On Content Creation

There have been complaints about a lack of content on this site of late. While they are led by our site’s most infamously irascible community provocateur, that doesn’t mean they are unfounded. And while the nature of this free blog format site means that we aren’t beholden to any production quotas, we do nevertheless owe it to our community to ensure the continued existence of the community. There is an argument to be made for remaining silent on the issue, but I like to think we stay fairly transparent to our readers and it’s one of the reasons this community feels more genuine than the rest of the vast wasteland of internet tribes.

If one was to look at my recent past you would notice a correlation of three events: a change in my career path that eliminated my ability to work on GBH while “working” at my real job, the birth of my daughter which eliminated my ability to work on GBH at home, and a marked drop off in my GBH production volume. These excuses (and that is what they are) also provide easy pretext for me to mask the general malaise that the internet at large has visited upon me these last couple years. I’m a grownup and I understand that the cost of doing business on the internet is having anonymous strangers in your mentions calling a “fucken idiot”. It still sucks being vilified for something you spent your free time doing.

I remember years ago when Spencer Hall wrote a post explaining that the Curious Index would be temporarily going away. He said that as soon as the CI became an obligation, a chore, they got rid of it because the love was gone. As an EDSBS addict at the time, I was pretty sad about it. These days I totally understand. The Daily Bull can be fun, but sometimes (particularly when nothing is going on) it can be a real grind. (And no, we will never just post a daily blank post.)

Comparisons to the content creation at TexAgs are an interesting exercise, particularly because everyone at TexAgs (minus interns, I suppose, if they have those?) works there full time. No one has ever worked at GBH full time, though there have been periods in years past where I have put in 40 hours in a week for it. And while there is some money, it is not whatever people in our comments seem to think it is. That is not a complaint - if we were in this for the money, we wouldn’t be in this - just an acknowledgement that GBH would not support a daily Starbucks habit, let alone a family.

(While we’re on the subject: we are often accused - by denizens of the other Aggie internet communities - of being a site that says anything just to get clicks. While we don’t hate the idea of increased traffic and more people reading the site, nothing about our site is incentivized by click volume. Getting Rock The Good Ag to click on a link is an easy thing, just write a fluff piece talking about how perfect A&M is. If anything, we’d rather keep those people away from GBH and cultivate the more select community of Aggies we currently have. The kind who think for themselves and communicate their arguments in complete sentences with logical thought processes. Y’all are our kinda folks.)

Good Bull Hunting was started because some very funny guys had some fun ways of looking at Aggie football and they wanted to share that. Getting brought in as an author and eventually an editor has been one of the genuine pleasures of my life, and I no longer even think that it’s weird that some of my lifelong friends are people I met on the internet and never saw in real life for over a year. This site means a lot to me, even if that has not shown through lately. That I have been remiss in posting is a regret, and a situation I hope to rectify.

We need to do better, by which I mostly mean that I need to do better. Rush and Jimmy have always been the workhorses that keep this site churning along, and I am the one whose production has dropped off significantly. They keep me around because of my dashing good looks I assume without asking so please don’t ask them.

Those are my rambling thoughts for now. See y’all on #WednesdayTrendsday.