On Fandom Evolution
Aug. 14th, 2019 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dinoblob I've been really active here lately and since tumblr was sold off to the parent company of Wordpress just a few days ago, it's made me think back about how fandom has used platforms available and how the platforms molded fandom back.
Something I think that new fandom lacks is larger structured communities. Before the blue hellsites of facebook, twitter and tumblr came along I felt like I really needed to look for dedicated fan-sites in order to interact with other fans and browse discussions and fanworks all on one site. The biggest thing that made forums and LJ communities work well were moderators, who really cleaned up the rage-y, grammatically incorrect personal-attack posts. Subforums were even locked for age-restricted content so there was little worry to find something inappropriate by accident.
Sites like tumblr and twitter were marketed as micro-blogging sites, so I don't think it was ever really geared towards forming a community in a structured sense, since you could have hashtags to mark topics, but there's little control to filter even tags that included other tags. The most frequent thing I saw happen on tumblr when the search algorithms were getting tweaked was that sometimes subjects that weren't tagged would still show up as related, which created major problems between shippers finding anti-shipping posts in their popular tags.
You could follow tags in a general sense, but it really felt more like the wild-west in terms of what you were prepared to engage with. This was how I could majorly see the difference in opt-in culture vs opt-out culture. Subscribe to a specific community or topic if not a specific person, you choose what to see. Whereas tumblr had the indie-made widget XKit so people could black-list terms and hide things they didn't want to see and twitter barely has those controls natively but still likes to spam up your feed with likes and retweets by people you follow.
What I do miss with tumblr is that it attracted many artists who left deviantART and that community is definitely struggling to find something suitable to both socialize and share work. I want dreamwidth to be that new thing but I'm not sure how people feel about external vs internal image hosting, and I realize that the focus here would mainly be writing.
Twitter is so ubiquitous that I don't feel like it will necessarily go away unless a new platform can come in with the breathtaking focus of *chronological timeline* because that's one of the things every major social media giant has abandoned in favor of algorithms made to sell advertisements.
I dislike the way that twitter can make total strangers feel way too comfortable and close to people they are able to interact with and the mob mentality that can come with it. It does make me think that twitter is partially responsible for how entitled fans have become when it comes to making demands from creators or even worse, harassing them since it's so easy to just reply directly to tweets.
I don't know how likely it is for fandom to go back to things like forums or even if DW really takes off as that place, since it has a lot of things I think works for sharing and privacy. It feels like the craving is there, if you look at how modern platforms are being used vs how they were intended to be used.
Discord for example is a strange in-between that is casual enough for chats, has organization for topics via channels and servers, but having to scroll through a chat-log makes it a lot harder to engage with things asynchronously. It adds to that anxiety of missing out on a conversation that I feel like forum threads gives people a chance to respond to thoughtfully. But again, discord wasn't really meant to be structured like that, although it can be argued that it is about community building--for gamers being able to find online partners and quickly coordinate its perfect.
I thought twitter was odd when my friends were using it to RP but even now I find it hard to define. What is the point of twitter for fans and casual people alike? I think it put us in a habit of elevator-pitching our thoughts into easily digestible marketing bits to spread around. When I think about reblogging/retweeting, it's a way to boost something without your own input which is great for seeing new things though comment strings can rope people into discussions they weren't even part of to begin with.
Is the answer to build something new, or is there a way to renew old fandom culture?
Something I think that new fandom lacks is larger structured communities. Before the blue hellsites of facebook, twitter and tumblr came along I felt like I really needed to look for dedicated fan-sites in order to interact with other fans and browse discussions and fanworks all on one site. The biggest thing that made forums and LJ communities work well were moderators, who really cleaned up the rage-y, grammatically incorrect personal-attack posts. Subforums were even locked for age-restricted content so there was little worry to find something inappropriate by accident.
Sites like tumblr and twitter were marketed as micro-blogging sites, so I don't think it was ever really geared towards forming a community in a structured sense, since you could have hashtags to mark topics, but there's little control to filter even tags that included other tags. The most frequent thing I saw happen on tumblr when the search algorithms were getting tweaked was that sometimes subjects that weren't tagged would still show up as related, which created major problems between shippers finding anti-shipping posts in their popular tags.
You could follow tags in a general sense, but it really felt more like the wild-west in terms of what you were prepared to engage with. This was how I could majorly see the difference in opt-in culture vs opt-out culture. Subscribe to a specific community or topic if not a specific person, you choose what to see. Whereas tumblr had the indie-made widget XKit so people could black-list terms and hide things they didn't want to see and twitter barely has those controls natively but still likes to spam up your feed with likes and retweets by people you follow.
What I do miss with tumblr is that it attracted many artists who left deviantART and that community is definitely struggling to find something suitable to both socialize and share work. I want dreamwidth to be that new thing but I'm not sure how people feel about external vs internal image hosting, and I realize that the focus here would mainly be writing.
Twitter is so ubiquitous that I don't feel like it will necessarily go away unless a new platform can come in with the breathtaking focus of *chronological timeline* because that's one of the things every major social media giant has abandoned in favor of algorithms made to sell advertisements.
I dislike the way that twitter can make total strangers feel way too comfortable and close to people they are able to interact with and the mob mentality that can come with it. It does make me think that twitter is partially responsible for how entitled fans have become when it comes to making demands from creators or even worse, harassing them since it's so easy to just reply directly to tweets.
I don't know how likely it is for fandom to go back to things like forums or even if DW really takes off as that place, since it has a lot of things I think works for sharing and privacy. It feels like the craving is there, if you look at how modern platforms are being used vs how they were intended to be used.
Discord for example is a strange in-between that is casual enough for chats, has organization for topics via channels and servers, but having to scroll through a chat-log makes it a lot harder to engage with things asynchronously. It adds to that anxiety of missing out on a conversation that I feel like forum threads gives people a chance to respond to thoughtfully. But again, discord wasn't really meant to be structured like that, although it can be argued that it is about community building--for gamers being able to find online partners and quickly coordinate its perfect.
I thought twitter was odd when my friends were using it to RP but even now I find it hard to define. What is the point of twitter for fans and casual people alike? I think it put us in a habit of elevator-pitching our thoughts into easily digestible marketing bits to spread around. When I think about reblogging/retweeting, it's a way to boost something without your own input which is great for seeing new things though comment strings can rope people into discussions they weren't even part of to begin with.
Is the answer to build something new, or is there a way to renew old fandom culture?
