.<\/span> and they were all broken in minor but irritating ways. Worse, I remember that a lot of plugins would only serve one social media site, so you needed a lot of plugins. A plugin for Facebook, another for Twitter, another for StumbleUpon, or whatever else was big at the time. The plugins fought with each other, it was difficult to properly format their outputInstead of a row of buttons, each button would appear on its own line, thus wasting tons of precious screen space.<\/span>, sometimes they would break for no reason, and it was basically a giant headache. I eventually gave up on them. <\/p>\n
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