A section of the latest
Communitoid that touched upon people asking how to gain a higher profile in the community resonated pretty solidly with me. A lot of good points were raised, and, having been floating around here for a while, I figured I'd share my own experience and opinions on the topic of making yourself known.
Mind you, I'm not so vain as to assume I'm that high-profile a member, so don't think this is about tooting my own horn; at best, I'd say I'd rank an "Oh, that guy," level of awareness amongst other Dtoiders. Rather, I've been ranking with plenty of others with low fap counts and mere smatterings of comments for long enough that I feel I'm in a good position to tell you guys, new or old, not to worry about it.
Oh, and if you screw up? Have the stones to fix things and/or apologize. It's not hard to make another post in a forum thread. The blog editor lets you go in and tweak things even after a post goes live, and I've taken to making note of any changes introduced in the posts themselves, both as a reminder of errors I've had to correct and as a show of transparency. Hell, the staff themselves make corrections and updates to front page posts all the time. If you say something out of line or link something that gets you warned or timed out from chat during a livestream because you didn't know better, say you're sorry and the mods'll cut you a break. Whenever you do something new, you're bound to do something stupid; hell, my very own
first cblog is marred by some nightmarishly oversized images because I didn't notice the bit about how everything gets resized to 620p wide once it's uploaded. After that, I made it a point to resize things on my own and crop them to keep dimensions reasonable. Own up to and learn from your mistakes, and people will notice you're improving.
That's about all I've got, really. Thriving here as a contributor is pretty easy, if you feel you've lurked long enough and want to get more involved. Between the cblogs here, the
forums, front page commentary, or even streaming for
Streamtoid,
Dtoid.tv's community-oriented sister channel, there are myriad ways to make an impression on the writhing mass that is Destructoid. Just try to make it a good one, regardless of how far you hope it'll take you.
(Apologies for reposting the incredible community mosaics of Dtoid past, but I could think of no better way to depict this place. Credit goes to tehuberone for
the original and TheToiletDuck for
the kaiju edition, along with several others.)
(Oh, and those two sites I mentioned contributing to are cool with me still posting here, given the difference in nature of my posts here and my work for them, if anyone's wondering. This not always the case, so any tryhard bloggers who manage to move on up should check with their superiors regarding how tightly they're locked in to other writing gigs, and perhaps draw down their presence here a bit out of respect anyway. Just a tip.)
LOOK WHO CAME: