Lament for the blogs and forums

There’s never been a better time to be an enthusiast in Retro Computing. The computing age is now the right - well - age, as are of course its enthusiasts. The explosion of the “home computer” market in the 1980s appealed strongly to the children of that time. These people are now in their 40s and 50s, still have the old computers in their attics, disposable income to buy more stuff off eBay and trading sites. Many of them - perhaps due to a mid-life crisis - are seeking to make more of a hobby out of this and have become “content creators” - head off to YouTube and there’s a lot of content around exploring these retro computers, the games on them, the history behind them, repairing them, interviews with the games writers of the time, and more.

This is great - if you enjoy consuming videos. For me, I’m never in the right time or place to watch a video. It’s a frustrating experience to see a link on BlueSky or other social media to what looks to be a really interesting subject, only to see that it’s to YouTube. I don’t really have the time to watch a 30-minute video just now - or indeed, at any time really. The video format isn’t suited to skimming, which is kind of needed since these videos will commonly have to set the context for themselves, but I don’t really need to hear another introduction to the Commodore 64. And skipping the inevitable PCBway sponsorship segments.

I’d much rather have this content in the form of a blog post. At any time I can open up a browser tab for it and it can stay there until I’m ready to read it - and dip in and out of it as time permits. I can skim-read it, skip to the bits I’m interested in, and if it’s useful, bookmark it for reference. But sadly it seems that the blog post has been long in decline.

It’s about the money

It’s not hard to see why content creators prefer YouTube. YouTube makes it easy to monetise channels. Content creation is part hobby and enjoyment and part revenue-making. The video equipment needs to be paid for, the retro equipment needs bought, and of course some profit to make up for the hours of effort needed is right and fair. Blogs can’t be monetised in the same way. The closest equivalent is to host adverts - but that has something of a sleazy feel, getting a decent return requires an obscene amount of adverts, and of course an ad blocker will instantly dent this income source.

Sponsorship is an option, but you really need to already have the readership in order to be able to do this. Blogs such as Troy Hunt’s can use this effectively - the sponsorship is unobtrusive, relevant to his audience, and personally vetted by him. This is an ideal way to monetise, but Troy has a huge audience and this isn’t an option for most of us.

Patreon - essentially blogs behind a paywall - is obviously built around monetising content, but it’s an “active” form - people have to subscribe and hand over their credit card details and pay every month. This is great for maximising the creator’s income - nobody wants the middle men taking a big slice - but the creator has to actively seek out their audience and convince them it’s worth paying for. Whereas with YouTube, it’s passive: the audience turns up if it’s interesting and the creator gets a slice. No commitment needed from the viewers.

The decline of forums

It’s not just blogs that are in decline. Blogs were a great way for individuals to create a site on the Internet and not just talk about their interests, but to share information and techniques that can help others. Tried to do something, hit a tricky problem, and then solved it yourself? Write it down in a blog post, and the next time someone hits that problem, they can find your solution. For those who had the first part - the problem - but not the second part - the solution, that’s where the forums come in.

For a large part of the first decade of the 2000s, forums where commonplace. phpBB was easy for a sysadmin to set up (as long as they had PHP hosting and a MySQL database - not quite as cheap and easy to get as they are now!) and so these forums sprang up everywhere, for all kinds of subjects. But again, these are in decline - but the reason for this is a bit more unpleasant - they are locked away by commercial interests.

Facebook’s Groups function has taken over a lot of forums. They’re a place to post questions and get answers from other people. There are many such forums on Facebook related to retro computing, some with thousands of members. They have really good content in them! Solutions and answers to all sorts of questions can be found. But they are locked away - they are invisible to the search engines. Many of these groups also require you to request membership - partly as a way to keep out spam and also troublemakers, but I suspect also give a feeling of power to the group owners.

In the last decade, Discord has also taken off in a huge way. This is a different thing - it’s real time chat rather than a forum or a blog, but again it’s used - amongst many uses - by the retro computing community as a way of spreading information, and getting and giving help. The PiStorm project, for example, is almost exclusively focussed around its Discord server. But again, this content is locked off the public Internet, requiring an app to see it.

A case in point

I spend quite a bit of time working on Amiga computers, and although I have the real hardware, sometimes it’s just more convenient to work in a WinUAE emulated environment. Whenever I set one up, I’m always trying to remember exactly what I need to do to get RTG working and get high-resolution full-colour graphics. Usually I work it out enough to remember it but I never do the task frequently enough to memorise it.

On a recent attempt at this, I was searching the Internet for some advice. This should have been easy to find, but I was surprised at how little information there was. The forums discussed it a bit, but were literrally nearly 20 year old posts, and, in the style of most forums, the good information was scattered inbetween poorly-written questions and answers and dead links. There were also some blog posts and other pages, seemingly in hand-written HTML 3.2 and with screenshots taken on Windows XP. Has really nobody had to solve this problem since 2009?

Conclusion

Really, this is a post without a conclusion, because there’s nothing much that can really be done short of a grass-roots movement back to blogs, or to some other new thing that means that content creators can be rewarded for written content in a passive style. In the meantime, our knowledge will unfortunately remain held by Google, Meta and others, and searchable written information will continue to decline.