With Blaugust coming to an end this year and September just having started, why not kick off the new month with a blog post? Yeah, this one is my wrap-up post on the event and stuff.
This year, I ended up signing up for Blaugust, as per usual, to get back into writing posts and just hitting “publish” finally. I also wanted to really challenge myself by also publishing daily videos on YouTube, featuring commentary and all that. Put some effort into it, try out that whole thing.
And well, as Belghast announced, the event just ended and the tabulations have been made. Huzzah! Anyway, today, I wanted to share some thoughts on the event and add my own two cents to everything.
My Performance at this year’s Event
For starters, I ended up participating this year with both my YouTube channel as well as my blog. I think I also signed up with my stream, technically, but I’m not sure if and how much that can be counted.
Anyway, this year, I ended up…
- publishing 31 videos on 31 days on my YouTube channel,
- publishing 18 posts on my blog,
- and streaming 22 times.
Because of that, I got the rainbow award in Bel’s tabulations but I’m not 100% sure how I should feel about that because I personally feel like there is more effort that goes into writing posts compared to recording gameplay with commentary… and streaming is somewhere in between that, where I personally put in a lot of effort into that, I’d say, but I’m not 100% sure if it’s as much or more effort than blogging.
More than anything, I think that it also greatly varies. A blog post can absolutely “just” be a listicle that was generated by LLMs (more on that later) or “just” a fluff post rambling about one’s favourite copy-pasta to use, just to name a very stupid fluff post I did ages ago, but who gets to decide whether or not to apply that “just” to a sentence?
Like, I’m not sure how one can quantify effort and whether or not it’s even fair to do so. I don’t think so. I don’t think one form of content creation is worth more than the other or anything of the sorts, just like microblogging and book writing and many others.
In the first place, Blaugust is a friendly competition that is mostly about the community aspect (more on that later) and is supposed to invigorate the blogosphere while also getting people into it. It’s a great way of getting started and while plenty of people don’t continue to write, many become mainstays in the event for years. I mean, just look at me, for instance, I guess.
Anyway, so, what I was getting at is that I wrote only 18 posts but I did publish 31 videos and I did stream on Twitch for 4-6 hours on average a total of 22 times, so I think I earned that, I guess, even if I feel iffy about it.
Trouble in Blaugust Town
This year had its own fair share of growing pains, as Belghast also mentioned in his post, and I wanted to share my thoughts on it, as one of the mentors.
This year, we had a huge turnout with 116 blogs signing up for Blaugust, out of which 113 published at least one blog post. 67 of those never participated before and a total of 1978 blog posts were created during this event. It’s a huge number of posts!
Anyway, with the community growing so much bigger and many different people from many different walks of life ended up joining the Discord server, and it wasn’t without its issue.
For instance, one person joined the server whose blog posts were just advertisements for their business. When someone asked for some help with the hosting question, this person chimed in to recommend… themselves. I asked if they could tone that down, and they decided to leave the community altogether since they appear to not have seen any value in the Blaugust community outside of the promotion of their business venture.
Outside of that, we also had a spammer on the discord but that was taken care of swiftly while I was asleep, so that’s neat.
But overall, we ended up discussing the addition of some guidance to the community server, including a basic set of rules and values, as well as some auto-mod shenanigans for spammers and auto-role stuff for easy of access.
And then there’s the AI question… This year, there were to participants in the event, that made use of AI/LLMs to generate their content. It was, of course, only a matter of time before this would happen but we didn’t expect it this year and since we never specified that AI shouldn’t be in the event,… yeah.
Anyway, Belghast is the main organizer and quite frankly, I fully support his call to not put the two people that used LLMs heavily into the same category as everyone else who participated and made a genuine effort to create content for at least 31 days in a row.
Namely, one person in question published 63 posts that apparently were “aided” by AI, according to themselves, but a lot of their posts ended up just being listicles pumped out by LLMs, which I find iffy. The other person doesn’t get “help” from AI but just flat out has the LLM write the full thing for them. I find that difficult, to say the least, and again, it’s Bel’s call ultimately but I think I would have just clarified that mid-event that Blaugust is and always has been and always will be an event that is all about human creativity.
Again, getting a prompt from an LLM would be fine as long as you write most of the post yourself. Again, using AI tools to correct typos and grammar issues (see Grammarly) should also be perfectly fine… but generating the whole thing and making minor tweaks?
Personal Lessons Learned
This year, I haven’t done much writing. Between the big move at the end of last year/beginning of this year, exam season, the new semester starting and, well, exam season again (only one more to go, only one more to go!), I didn’t get to write as much as I used to or as much as I wanted to, and so Blaugust has been a good way of getting back into the habit. I frankly didn’t expect to publish more than 10. Of course, I aimed for 31, but writing 18 posts feels pretty amazing to me, especially considering it’s more than the number of posts I’ve written this year as a whole before August.
That said, this also showed to me that daily content uploads are not feasible for me as a student… but bi-daily uploads to YouTube could definitely be a thing I could try out sometime. When I say bi-daily, I mean every other day, btw. I know some folks use bi-daily to describe “twice a day” but in this context, it means every other one.
As for my writing, I need to just get over it. I tend to overthink a lot and especially with reviews and other commentary posts about topics I care about, I should just hit publish rather than overthinking it all. I ended up publishing my fair share of drafts that just have been lying around for ages and that didn’t age badly.
I still have a lot of interviews that I need to publish that require some transcription efforts on my part but I realised that transcription doesn’t take as long as it did last year… mainly because I (this time) guided the interview a bit with my questions and made sure to ask follow-up questions that sort of help it flow naturally, like a conversation. This on the other hand made it easier for me to predict what was being said next in the interview which sped up the progress of listening to the thing while typing it out.
At the same time, though, I also held the phone closer to the people I was talking to, resulting in less of a struggle when it came to understanding what people said due to the venue being incredibly loud. I’m looking forward to doing more interviews like this in the future!
So, I’ll definitely publish a lot of these interviews again in the near future. I’ve got some opportunities lined up, too, for written interviews which should be easier to implement, and I hope that with the growth of my YouTube channel, some calls with developers could be possible as well, like with the interview I did with Matt from Hiding Spot.
Something I regret is not doing my usual “Blaugust Participant Appreciation Post” that I tend to do. I was working on it and eventually just gave up working on it since I was under too much pressure with exams going on, either way, and as a result, I just dropped it. I was debating to publish what I wrote already and just do a Part 2 later, but it felt unfair to the people who I didn’t feature immediately if that makes sense.
There is a chance, though, that I might publish the post another time, as long as it isn’t too late. If I get some work done on it, I might even release it this month still, just as a “nice things about the participants” kinda post with some insights into people’s writing and some recommendations, basically.
Similarly, I’ve got plans to still publish the posts on toxicity in gaming that I was working on but I need to do more research… I also have posts on some other topics, including mobile games, that I wanted to share but I just need more time for that… and time is a bit rough with me visiting my family for a week starting tomorrow and with an exam coming up in two weeks… not to mention the new semester starting in Mid October!
All that said, I’m looking forward to (hopefully) writing more in the near future! Thanks to everyone who participated in the event alongside me – it was great meeting ya and reading so many new posts by so many new people! Thanks to everyone who read my blog so far! Uh, have a nice day.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.
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