The little My IGN blogging experiment has come to end
I guess I kind of let one of my blogging topics out of the bag early with my first posting for the Octoberween holiday. I mentioned at the end of the blog post that I wasn’t letting IGN’s nuking their blog section get me down in taking part in I guess what most may consider a great digital pastime: blogging. I have to admit that I haven’t been that active with blogging as of late, finding myself using twitter, Instagram, gab, snapchat etc, for my social networking interactions. I too have been caught up in the easiness that is to just post something short and sweet on those platforms. Life doesn’t help either when you can find the time to sit down in front of a PC with a word processor program or the very worst end up consuming other form of media like digital streaming. But there are still some urges for me to take the time to sit down and try my hand at writing, even if I feel my time to shine on this platform has long passed.
It hasn’t been easy to find a blogging platform that is dedicated to any particular hobby or interest, seeing how many have moved on to the video format, longtweet and even forum postings. Don’t get me wrong there are still some blogging sites still out there like Medium, blogger, wordpress and the like. Yet it’s hard to find a dedicated blog site that has a specific hobby or interest of sharing. In my case it was videogames, back when blogs were broad and diverse enough that you could have a different website for different interests. I originally started on 1up.com but ended up diversifying when it shut down, along with another social media site that had a blog section by the name of MySpace. Despite joining up on pixlbit (especially when I swore I’d never use a product that seemed to go with the moniker of the “poor literacy is kewl” school of names *I know that’s not the reason for the name*) I’ve always been fearful that in the digital age any site could get unplugged. So I ended up joining up with IGN, along with some other ex-1upers, to see on having a secondary site to keep my blogs intact. It seemed to be slim pickings for videogame blog sites as the other sites I considered slowly died as well (Blistered Thumbs), didn’t offer a blogging format (Giant Bomb) or I wasn’t sure if I should bother with any others due to their recent controversies (GameSpot).
If worse came to worse I considered trying to write for Kotaku since basically their idea of news reported seemed to rely on a blog style format. But I digress
So imagine my horror when I tried to log into my IGN Blog page this year in prep for my Octoerween blog celebrations, I will admit the last time I posted a blog on IGN was on 11/01/17, I found this message greeting me at the log in section that was supposed to be my linkpage to MyIGN blogs.
“Thank you for posting and reading blogs on IGN! Our little My IGN blogging experiment has come to end, but we really enjoyed many of your contributions.”
What the hell?
What happened? This was completely unexpected. When did this happen and why? Why wasn’t there a formal announcement of the My IGN shutting down? Well it turns out there was a formal announcement of the closing, sort of. On the GCB forums thread on the IGN forums someone posted the news that a former My IGN moderator wrote on their wall (IGN’s version of Facebook’s wall feature) that as of Jan 1st, 2018 no more new blogs would be published on the site and later in June the My IGN blog page would no longer be accessible. There was no word if any of those blogs would be saved or purged from the site.
I was not expecting this closure in the least. I figured that given that IGN was such a big site they wouldn’t consider shutting down the blog site given how bit IGN was with user collaboration. But as I stared at the message screen it slowly dawned on me that I should’ve seen this coming. All seemed alright at first when I first signed up back in 2012. Their blog tools were not as robust as some other websites I’ve used in the past but their tag system and embed linking seemed to work for the most part. Given that the IGN Blog section used wordpress was helpful though I could never figure out if I did end up having my very own Word Press account or if it just happened to be linked to my IGN login credentials. I can’t say if my blogs thrived on the site given there were not in site tracking tools for clicks and current views but the comments section seemed to be a good indicator if you got noticed. It was never like the heyday back on 1up.com but in all honesty could it ever be?
