This is just a quick housekeeping note: my blogposts will be few and far between during the month of September! However, I will still be working with my co-producer and director, Carlos Austin, on the next couple of episodes of season two of the Metaverse Newscast (if you’re interested, you can watch episode 1 of season 2 here). Carlos and I have some exciting shows lined up for you!
The start of the Fall term is always a very busy period for me in my full-time paying job as a university science and agriculture librarian, and I hope you will understand that I can only do so much juggling at one time! Please rest assured that I will return to regular blogging once things are a little less hectic in my life. 😉
It was exactly five years ago today—on July 31st, 2017—that I wrote my first blogpost on this blog. It was to announce the public beta of the social VR platform Sansar, which at the time was owned by Linden Lab (the makers of the still-popular virtual world, Second Life).
At the time, this blog was called the Sansar Newsblog, because that was the only metaverse platform I wrote about. Over time, I began to expand my coverage to include many other social VR platforms and flatscreen virtual worlds, and on February 10th, 2018, I changed the name to the RyanSchultz.com blog.
One of the advantages of using your real-life name as your blog name is that you can go off on tangents, and because it’s you, you never go off-brand! 😉 And so, in addition to “news and views about social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse” (as the tagline for this blog states), I have written about artificial intelligence, the crypto/NFT space, and notably, my experiences during the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the past five years, my blog has become more popular, and I have even been interviewed by publications such as The Globe and Mail newspaper and New Yorker magazine. I’ve also been a guest on several podcasts about the ever-evolving metaverse.
In 2018, I set up a Patreon (from which I earn a small amount of money, enough to cover my WordPress.com hosting costs), and I also set up my Discord server, which now boasts over 685 members representing any and every metaverse platform!
In retrospect, creating the RyanSchultz.com Discord was one of the smartest things I have done. I have made so many new online friends who are also keenly interested in the metaverse! I rely on them to alert me to news and events happening on the various social VR platforms like VRChat, and in the flatscreen virtual worlds like Second Life. Honestly, I get half my new story ideas from them, and I thank them! And I believe that the members of my Discord are the single best team of metaverse bullshit detectors on the planet! 😉
Some statistics from five years of blogging:
2,553 blogposts (which works out to 1.4 posts per day, over 1,827 days)
Over 1,280,000 blogpost views (my busiest month so far has been January 2022, with over 40,100 views!)
Over 720,000 blog visitors from all around the world (top ten countries in order: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Spain)
Over 1,500 comments!
Over 450 blog subscribers via email or WordPress
My Top Ten Most Popular Blogposts in 2022:
Please note that, for a few months in 2022, I did test out Patreon patron-exclusive blogposts, but I have since decided that it’s not worth the hassle (also, Patreon has changed its rules and that particular plug-in no longer works in WordPress unless I upgrade from “Patreon Lite” to “Patreon Pro”). Accordingly, I have now unlocked all my previously-restricted blogposts, and you should be able to access and read all of them. Please note that all these blogposts are safe for work, even the ones which discuss adult or sexual topics.
The Dirty Little Secret of VRChat—Hidden Adult Content (which to my bemusement, is still, far and away, THE most popular blogpost on this blog, mainly because it comes up as the first result when you Google “vrchat adult”)
Please note that there are two categories of metaverse platforms which I will not endeavour to cover on this list:
• Products aimed at the teen/tween market (mostly on mobile devices, e.g. IMVU); and • Purely sexually oriented or “adult” virtual worlds and social VR
Why? Well, I’m not interested in either category, and I will the herding of those particular categories of cats to other people… I’ve got my hands full as it is!
However, you can expect a complete overhaul and reorganization of my list of metaverse platforms (item #2 in my Top Ten list above) in the second half of this year.
While my formerly blistering pace of blogging has slowed somewhat this year, I do plan to continue reporting on news and events in the ever-expanding and ever-evolving metaverse, and the many companies who are building it!
Over the past month, I have been testing out Patreon-exclusive, paywalled blogposts on my blog. For example, if you are not a Patreon patron (more info here), you would only see a paywall message when you click on the link below. (By the way, this post is, by far, the most popular blogpost on my blog, mainly because it is the first result when people do a Google search for “vrchat adult”.)
UPDATE May 9th, 2022: After watching BrandonFM’s documentary (more details here), I have made the decision to un-paywall that particular blogpost.
I set it so that you would have to sign up to be a patron of my Patreon, and have paid me at least US$1, to be able to access and read this blogpost (which, by the way, is quite safe for work AND DOES NOT PROVIDE ANY LINKS TO NSFW VRCHAT WORLDS, talking about the topic in a very general way only). I just got so tired of having a page with so much traffic, and so I put a paywall on it! It doesn’t seem to have dented the traffic one bit.
And, as I have discovered, people are indeed willing to pay me a dollar just to read that particular blogpost (or one of the other two I set up in this way). So, moving forward, I reserve the right to begin imposing such a paywall on some of my content.
P.S. If you do want to make a one-time financial donation and don’t want to use Patreon to do it, you can buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi or Buy Me a Coffee. Thanks!
Because I have been occupied with my full-time paying job as a university librarian these past couple of months, I have fallen behind on my monitoring of what’s been going on in the many social VR, virtual world, and metaverse platforms I write about on the RyanSchultz.com blog.
So I have been out of the loop (and trying to get up-to-date) on the recent news about NeosVR, and the now-public dispute between the company’s CEO and the rest of the team, involving NeosVR’s cryptocurrency, called NCR. I have been madly bookmarking and reading everything that I could get my hands on over the past three days, and at this point, due to the large volume of information I have to sift through, I will probably be writing up a series of blogposts, instead of just a single blogpost, starting sometime next week. I do realize that because of my position and experience, I might be the best-placed person to write up something about this dispute!
But with that position and experience, I also have a responsibility.
I have learned (the hard way) some hard lessons covering corporate disputes and controversy in the past on my blog (notably the series of layoffs at Sansar), where I realized that I wasn’t just a blogger—I’m a reporter, and what I write has real-world impacts on the metaverse platforms involved, and the companies that build them. You could say that I have become somewhat battle-hardened. This means that I have a responsibility to my readers to be as accurate and as neutral as possible, while still having an editorial viewpoint (after all, the tagline of the RyanSchult.com blog is “News and Views on Social VR, Virtual Worlds, and the Metaverse”).
So, I plan to dot all my i’s and cross all my t’s before I publish anything about the NeosVR situation, and I will also try to incorporate a variety of perspectives and opinions, using direct quotes of source material as much as possible.
TL;DR: I am very well aware of what’s going on over at NeosVR, I am actively researching it, and I plan to write up a series of blogposts about the dispute, probably starting later next week.
P.S. Of course, I have many other story ideas in the hopper, as I usually do (for example, the response of the AltspaceVR community to the removal of the central gathering places like the campfire by the company). I never have a shortage of things to write about lately, there’s just so much happening! Stay tuned 😉
