memorizingthedigitsofpi | modern social media sucks for fandom

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modern social media sucks for fandom

Sometimes you just need to make a bulleted list.

all posts are public, leading to epic levels of wank
people reply at different points in the conversation, also leading to wank but more importantly, obscuring parts of the conversation and also making the full conversation only viewable to the initial poster
sharing anything automatically shares it with everyone you know on that platform because you can't have subgroups for your content unless you make multiple accounts
real fucking names
constantly changing usernames (looking at you tumblr) makes it impossible to know who you're even following/who's following you. it also makes it hard to keep track of friends
platforms are maximized for "engagement" not for community, so it's all about getting the likes and shares and who cares about deep diving anything
priority is mostly given to short form content which makes nuance difficult
everything moves so fast that it's difficult to have a follow up conversation on anything you post because people can't find the initial thought
everything is presented without the context of the posts that came before and after them - especially on sites that don't give you a date/timestamp
tags are communal rather than personal, so you never really know what you'll find in there. Everyone wants to organize their own space, but the items they put in their containers might be something you're allergic to (to stretch a metaphor)

I can't do twitter. Tumblr makes me feel more like either a spectator or a performer. Tiktok is every social media experience I've ever had, played through at 100x speed. No option is perfect, but some are way less perfect than others. At least for me.

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The constantly changing usernames is absolutely one of Tumblr's weakest points. The link rot alone makes me shudder.

I definitely find tumblr "easier" in a lot of ways because of the passivity of it. I don't have to friend or even follow someone in order to reblog their post. But the downside of that is that it makes it that much more intimidating to try to add your own response or content.

One of the worst things, I've found, is the algorithm. I very very rarely make a text post on Tumblr because when I do ... who sees it? My fannish account has 231 followers, which to little ol' oldbie me sounds like a lot, but it's not enough to give what I say the kind of boost that would actually make my posts show up in the tags and get any kind of discussion going.

(Also, the idea that "if you have something to say you should put it in the tags, and wait for someone else to excavate it out and share a screenshot, potentially without your name attached" is SO TOXIC. I don't know who came up with this or why so many people accepted that posting your own thoughts on a reblog is arrogant or out-of-touch, but just thinking about it gives me the heebie-jeebies. And yet I tend to confine myself to the tags anyway, because I don't want people to point and laugh at my self-assurance.)

These are ALL good points, but others have covered a lot of what I feel about the speed and privacy issues, so I feel particularly sympathetic to the one about constantly-changing names. As someone who has had maybe four usernames in two decades of fannish life, I don't think I'm ever going to understand the rapid-fire name-changing that younger fans do! 'I'm in a new fandom now; time to destroy my old account and make a new one' - what?? Or even name-splitting, which I also see all the time: people who will admit that they have one account for porn, one for gen, and one for exchanges, or some other set of divisions.

It's such a marketing thing that I always have a bit of a flinch reaction. The impression I get is that their fic is a product, and their name is a brand, and the brand must deliver a promised product and only the promised product with no surprises - on pain of being sued for breach of contract.

On a personal level I hate it because no, if I like five of your fics I would love to be able to find the rest! Why hide them? It's not as though nobody in the world could possibly enjoy both gen and romance, or casefic and curtainfic; the fact that you're writing all of it is pretty much proof that people can like all of it, right?

On an emotional level I hate it because no, that's not what fandom is supposed to be about; this is a hobby, not a job, and a friend group, not a networking event. You haven't promised anybody anything; if you want to write tentacle porn one week and modern-AU fluff next week, you should! How can you make friends and enjoy your hobby if you're carefully slicing yourself into market segments and pretending to be three different people with singular interests? How can you keep friendships if every time you find a new interest you vanish from the old one?

I see this on smaller scales, too: a couple weeks ago I saw someone say they had deleted a fic a couple months after posting it because it hadn't 'done well' and that was obviously embarrassing. D: I couldn't help but think, a couple months? But what if the fan who would have loved that fic is someone who won't get into this fandom for another five years?

There have been so many fandoms where I was late to the party; sometimes by a couple of years (Nirvana in Fire!) and sometimes by decades (Starsky & Hutch)! The idea that a fic has to 'do well' to justify its existence is strange enough to me, but the idea that a couple of months is a sufficient window for a fanwork to be judged by is unfathomable. Yet this seems to be How People Do Fandom on large social media sites now, whether it's a fic or a whole persona being assessed.