The only thing that let me know if My IGN Blog section was being visited was thanks in part to the twitter retweets of those blogs whenever I happened to share a link via my twitter. I got to know some people on there, like diehard blogger PoorPig and Moogle_Mom, but for the most part the site served its purpose as a secondary site to host my blogging content that was also on Pixlbit. I was never featured as a featured blogger on the blog community page but that was never my aim in the end. I have to admit though that over time I did notice that the site began to show some problems. Occasional you’d get a broken page link when you’d post a blog or some of your comments wouldn’t appear on other’s blogs. There were times you’d get a notification via your main page in your My IGN status page but the link to that status wouldn’t show unless you opened it in a tab than in a new window. There were even times when the notifications didn’t even work at all. Despite this myself, and a few other bloggers kept at blogging away thus keeping the community active. I’m not sure if IGN’s attempt to merge blog and forum interconnectivity worked given I never bothered any forums as a general rule.
In the end I started to blog less and less given how busy my life got to the point where I didn’t even bother to read comments made on them. That was my fault as a whole given my mindset that I was just happy someone would bother to read what I wrote than leave a comment to such. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I began to really notice some of the problems with IGN’s blog section. It was getting harder and harder to log in to your page and if you happened to post a blog, it would get lost in a sea of spam blogs about illegal websites that stream football games or other cable shows. Even with the inclusion of the Image CAPACHA security log in, to prove you were not a robot, didn’t seem to help stop the flood of spam blogs being posted on the site. I did see that IGN did their best to delete them as soon as they were posted but like on 1up.com during its final days, it seemed to be too many spam blogs postings to stop. Last year during Octoberween 2017 I noticed that I had broken links to my blog page when I tweeted out a link via the twitter button on my blog. I could see the blog myself on my page, and on the main IGN website, but if someone happened to click the twitter link one would get a 404 broken link webpage.
I still blogged on IGN that year in the hope that they would fix the issue sooner or later. I even tweeted to IGN about the broken share feature on MyIGN blog but to no avail. In the end I didn’t go back to my blog after that until but a few days ago when I learned the terrible truth. It’s a shame to lose another blogging website yet again. This time instead of the whole website shutting down, it was just one section that I’m sure was causing them more trouble that it was worth. Long ago I said I had a feeling that blogging is now a thing of the past. It was yet another one of those internet fads that took hold back in the 2000’s when anyone with a PC, some basic HTML embedding skills and an idea could share their words with the world. Now it seems to be more focused on video presentations on video sites like YouTube, BitChute and Dailymotion. Long form blogs are slowly being overtaken by 160+ character posts that are basically just an over glorified version of a world wide web status update about yourself. Or worse in a sense where a social media platform based on sharing photos itself can say a thousand words without the post ever typing a single sentence.
It may be too soon to say that blogging is dead, given there are alternatives, but I’m not sure if the website specific based blog is will be with us much longer seeing how a site as big as IGN will kill off one form of community interaction. It makes me glad that Pixlbit has hung on for as long as it has given what became of 1up.com 6 years ago. Still I’m finding myself searching other sites to consider blogging on to help archive what I’ve posted all these years. Currently I’m trying out Minds but I just might have to consider blogger or a general “no theme blog” website or in the end just make sure I save my original blog as a word document and save that to an external thumb drive.
It’s bad enough I’m finding it harder and harder to embed videos and pictures thanks to crackdowns on 3rd party sharing.
I’m not sure I would consider this post a eulogy to the MyIGN Blogs section or even to my personal blogs on IGN.com. I will miss it and all the work I put into my blogs on there for it was a chore sometimes to copy/paste one blog from pixlbit to IGN and vice versa. I met some cool people and kept in touch with some former 1uppers, like gamergirltay and CerealKiLLuh82 on there before they either went dormant or moved on to other sites. So to quote the forum post title about the death of blogs on IGN: Hello, 2018….Goodbye, MyIGN. It was a shame they didn’t formally announce the end of the blog section on IGN or even give bloggers a chance to archive their work. Saying the enjoyed many of the contributions to the site seems more like a slap to the face since there seems to be no means to see old content ever again. Just goes to show that despite many saying nothing is forgotten on the internet, it doesn’t mean it can’t all go away with just a push of a button.
Goodbye MyIGN and My IGN Blog section. I doubt I have a reason to log back in ever again.
Sleep well tonight everyone.
Ta-ta
“N”
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