Rob on the reddit thing:

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Uncool times call for uncool measures. In the years of having the subreddit do its thing, it's been hard to argue that the benefits outweigh the problems.

It's not a great discovery mechanism for new readers, so there's no real growth or marketing value in it.

The post discussions there are generally kind of diluted and short, but they can be helpful. The main benefit of having the subreddit is to get a second set of update reactions from a group with less enthusiasm and mental investment in the story. If you're writing a serial and you get all your fan feedback from superfans, you can end up going down a rabbit hole and telling a more convoluted story than the average reader can follow. That subreddit is one way to check that.

The tradeoff is that Reddit's the happy home of a lot of echo chambers for throwing crap at things, like /r/****tykickstarters and /r/buttcoin. The fan subreddits for most shows, games, and things that I've followed usually get real ugly, real often. So it can be kind of a low-barrier space for Erfworld haters to post and reinforce each other's "Balder did 9/11" theories.

That alone wouldn't hurt anything. The main problem is that /r/erfworld is one of the few places those people will intermingle with people who actually do enjoy the story and support the team. And they love to lie to those people. Every time there's a meta issue with making the comic, somebody starts a fire over there with the special kind of inflammatory, made-up "I'm just asking questions" horse**** that the internet specializes in. Then that post and any reactions I might make to it will get used as a link to start fires in other channels. You'll see those kept as catalogs and get thrown back years later when something else is going wrong.

All of that is to say, the benefit/cost of the subreddit has always been a neck-and-neck race. Right now, that race is not close. Nothing good that has or will come out of /r/erfworld while we are not updating. There's only one thing we can do that will save the Erfworld community, story, and enterprise. "Get back to updating." Start Book 5 with better frequency and quality than before. Get the story moving. Make it fun to read again, and keep it coming.

That's the place we're aiming. That's what we're working on, every day and night. Anything that takes my time away from that stuff is delaying the day when that switch is thrown, and we abruptly reverse direction from decline to growth again. During this span, you can expect me (or the mods) to shut down threads and delete comments. I've already banned one user on these forums "until we begin updating again" and I expect to do that again. The cost of doing uncool **** is less than the cost of trying to make it cool.

Tl;DR I'm just going to hit things until they stop making distracting noises. It's actually kind of liberating to have other problems so big that the drama **** looks small and solvable with a hammer.

This thread is locked in a really uncool way. 8-)