I don't get it, and probably never will.

(While I'm at it, I'd also like to register my PROFOUND disapproval for sites that don't provide timestamps! Why is this a thing. Whom do I shout at to make it stop.) D:

Edited 2021-07-06 03:49 (UTC)

I set things up to get notified of new messages on this post since everyone's made so many interesting points, and so are you now!! I've got a post percolating somewhere around commercialisation in fandom, and what you mention about marketing really connects with that.

Like, I'll be reading a fic on AO3, and the end author note will say "Twitter saw it first!" because building engagement/followers is so important...? I don't remember seeing that kind of things before, it feels different than just dropping a link to your blog so people can chat with you.

Or something else that keeps making me go "this isn't my experience of fandom" is people circulating the first few pages of awesome fanart/comics they write, and at the end explain how you can buy the rest because it won't be shared on social media.

And I understand people need to make a living and capitalism is so tough on people, but this is so foreign to my experience of fandom. This isn't what I come here to do. And I don't know if it's something new or if it was always there and it's just accelerating now. I think maybe people always sold merch and fanzines and fanart at conventions? I do remember buying postcards with cool fanart. But I don't remember that exhausting marketing push at the time. Maybe I'm just more tired nowadays...??

Yes! Continual reminders at the bottom of every chapter to follow the author on platforms X and Y, or 'like this? check out my original works at link!' seem FAR more common now than I remember. To me it's almost redundant? To me it's perfectly natural that, if I liked your fic, I'd try to see if you were on LJ, friend you or join your fic-posting comm, etc. But that doesn't seem like quite the same thing as following someone on Twitter or Tumblr (or Patreon), and there wasn't that same push to do it as a means of engaging with the fic. (It gives me the impression there's someone on the other end of the Tumblr going, 'if I post a fic and only get 6 new followers in the first week, is the fic a failure?')

The shifting usernames and lack of continuity seems to go hand in hand with there being more focus on what one's fandom presence is 'about' in some very broad sense, as though one is locked into a fandom track once one starts out, and can only escape by destroying it and starting over from scratch.

In some ways, we've always had the idea of fannish paths or personas; things like "I'm a slasher," or "Rabid Sephiroth Fangirl," go way back. "I am ExcWriter2001 and all I do in fandom (that you know of) is write for exchanges" feels different, though - rather as if a PR firm or marketing consultant was involved and said, choose which persona you should project for maximum engagement, and hide anything that doesn't fit to avoid breaking the illusion. It reminds me of authors (i.e. paid professionals) having different pen names for different genres, because you can sell more erotica AND more fantasy novels if shoppers know that an Anne Rice book is fantasy and an AN Roquelaure book is erotica. I don't get that vibe with "yaoi fangirl." It comes across as something between a statement of fact, a badge of pride, and a warning, not a constraint.

As far as actual things for sale go: Fancomics are... interesting. Because the very first thing I thought of was doujinshi; "buy my fancomic" certainly has a long history, especially on the anime/manga side of things. And zines, certainly, though I think it was considered poor ettiquette to sell them for more than the production/shipping costs? Fan-made merch of other types has a long history, as well; I own some of it going back at least to my HP days! (You'll take my Homestuck amigurumi over my dead body, even though I'm not really in the fandom anymore.) :D

Looking at the 'historical' versions, what strikes me is that it almost seems like the fan is the product now. (Or perhaps that the product is the product, but what they're really trying to sell is the "brand.") Instead of 'be my LJ friend and discuss my fic' it's "be a follower of my FemslashSmutWriter Ao3 account"; instead of 'buy a doujin' it's "become a Patreon supporter and get a doujin page per week."

That's what's so antithetical to my experience and view of fandom, really. I'm here for friendship, not followership. I want to cheerlead your fic chapters or ask you what you thought about Episode 7 or make a stupid pun about our favourite character's name. Five years down the line I want to still be cheerleading your fic chapters, even though you're now writing for a fandom I'm not in! Sure, we might part ways because ~~I bear an irrational grudge against SG:A for taking all my HP friends~~ you can't stop talking about some guy named Rodney, but then again, maybe your posts about Rodney are funny enough for me to keep reading. I'd prefer either to waking up one morning to find your journal deleted, and wondering where you are and if you're okay, when all the while you're still right here, being

rodneyrox whose fannish history starts and ends with SGA.

