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labingiI just read this excellent overview of the evolution of fandom community over the past two or three decades by mxcatmoon (via princessofgeeks). And I want to add my own two cents about what I think has changed and online society might improve some of it.
I agree with mscatmoon's analysis completely: the early(ish) web of the late 1990s through approximately 2007 was a glorious ten or so years for online fandom. Beginning with mailing lists and flowering into discussion forums, fan websites, and the glory days of LiveJournal, there was a beautiful burgeoning of world-wide community oriented around love of particular fandoms (shows, books, etc.). These communities largely shared fan fic and discussion ("meta," God I miss that word), along with some art, icons, fan vid links, etc.
Here are some of the common characteristics that made it work and how they've changed:
1. The posting structure (except for fan websites) was egalitarian rather than hierarchical. There would likely be a moderator, but every member could post or comment, and every post and comment was displayed equally, usually chronologically. In today's hierarchical model, one "important person" (celebrity, successful blogger, influencer, etc.) posts and others like, share, or comment. The result is that what felt like a group of friends talking has become more like an audience clamoring for attention from the famous person--or simply a one-way article, as in most print media.
2. Because popularity was less important to being heard, conversations could be more diverse and open. When scoring likes and hits is a prerequisite to having a voice, there's a vested interest in doing things a broad audience looks for. I think this is partly why search results for shows are so dominated by reviews of episode 1. When scoring big is not needed because you have a small, cozy, engaged audience, there's more freedom to say what you want, not least because the odds of being trolled are less. This freedom allows interesting discourse: fan essays on what Character X's childhood was probably like.
3. The internet used to be more text based, less image based. This is probably a generational woe. The younger folks seem to prefer imaged based, and that's valid. But a necessary corollary of it is that less is said. You can't image an essay about X's childhood with the same nuance you can write it. So there's less discussion, which means less interrelation among people and fewer ideas to share.
4. The internet was smaller and less commercial, so search results tended to bring up more fan-relevant hits. Fan websites would be near the top of the results. Individual LJ posts would appear high in results if relevant to a search. Today, top hits tend to be low on content: IMDB, Wikipedia, reviews of episode 1.... In a word, stuff used to be findable.
5. People used user names more, not their real identity (as on Facebook, Twitter). This could contribute to trolling but in small fandom-based communities, it tended, instead, to be protecting. The fandom community was a place to seek refuge from "real life." It allowed a separation between free, fun fandom talk and "real life" family, friends, work--anything you say online following you forever. The investment in the community itself usually kept it friendly.
What to do?
That's a big question that depends on the socioeconomics of big companies like Google, which I can't affect, but to play with ideas:
1. Create or adapt (or, as possible, choose to use) platforms that are egalitarian. Bring back the idea of the fandom community as a place to be.
2. Avoid strict limits on how much text can be written per post/comment (vs. Twitter) and put users in charge of what/when to put text behind a cut (vs. FB doing it automatically). Allow comments by default, and possibly just don't have likes. Let people either personally comment or not. (But, yes, I do like kudos on Ao3, so...)
3. Adapt search algorithms and other internet infrastructure to emphasize precision of result over site or page popularity. Yes, I know this is easier said, and I'm not a programmer. But it's an important thing to pursue--and not just for fandom, for all searches.
4. Support user names with privacy so they cannot easily be traced back to RL identities unless users so choose (combined with banning for violation of terms of use, overseen by human beings).
And this is totally off the top of my head--like an old LJ post, not a blog entry to be displayed on my website blog page, but oh well. Sometimes you gotta.
mxcatmoon (via princessofgeeks). And I want to add my own two cents about what I think has changed and online society might improve some of it. I agree with mscatmoon's analysis completely: the early(ish) web of the late 1990s through approximately 2007 was a glorious ten or so years for online fandom. Beginning with mailing lists and flowering into discussion forums, fan websites, and the glory days of LiveJournal, there was a beautiful burgeoning of world-wide community oriented around love of particular fandoms (shows, books, etc.). These communities largely shared fan fic and discussion ("meta," God I miss that word), along with some art, icons, fan vid links, etc.
Here are some of the common characteristics that made it work and how they've changed:
1. The posting structure (except for fan websites) was egalitarian rather than hierarchical. There would likely be a moderator, but every member could post or comment, and every post and comment was displayed equally, usually chronologically. In today's hierarchical model, one "important person" (celebrity, successful blogger, influencer, etc.) posts and others like, share, or comment. The result is that what felt like a group of friends talking has become more like an audience clamoring for attention from the famous person--or simply a one-way article, as in most print media.
