I’ve though about the role of blogging & posting on itch.io for quite some time. Ultimately, though, I’ve been at a standstill since I’m unsure about the direction I’d like to see it evolve. Now that Twitter is taking a dump on itself with its recent acquisition there have been many people seeking a new home on the internet to share their posts.

For many years now we’ve made Devlogs available to our users to post content. Additionally, our team utilizes the same system as devlogs to manage and publish content for the site blog. Recently I’ve unlocked all the tools of our site blog for all users. Anyone can now create posts without the requirement of making it a devlog of a particular project. (aka top-level posting)

I’m trying to make sense of the expectations our users have for “posting”, and figure out what makes the most sense for itch.io long term. There are fundamental decisions to make about how the product will work, and the choices made may lock us in one direction that may be in opposition to the other.

Fundamentally, I see there are two directions we could go: I’m calling it “narrow” and “wide” posting, named after how the posts are typically displayed.

• Narrow posts are going to be shorter content that will typically show up directly in a user’s feed. They are rendered in a narrow column alongside many other posts. Examples could be twitter, instagram, mastodon, facebook, possibly tumblr. Comments are displayed with high prominence, typically right near the start of the post so you can see them immediately without even having to read the post. Content may be relevant only for a short period of time.
• Wide posts are typically going to be longer in length. Visually they may be designed to take up an entire page. Examples include traditional blogs, wordpress, medium. Content may be considered “evergreen,” as the posts typically continue to be relevant over a long period of time due to more effort being put into their creation.

The moderation consideration

Building an online platform that allows someone to submit text invites a large class of problems, from harassment to spam and scams. I am often hesitant about releasing something with a text field because of the additional load it would create on our team. We need to have pipelines in place to handle user-submitted content, both automated and manual. There is a lot of invisible work that goes on in the background to make sure that the experience isn’t degraded.

It only took two days after opening up top-level posting before spammers found the “new blog” page and started pushing ads.

Narrow vs Wide?

Narrow posts are typically associated with social networks. They encourage much higher user engagement because the barrier to creating a post is low, and consequently the barrier to leaving a comment is also low. The large amount of user activity tends to create a lot of noise. This invites a large amount of moderation work. The shorter amount of text may also make it difficult to algorithmically classify the content as spam with high confidence.

Wide posts hopefully would encourage higher quality content. Theoretically speaking, this would reduce the amount of work we would spend reviewing content. It may also make itch.io a better repository of high-quality information. Unfortunately, the barrier to entry feels much greater, and it discourages those from participating. Plainly speaking, it’s just not as fun.

Reviewing the posts that have already been created via our top-level posting system, I can see users attempting both narrow and wide style posting. Currently, the visual design of the blogging system is focused on wide posts, but there isn’t a strong precedent currently on how people should be posting.

The question then becomes, how do we evolve our blogging system and what should it look like? A side goal is to minimize competing ways to post within itch.io itself.

Forums vs blog posts

At one point in itch.io’s history I was focused on expanding the blogging/devlog tools. We have such a wide range of functionality for users to post things, though, I often found myself feeling déjà vu implementing functionality. We have message boards, and now we have blogs. The both effectively allow you to create a “post” that can receive replies. They both have very similar requirements regarding moderation, indexing, spam scanning, inserting images, embeds, formatting, etc. From an engineering perspective, the way they store data is also similar. They are just different enough, though, that they ended up being implemented as independent systems, and they end up being viewed differently by end users.

At another point in itch.io’s history I decided I wanted to focus on using forums a means for communication. Unfortunately the baggage associated with forums is probably too great for users to make the leap and use them as something that would function like a blog. The fixed requirements about what and where one should post within a particular forum, combined with the end user presentation, ends up keeping forums relegated to a very specific method of discussion.

I experienced this very struggle personally when posting updates about itch.io. I felt like the itchio updates blog deserved high quality posts, with substantial features. Because development actually was more fragmented, without big launches, I ended up making no posts at all. I felt guilty about giving a bad public impression regarding itch.io’s development.

To get over the block, I switched to using the forum to post updates, where I felt the barrier to posting was much less, and I felt I could share updates to updates via replies.

As of today, though, I’m still not sure where I should posting.

What is the role of itch.io

Often when a big tech company messes up we get requests that itch.io should provide some of their functionality. Because we have stayed respectful of our users’ needs, I find that others think we could fulfill an ever expanding role in their digital lives. (Eg. add Patreon style campaigns, add crowdfunding, add posting, etc.).

I am hesitant though, larger product shifts create more demands on our team. We have no plan to be an infinitely growing corporation trying to consume every possible idea. We are a small company trying to make something useful.

Building out a “posting” system essentially puts us closer to being a social network. In additional to the fundamental user experience problems I shared above, there are also problems related to how to decide to prioritize user engagement. Additionally, there will always be platforms like twitter or discord where the merging of posting and chatting happens. So I think it’s valuable to question what the role of itch.io is here.