Edited (fixed my broken HTML!) 2021-07-07 03:03 (UTC)

On the "engagement" aspect: recently I've written a few nonfiction/essays for an independent website that does journalism and opinion pieces about a specific subject area. The site doesn't have comments, so you have to search around on social media to see if people are posting and engaging with articles. I wrote one thing that was controversial and got shared around a lot, and one that for some reason didn't. And after the one that didn't get a lot of discussion, I found myself thinking, "maybe I should've found a way to make it more controversial so that people would get into arguments with it." I think similar dynamics come up in fandom on platforms where people don't have strong social bonds; it's rewarding to stir things up because that gets you noticed, while if you're in a community where people talk and know each other you're more reticent to say things just to start something because you don't want to get in a fight with your friends.

I found this post via this Tumblr post, so I'm sorry if this seems out of nowhere, just thought I'd add some thoughts.

I think a lot of what you're pointing out here applies to how bad corporate social media is for communities generally. A while back, I read this post about how "Tumblr is ruining fandom," and it's part of what inspired me to compose my own writeup of how Tumblr is harmful to communities in general. Things like unmoderated tag searches getting used as a proxy for "community" spaces, the reblog-addition system, and punishing people for using links has an overall negative impact on what kinds of community dynamics can emerge.

There are other social media options out there -- datestamps, post privacy levels, proper threading, topic-based opt-in groups to share to, actual comment sections friendlier to full back-and-forth conversations, urls independent of usernames, basic community moderation tools, lack of intrusive algorithm, a slower site culter, etc., these all do exist in some places.... but yeah, those features tend to be found in the more niche places, not the big names. Because catering to users' needs isn't where the money is.

Yeah, that's one of the things I find really stressful about Discord servers -- something I wrote about over here as well. It's gotten slightly better now that they've added that direct reply feature, but if I'm bringing back something more than a day old... it can still feel inappropriate and out of place. It's just the nature of live chat rooms that they're very based around fast-moving immediacy, in general, and that's why it makes me queasy to see people using Discord servers for things that aren't best suited to being Discord servers.

Curse the trend of indie game devs sequestering all their updates there.

Ah, that post (entry?) of yours managed to perfectly encapsulate the Discord experience. It's ABSOLUTE agony to find anything if it's a even-bigger-than-50-people server, and I honestly don't understand how people can do it at all. Not enough hours in a day to keep looking in the same server just in hopes for a good conversation!

Nevermind having to join entire servers that you know you aren't going to talk just for things like game updates, like you mentioned. Really makes me wish discord had a "mail" bot that could send important menssages to people who might not be in the server but have a "subscription" to a specific channel or something.

Oh man, an email subscription to announcement channels -- that would be ideal.

I just wanted to say that I agree

Hi, do you mind me linking to this over at

fictional_fans?

I agree with so many of your points. I‘ve never experienced Twitter, but I am on Tumblr (after a great deal of wibbling and overthinking) because it is very good for visual media (I‘m a fanartist). But I was always aware that it would only ever be on the periphery of my fandom experience. I‘ve tried interacting with people in chats and reblog additions but it is a nightmare. I‘ve very clearly separated it now and only use it for posting my art (after first posting it here and on AO3), and looking for pretty pictures (sometimes there is good meta).

It's such a marketing thing that I always have a bit of a flinch reaction. The impression I get is that their fic is a product, and their name is a brand, and the brand must deliver a promised product and only the promised product with no surprises - on pain of being sued for breach of contract.

I‘ve never thought about it like this but yeah. Maybe part of it is also young people still figuring out their identity, not wanting to be tied down to a specific thing. Especially if they chose a very fandom-specific user name first? I remember agonising over choosing a user name here for Dreamwidth because I went into it, wanting it to be my name for basically always. Maybe that is not the approach nowadays.

Oh yeah. Bookmarking things and a couple of months later they are just. Gone. Horrible!

Two things: Go you for making original stuff! At least something good came out of your negative fandom experiences. Though it always makes me sad to hear about fans being driven away from what they liked.