2. Because popularity was less important to being heard, conversations could be more diverse and open. When scoring likes and hits is a prerequisite to having a voice, there's a vested interest in doing things a broad audience looks for. I think this is partly why search results for shows are so dominated by reviews of episode 1. When scoring big is not needed because you have a small, cozy, engaged audience, there's more freedom to say what you want, not least because the odds of being trolled are less. This freedom allows interesting discourse: fan essays on what Character X's childhood was probably like.
3. The internet used to be more text based, less image based. This is probably a generational woe. The younger folks seem to prefer imaged based, and that's valid. But a necessary corollary of it is that less is said. You can't image an essay about X's childhood with the same nuance you can write it. So there's less discussion, which means less interrelation among people and fewer ideas to share.
4. The internet was smaller and less commercial, so search results tended to bring up more fan-relevant hits. Fan websites would be near the top of the results. Individual LJ posts would appear high in results if relevant to a search. Today, top hits tend to be low on content: IMDB, Wikipedia, reviews of episode 1.... In a word, stuff used to be findable.
5. People used user names more, not their real identity (as on Facebook, Twitter). This could contribute to trolling but in small fandom-based communities, it tended, instead, to be protecting. The fandom community was a place to seek refuge from "real life." It allowed a separation between free, fun fandom talk and "real life" family, friends, work--anything you say online following you forever. The investment in the community itself usually kept it friendly.
What to do?
That's a big question that depends on the socioeconomics of big companies like Google, which I can't affect, but to play with ideas:
1. Create or adapt (or, as possible, choose to use) platforms that are egalitarian. Bring back the idea of the fandom community as a place to be.
2. Avoid strict limits on how much text can be written per post/comment (vs. Twitter) and put users in charge of what/when to put text behind a cut (vs. FB doing it automatically). Allow comments by default, and possibly just don't have likes. Let people either personally comment or not. (But, yes, I do like kudos on Ao3, so...)
3. Adapt search algorithms and other internet infrastructure to emphasize precision of result over site or page popularity. Yes, I know this is easier said, and I'm not a programmer. But it's an important thing to pursue--and not just for fandom, for all searches.
4. Support user names with privacy so they cannot easily be traced back to RL identities unless users so choose (combined with banning for violation of terms of use, overseen by human beings).
And this is totally off the top of my head--like an old LJ post, not a blog entry to be displayed on my website blog page, but oh well. Sometimes you gotta.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-08 10:07 pm (UTC)Huh, that's interesting to me—that decade happens to coincide with my main years of fannish participation almost exactly. (I discovered fanfic accidentally in 1998 while doing an internet search for episode transcripts of a show I liked; after that I participated in online fandom in various ways, starting with mailing lists and peaking with Livejournal, and then I had a baby in late 2007 and fandom got sidelined in my life.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-09 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-08 10:13 pm (UTC)I've had to rejoin tumblr because I fell back in love with the beatles and its' where the fandom is, but it's really hard for me to see why I would want to follow twenty people when they all reblog every post each other make anyway. And you don't get a proper feeling for who a person is when they're mostly posting other people's stuff, sometimes with a couple of tags to comment on it, but often with nothing at all. It's really alien to me.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-09 03:03 pm (UTC)(Personally, I don't get the swirl your finger across the screen to type method, but it seems to let people type fast on phones. I was sitting behind a guy at an event watching him do that and pretty much in awe. It looked like magic.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-10 04:15 am (UTC)People will write longer things on facebook, but I suspect a lot of them either use a computer, or dictate via phone. (One person I know whose facebook entries are full of replies almost exclusively dictates their entries. They generate a lot of back and forth and are interesting.) I don't comments on facebook posts because the company is a vile pit of snakes with a lot of digestive system issues and no personal hygiene.
I want to post more on DreamWidth, as people have given up on LiveJournal it seems. (I still pay them, I like what the site means to me.) But, I just ... don't, usually. Which is sad.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-10 02:41 pm (UTC)I actually have a scene of almost exactly this in the sci-fi book I'm currently rewriting.
FB, in addition to the moral questionability you mention, has a bad user interface. It always has; it seems totally uninterested in improving it: a punky little window with tiny amounts on tiny text (unless you're writing, like, ten words).
