We’re going to take a step back in time for a few minutes:
When Minecraft was back into in it’s infancy with Alpha or even Indev, everything about it was fascinating, new, and well, a little blocky. When news broke out with Notch’s Friday updates, or when a new mod that helped with fixing apple drops or leaf decay it became huge news among the small community of users. That being so, Crafthub has been that pinnacle of breaking news and updates with anything Minecraft related.
The modding community was also in its’ own heydays at the time. What little we did have was either small tweaks to the game, or some large conceptual ideas like Risugami’s great Mod-loader, 303’s assortment of new arrow mod, or DrZhark’s Mo’ Creatures Mod. I even attempted to do what most had not done at the time and that was to have an index of the newest and most popular mods back then.
But there is something you can take from this: That was about three years ago.
I haven’t been writing articles since 2011, and I’d say since then things have gotten rather simple in terms of how we get our news. Three years ago, the best hope of getting the latest news for Minecraft was to try and follow Notch’s blog, or catch up on the news or information from another source such as Crafthub. Reddit’s popularity for example has aided in expanding the reach of users, helping them share information quickly and reliably with the masses. Mojang has also frequently participated with their ever growing community on /r/Minecraft, getting information such as suggestions or even a bug (and really, people have some odd ways of finding bugs you’d never have even thought of!)
What I’m getting at is that the times are changing fast and so are the ways we communicate with everyone else on the Internet. To me and my semi-large connection of friends, articles almost seem like a sort of dying breed.
Some might argue against this saying that popular sites like Kotaku, The HuffingtonPost, or PCgamer are doing well in their own regards, and I’d agree with you on that. Yet, the majority of information that I gather on a daily basis comes from videos online rather than written articles that I read. This might be due to the fact that I’m a visual learner, but about 65% of the USA population are in the same situation as me as well. Popularity of “Let’s Play” videos for example, have also increased over the past three years. It’s become well accepted that information gathered by watching a video is easier to absorb and understand, but also less time consuming on our busy lives. Perhaps this decline is only relative to some users as watching a video about a cool redstone machine or concept is more visually pleasing than reading about it with images. I think both work, but from the point of view of the content producer it depends on the subject, how much time you have on hand, and available staff or resources to get it done. While writing articles seems time consuming, capturing a video and rendering might take longer to produce. I could go on and on about these comparisons, but I hope you get the jist.
Articles may have fallen behind more popular mediums these days, but don’t count them out yet! A well written article can still get it’s point across just as well as a video, if you have the right person behind the keyboard.
This opinion based article does not reflect on Crafthub as a whole and rather that of the author’s own judgements and beliefs.
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Nathan “fv” Mendes