Oops, I rambled again;

That is what Dreamwidth and other journal style sites are for! I think spending time on sites like Twitter and Tumblr makes you forget (I’m including myself in this) that rambling can be a good thing. Just writing your thoughts down (without the goal of needing it to be a structured essay on a certain topic) feels freeing.

Edited 2021-08-08 08:13 (UTC)

I'm also very sad that fandom doesn't inspire me as much anymore. It's like, even if I still watch the show, I'll have reservations about the fandom and other fans.

And it really is freeing! Taking thoughts out of your head and putting them down somewhere where you still can see them and think about them later if you want is such an awesome thing to have (especially when I forget things pretty easily)! I'm starting to think of DW like I do of my physical journal, except I can choose who sees it. I think it's the absence of 'notes' on posts. With tumblr, you can't help but notice when something hasn't been interacted with. But here it's just a post in a journal.

I mean, I do notice when an entry I made here has no comments at all. And I rarely post stuff where I really don‘t want people to interact with it (mainly locked posts with rants and or personal stuff). The fannish stuff is always meant to be read. But since there is no kudos button or like feature I know that there are lurkers who still read but are invisible. I used to be one of them after all. ;-)

I guess it varies from one person to another. (I'm pretty much a lurker, mainly because I often don't know what to say. XD)

They kind of do now? For community servers at least - you can "follow" updates from servers that are marked as communities to whatever servers you created. You can even create a server that just has you in it and create a RSS feeds of sorts for those servers!

Wow, I am so late replying; apologies!

That could be it, but that just brings back the marketing issue: why would you be "tied" to anything just because you started with it?

I mean, I put some thought into my username - I knew I didn't want it to be fandom-specific, because I did love other things, too, and might eventually move on completely. But that was kinda the point: I knew going in that the username would probably outlive my current interest, and it never occurred to me that I'd have to stop being Krait if I left my current fandom.

My fannish identity is pretty much "me," so it seemed perfectly normal that whatever I was into should be part of my fannish identity, and that it would change over time. (Do I edit and select which parts of 'me' go into my fannish existence! Sure; I don't post about my RL work or my offline hobbies much, because the focus here is fandom. But not the reverse: I don't edit and select only some of my fandoms to admit to. Which seems to be more and more what the Tumblr/Twitter crowd thinks is normal.)

Here from tumblr!

If I can provide a different perspective, I was a lurker from when I first discovered fandom in my early teens (of the "old enough to know what a lemon is, too young when I learned what it is" generation). Fandom was mostly on livejournal at that point, and oh man it terrified me: I'm scared to talk to people online. It seemed that everyone had their friends already and while I completely understand locked posts, from the outside it made it seem like I could never join in. Fandom seemed cliquey to me. And I'm sure it was in some areas and wasn't in others, and other people did feel free to join! But it seemed unwelcoming. I know others felt the same way - I posted about this (https://undercat-overdog.tumblr.com/post/656907112902017024/i-reblogged-with-tags-this-post-about-making) and had a bunch of people reach out, mostly privately, and say that they too were scared to join livejournal too and only delurked on tumblr or twitter (and ao3).

Part of my fear was that I didn't think I could contribute anything. I considered trying to write fic but the thought of actually posting scared me too - this was also in the days when there were a lot of moderated archives and I know that some of them absolutely were cliquey (that may just be my fandom; the main "good" archive site had to have each fic evaluated for "quality" before it could be posted - unless you were a member of a certain crowd). It took until I up and decided one day to write fanfiction, and oh look, now there's an archive that feels safe to me and easy to use and here's a social media site that feels ok. In some ways the openness of tumblr and the lack of private settings made it easier? I didn't fear that I was missing out on the good content because people didn't like me; it was easier for my personal internet social anxiety. Plus I was older, and now had things - fic/meta - to contribute. But even then, had fandom and social media looked like it had in the 2000s (or if it were just twitter), I would have kept lurking.

Fandom in the golden days wasn't golden for everyone and I want to speak for that perspective.

(Also livejournal was absolutely terrible for finding fic. That is not a tumblr and twitter only problem. Tumblr is also the only social media site where I can get non-fandom material (art, long random posts about weaving or tombstones of roman dogs, etc - ok twitter can too but not the long posts and my non-artist understanding is that tumblr has good media hosting) on the same feed so I only need one account: a huge blessing! Well, a discord account too if that counts.)