It would be great to see you on DW more!
no subject
Date: 2019-09-11 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-14 07:38 pm (UTC)(Personally, I put it down to about 4+ generations of deriding the humanities as irrelevant, which means, among other things, there are no ethicists/philosophers/cultural analysts hired to help figure out how technology should serve humanity.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-14 10:49 pm (UTC)Probably on a platter with a nice wine reduction sauce...
no subject
Date: 2019-09-16 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-10 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-10 02:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-10 09:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-14 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-09 05:41 am (UTC)Facebook didn't allow members to use made-up names because they want to sell people to advertisers. Their policy of using only real names (which is a huge problem for trans/queer individuals) made it certain that I would never get a Facebook account. Facebook doesn't care.
Dreamwidth still exists (as well as LiveJournal, if you aren't bothered by their restrictions); we can still do old-school blogging. But most people don't want to. I guess the world has moved on.
(Sorry. Just being crabby/cynical tonight. I need another weekend day but have to go to work tomorrow.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-09 03:08 pm (UTC)That said, a friend of mine is doing some volunteer software development on decentralized special interest communities that she thinks have potential to re-democratized some kinds of internet interactions (including fandom), and preserve privacy better. I can't remember the specifics now, alas, but I'll definitely be asking her how it's going when I next see her.
(As to search engines, I wonder if Ecosia will ever be in a place to do some innovative, not-for-profit search design. My understanding is that right now they basically use Bing, but I don't know if they have plans to move beyond that.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-10 12:34 am (UTC)I miss fans. I'm still here and on LJ but so many left for other platforms, and though I know people read my stories on AO3, the connection isn't there. It's made me far less inclined to write.
I hadn't thought of phones driving a lot of the change, but that makes a lot of sense.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-14 07:41 pm (UTC)Here's hoping fans find each other again. I think there's a basic human drive to do that.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-21 08:09 am (UTC)1. A lot of "tumblr natives" find DW vastly less egalitarian than tumblr because a comment on tumblr is a reblog in one's own space, while a comment on DW is in someone else's space, subject to their rules. Whether or not I agree, this is a commonly-expressed view. You can also go viral or get famous on Tumblr for a much wider variety of skills. On LJ, you usually needed skill with longform text. (Or, at least, that's the complaint I've heard on Tumblr.)
You totally can get famous on tumblr for longform text though. I can think of a number of "discourse" blogs that have done it. All they do is discuss wanky fandom meta topics at great length. (And I do mean discuss: there's a lot of back and forth on those blogs, not just top-level text posts.) Overall, there has been a move to phones, and longform text can be more of a pain to produce on those, but lots of people still consume it, possibly writing replies when they get home to a computer.
4. I never really had this experience. Searching sucked in the past and it still sucks now. Searching LJ required understanding LJ. Searching tumblr requires understanding tumblr. Yahoo groups had brief periods when its search was useful. And then it would return to being the most useless goddamn thing! Discord is currently like that too: if you know how to look for what exists and the invite links to the same, it's usable. If you don't, it's not.
Repulsive influencer culture is everywhere on Youtube and Instagram, but it isn't how most of fandom has interacted with Tumblr for most of Tumblr's reign as the post-LJ fandom hub. Plain searches on Tumblr got ruined by this kind of programming, but tag view didn't, and most people block commercial promotions on their dashboard. Discord, where a lot of fandom is now moving, is also not big on influencer culture.
The big difference between Tumblr and LJ is that a fandom-friendly LJ fork/clone was possible with user revenue, while a fandom-friendly Tumblr clone is probably not possible because images and video are so much more costly to host currently. Some of those distributed options might work, but they're not ready-to-go for an un-tech-savvy user. Steep though I found tumblr's learning curve, these modern options are even worse. Discord is one product that has a good computer version and a good phone version. It's easy to learn as these things go. I'm not happy it's where most of fandom seems to be headed, but I'm not surprised: it enables small groups of friends to interact intimately around narrow interest topics without a lot of corporate interference and bad search results.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-21 05:17 pm (UTC)I totally agree search in LJ and DW were and are awful. I use their searches for almost nothing. I used to find Google easier--way back, like 2000-ish or something.
DW is definitely a pain to use for images, and I've heard it's hard to use with phones too. My very lay-person understanding is that its code is now so old it would be very hard to upgrade to be much more user friendly in these areas, so, yeah, I don't think this model is the wave of the future. People want to post images and video; that won't change. It'll be interesting to see where it goes next. I hope it doesn't stick at Discord for, like, the next 10 years, but I guess we'll see!