So, I left Backloggd

If you've followed me on Bluesky and/or Backloggd you've likely seen me allude to a growing frustration with the latter website, a frustration that takes the form not of a single holistic issue but of a million issues that eventually spilled over and formed the death by a thousand cuts that's led me to slap a Zonelets-Neocities together and start blogging for real. For the sake of making it absolutely clear where I'm stand, we're going to foresake brevity for a bit just so I don't miss anything, alright? Anyway, let's get started.

The Site Culture: In truth, I don't actually think a logging website should even have a site culture, but I digress. Backloggd's core problem as a community is that it's sponged up a lot of the worst parts of the wider Games Discourse that we're not going to get fully into here, but I feel like I can put a pin in the board to strike at the heart of the issue: What should be people either gabbing about the games they like/love/dislike/fucking despise has instead turned into a strange form of social performance. This isn't necessarily an accusation of performative behaviour or contrarianism but those have bled into the proverbial river anyway. Like the discourse it inherits Backloggd has turned into a pissing competition, where even banal opinions like "I think RE4make is midcringe" is used as a staging point ground for rambling diatribes about remake discourse or other people's opinions and how the OP is more smarter and geniuser than their peers. Alternatively, it's showmanship. Unnecessary grandiosity and thousands of words bolted onto a post that boils down to "i like it it made me feel good in my brain :D". Imitating writers who do longform stuff without really interrogating why those writers might need 4000 words to talk about the race politics of East Asia and why their short piece about how it was hype when Asura and Yasha fought to the death doesn't really need to be that long. It makes the mere act of casually reading reviews exhausting, and I had to use Ublock Origin to nuke most of the front page save for my oomfies. Even something as simple as wanting to see what other people think about a game I really enjoyed means sifting through 3-5 deliberately bad faith reads, 2-3 reviews by people that haven't even played the game, and an uncomfortable number of people who seemingly have an addiction to amassing Backloggd likes. There's probably a target for "discourse-based slam poetry written by 17 year olds", but I'm not it.
The Community: Part of why I tapered down my output on that website and generally stuck to my mutuals (an ever-dwindling pool of people as I eventually just unfollowed or blocked everyone who did snappy one liner reviews) is because Backloggd, despite its pretentions, suffers from most of the same problems as any other website. Criticizing something that's much-loved or, god forbid, still in the honeymoon phase is essentially sending out a signal flare for the jobless hordes to descend upon you and provide either bad faith interpretations of your words, outright spam, or stupid comments that boil down to "you're a meanie". But that's just comments, the actual review function of the website is 45% one-liners from the least funny people you know, 45% diatribes that don't actually say anything, 5% reviews that're basically tweets, and 5% worth reading. If you want to look at the Elden Ring top reviews you need to scroll down pretty far to start seeing things of substance, and even further if you want to see stuff that isn't just blatant skill-issuing. Also, while I'm here; the lists trying to do award shows and community rankings are kinda cringe. My first year on the website saw one of them occur and it was a nice celebration of the OP's fellow writers, and not even a month or so later the same concept became a pissing competition where people try to establish some manner of authority. This is all ultimately inconsequential though, the community's actual problem is a fundamental inability to engage with games beyond a lens of "did I, personally, relate to this" which leads to slapfights because users who live in North America view deeply Japanese, Buddhist works through an American Christian lens and make their fetish for misunderstanding Asian art into everyone else's problem. It's a clownshow and I want no part of it.
The Moderation: On paper I have no issue with anonymous moderators. Online content moderation is miserable, soul-crushing work. For a maximum wage of basically $0 you're exposed to the worst of humanity and expected to - for example - keep a level head even as they fill up your Discord server channels with pictures of dead bodies, ban them, and then file reports for the individual images. It's not only right but smart to insulate them from the inevitable heat they'll get. Except, in Backloggd's case it's created this weird air of unaccountability where a seemingly capricious group of people (or even one individual with a vendetta) essentially gets to pick and choose which rules are enforced and when, and with the anonymity there's no real avenues of challenging this. I've seen benign reviews get nuked for being misinterpeted as hostile to individuals or specific groups while reviews calling games "[slur]core" and users with Waffen SS profile pictures go untouched even after I file reports. Looping back a bit, on paper those basically offtopic haha-funny or cheap-dunk reviews are against the site's content policy, as are reviews that are barely even about the game. In practice, I've reported tons of these alongside the aforementioned hateful content and they not only stay up but have become part of the Backloggd Experience. It's just normal, now, to look at the front page of a new release and see someone say shit like "this is like Blade Runner if you popped a perc every time Harrison Ford scowled". DestroyerOfMid was a mistake, even if the man himself is a good lad. That an entire quadrant of games has been nuked for being nebulously 'adult' in a culture where that label is being thrown at queer works as an attempt at extinction, with nothing more than a invertebrate-core post from MrProg about the changes? Nuh uh. I morally and philosophically cannot condone supporting this website
The Ham: If I can be honest with you, I could ignore most of this. This is a bit of a skill issue on my part, but the actual worst part of Backloggd is that, on some level, it made me like games less. In joining that website, I asserted to myself that any game I played, no matter how good or bad, was worth reviewing or examining. While I still hold to this, I've come to realize that "is worth reviewing" didn't mean I should. I'll confess that, after ruminating on it for a while, the need to review everything had... Not necessarily damaged my relationship to games, but I was playing significantly less of them despite having basically the same approach as I did before starting. I tapered back my output and put markedly less effort into reviews, and surprise! I enjoy games again. I played Elden Ring Nightreign and had an absolute blast, didn't talk about it outside of Bluesky. My list of games played in late 2025 vs. early 2025 is day and night. I truly was hampering myself by giving too much of a shit. Further to the point though, being surrounded by a community that outright fetishizies incuriosity and is seemingly hellbent on reducing all art to post-ironic one-liners was pure miserable. I am a fucking sponge, it's impossible for me to not assimilate some of that, so I'm cutting the net loose. Do you know how good it felt to just sit down, play Lobotomy Corporation, and not worry about how I'm gonna exposit to a bunch of people who think a Yesod is a type of spoon?

At the end of the day, Backloggd is just kind of a dead end? There's no point using it to better myself because the primary audience for my posts is people who don't use it and never will, and any improvement would be wasted on a userbase that can't really muster any refutation of someone disliking a critical darling than saying "uh oh! stinky!" or even a rebuttal that references things said by the author. I used to moderate a Discord with a userbase of disgusting weebs, and 90% of the time a new user would ask me something where the answer was in something they already ready. On Backloggd, people read reviews where I talk about a game's difficulty and then go to the comments to ask me if I thought it was hard.