-undercat-overdog on tumblr. And sorry for the link thrown in as text, but the hyperlink tag didn't go through when I previewed the comment.

Ack ack! Oh crap, I am sorry. I did not realize the dates!

Or even name-splitting, which I also see all the time: people who will admit that they have one account for porn, one for gen, and one for exchanges, or some other set of divisions.
[…]
It's such a marketing thing that I always have a bit of a flinch reaction. The impression I get is that their fic is a product, and their name is a brand, and the brand must deliver a promised product and only the promised product with no surprises - on pain of being sued for breach of contract.
[…]
How can you make friends and enjoy your hobby if you're carefully slicing yourself into market segments and pretending to be three different people with singular interests? How can you keep friendships if every time you find a new interest you vanish from the old one?

Oh man, as someone who’s only been alive for about two decades, this hurts (in a good way, the way it does when someone finally puts a Thing into words, and the Thing is upsetting but now there are words for it) :,D Because I definitely do sense (and felt, very actively, when I used tumblr) this unspoken pressure to Perform Fandom in disjointed segments, which gets very tricky to navigate when those interests overlap.

This is sorta tangential but I think it started innocuously enough; I remember first getting into tumblr c. 2013–14, following a few people who posted stuff I liked, and being bombarded by not only reblogs of $fandom but also fifty other fandoms that I didn’t really care about. So I started seeking out fandom-specific blogs, and fandom blogs so often got way more followers/likes/general engagement than main/catch-all blogs, so it seemed both convenient and beneficial to split interests like that.

But the marketing. The marketinnnng. I wonder if this has something to do with the proliferation of Patreon and other donation platforms, and the trend of budding storyboarders and animators being found by the big studios through their fanwork? Both of these trends (the latter moreso than the former, afaik) basically smash the divide between personal and fannish, right down to legal names and portfolio sites. You don’t want the employers to find your smut, or maybe you’d lose patrons for drawing The Wrong Pairing, so you fragment. Sometimes the accounts are linked—and sometimes they’re not, with any connections deliberately and fastidiously scrubbed.

I dunno, man. There’s probably something else here wrt fandom longevity (people hopping from one trendy thing to the next; getting fannish about older stuff being unheard of in a self-feeding cycle of “there’s no community → so even if new fanwork is made it won’t have that positive feedback loop of a big/active fandom → people tend to make one or two things and leave → no community”) and bigger trends towards small attention spans and instant gratification, but I’ll stop here xD But yeah! Thanks for this comment, it articulated some things I’ve been mulling over really well.

I wouldn't worry about the date, you bring a lot of good points!!

Thinking of my LJ experience, I never really interacted much with writers. Definitely a lurker for fic. My fandom was SGA and I don't remember many cliques, there were a couple of closed communities for some nsfw content I think and it was really hard to get over my shyness to ask to join just to read the stuff in there, so I usually didn't.

I never formed connection with writers because I could see they already had their friends in the comments, and I was way too starstruck and thought they wouldn't be interested in anything I might have to say anyway - look how awesome they were being already ;)

However, I did make friends with other readers, people who posted fic rec lists in their journals, and shared their thoughts and hype whenever a new episode came out. Everyooone was on LJ at the time so I even managed to meet a couple of fellow fans at my university deep in the countryside, haha. We've long lost touch, but that was nice. I was a bit older than you, though. There might be a stage of life thing going on there too, with regard to feeling like you have something to contribute...

I think searching for "interest" keywords and/or communities was how to find the spaces where people shared their fic and meta and vids? It's not that much different than going through tumblr tags now.

Since last year, I write fanfic, and through mutual comments ended up befriending a bunch of other writers over time... I feel like "breaking in" to that circle must feel just as hard for lurkers today than it felt for me then. People see groups that seem already gelled and feel left out, don't know how to connect unless they have art or fic of their own to contribute. I see it a lot, in twitter spaces and things like that.

I wasn't writing during my LJ days so I don't remember how difficult it was to "break in," I'm fairly sure I found all the authors I liked through sga slash communities. I'm glad we have AO3 now!!

I just can't get over the feeling of having to be "on" and public speaking I get from tumblr, twitter, discord. It's interesting to see from the perspective of people who find it more freeing, thanks for taking the time to share!

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modern social media sucks for fandom

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driveby comment-stalker here hello

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