Want to hear my voice read this post? Catch it on Episode 8 of the Talkin’ Tabletop Podcast
I never really gave ‘engagement’ much attention before I started this blog. I was never all that into social media, beyond having a Facebook account to keep up to date with the friends I left behind after I moved away. I wasn’t on Instagram, or Twitter, or Pintrest, or any other broad social media platform. I did watch a lot of YouTube, and there were a few years when I was mildly obsessed with Reddit, and obviously I had a Board Game Geek account, but for the longest time, I was a ghost. I had these accounts with all my subscriptions to get notified when something new popped up, and I would spend all my idle time consuming content, but I would never like or comment on anything.
Anyone who’s watched more than the smallest amount of YouTube content is familiar with the call to action. “Like, comment, and subscribe!” You see it everywhere now, on recipe blogs, at the end of news articles, and to this day, at the start, middle, and/or end of most YouTube videos. And the reason for that is that engagement is incredibly important for content. Having people like and comment on your content tells the social media algorithms that the piece of media you just consumed, was good or enjoyable, and makes it more likely to be delivered to others. It also serves as validation to the content creator that they aren’t just screaming into the void, that someone out there is enjoying their creative output.
Circling around to Board Games, I noticed something recently. On BGG, reviews used to get hundreds of likes and comments. Rahdo’s run through of Caverna posted 10 years ago had 608 thumbs up, and 25 comments. Tom Vasel’s review of Dungeon Lords posted in 2009 had 236 thumbs up and 111 comments, and James Mckane’s review of Twilight Struggle garnered 765 thumbs up and 40 comments.
Meanwhile, new reviews seem to get significantly less engagement. Zee Garcia’s review of Splendor Duel got 83 thumbs up, and 3 comments, Tom Vassel’s Flamecraft review got 115 thumbs up and 4 comments, and Space-Biff’s review of Wonderlands War got an impressive 189 thumbs up and 13 comments. Keep in mind, these are the top reviews for each of these games. Looking back at Wonderlands War, Grant Lyon’s review got 7 thumbs up while Meeple University’s review got 6. My own review of Caverna posted to Board Game Geek a year and a half ago scraped together 14 thumbs up. My highest thumbed review (of Earth’s solo mode) got 45 thumbs up.
Board Game Geek has a couple “Hot” sections on their home page if you scroll down a bit. It only takes 30 thumbs up to break into the top 5 slots of the “Hot In-Depth Reviews”, and it seems that rarely the top spot is even breaking 100 thumbs up or getting more than 10 comments, unless it’s a negative review of a wildly popular game.
The point that I’m trying to make here is that it feels like engagement today is much harder to come by. And part of that I’m sure has to do with the fractured nature of social media. If I watch The Nerd Shelves review of Furnace, should I give it a thumb up and comment on BGG or on their YouTube page? Or do I like and comment on their Twitter post? Or, do I start a conversation in their Discord server? Everyone will have different preferences on where they choose to type their words, but from my observation, it feels like more and more people are doing what I used to do. Silently consume the content, then move onto the next thing.
Looking at the stats on my own blog, in the month of March I released 12 posts (most of those being my top 100 games as of 2024). I got 1,351 views from 725 visitors. I got 14 likes and 4 comments, all month long. This was actually a great month in terms of traffic and engagement! For the entire year of 2022 I had 3,454 views, 72 likes, and a whopping 10 comments on all of my posts for the whole year.
Look, I know I don’t do all the things that encourage people to engage. I generally don’t include call to actions in my posts, nor do I spend much time on social media promoting my own posts. I really prefer to just let my blog exist organically. But I do want to encourage you to engage with your favourite creators. Commenting on their posts, even if just to stay “thanks for the review” is incredibly exciting, especially to smaller creators. A lot of creators put a fair amount of stock into their subscriber numbers, as shown by the frequency of “subscriber milestone” posts I see on Instagram, Facebook, and BlueSky.
I won’t lie, I like seeing my numbers go up. It validates all the work that I put into this blog. An average review for me represents several hours of work, including the time to play the game in question enough times to have an opinion on it (the actual sit down and write part is generally between 1 – 2 hours). There’s also a financial burden that I’m shouldering. My domain and WordPress account costs me about $80 per year, and that’s having the most basic of websites. Daniel Wynter of BoardGameFeast recently posted about how his website hosting costs quadrupled since last year, leaving him with a $300 bill and made him reconsider his options. I met up with The Nerd Shelves last November, and they showed me their livestream space. The lights, microphones, and cameras all cost real money, let alone the fact that they have to have space in their house for that equipment and set-up.
What I’m trying to say here is, content creators put forth their time, money, and energy into creating content, many just for the sake of creation. None of us are getting “YouTube rich“, nor are we earning enough money to recoup our costs creating this stuff, let alone making a profit that could be considered a ‘fair wage’ for the work that we do. If you like what people are creating, I implore you to let them know. Liking and commenting is exciting for us, we want to hear from you! Subscribing let us know that we have an audience, and encourages us to increase our output. I know I would continue to maintain this blog without it, but it sure feels a lot nicer to have feedback from readers, rather than feeling like I’m screaming into the ether.
I feel like some of this is a shift from “everyone’s a creator on the internet” to “Content Creators” so people don’t feel that connection? They just scroll, sometimes like, but rarely put any effort back into it. Is it because more people internet now?? Was it a “smaller” group all chatting back then?
Obviously, I don’t have that problem LOL, I always leave comments and likes and I am always AMAZED when someone recognizes me because of it but that shows that even creators with 100K followers don’t get actual, productive comments. I grew up on Livejournal and blogging to meet people, but at some point “social media” just became more “media” and people don’t socialize. Which is shame because they miss out on making friends !
Good thoughts, Meeple!
First time on this site (although maybe I have seen your review of Pandemic: Fall of Rome before) and wanted to leave a comment given the subject of the post!
As a mostly silent observer of most board game reviews/news/media, my take is that there is such a saturation of content online that this, paradoxically, discourages people from engaging. Consumption of content has overtaken engagement with that content. And many content creators don’t value (or at least don’t value as much) “traditional” engagement, such as leaving comments on a blog post, as opposed to likes, shares and subscribes etc.
But I enjoyed reading your thoughts in this article and will make a point to engage more with board game content that I enjoy in future 🙂
I think you’re correct in that the saturation of content doesn’t encourage people to engage, nor does the system really encourage it either! Leaving a comment on a blog post like this requires YET ANOTHER account to sign up for, and if you want to have a conversation, you have to go back and check this space frequently, and who wants to do that?
That said, thanks for commenting! I sincerely appreciate it!