modern social media sucks for fandom

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

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.

Comments

[kadharonon]

I think the fact that it's really easy for a post to escape your local circle of friends is one of the things that modern social media just... it's rough on a fandom. It's easy for things that are inside jokes or someone being ridiculous on purpose to get taken completely seriously and at face value, and for a lot of wank to grow up around that.

And the communal rather than personal thing... well, okay, I actually entered fandom in the message board days rather than LJ. I did a lot of message board roleplaying, and I still have friends from the Redwall Fan Fiction board back in the day. And that was sort of communal, but you'd also have sub-forums for different types of conversations, and conversations that didn't belong in a specific place could be moved or removed by moderators, making it easier to tailor your experience in that communal space. And it's just impossible to do that on Tumblr or Twitter in any meaningful way.

I think that there's also sort of an entitlement to certain interactions that would make it hard to do the same sort of thing these days; I could see someone pissed off that their thread got locked starting a hate-brigade, and a moderating team just getting flooded with nonsense.

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

I never participated in the forum parts of fandom (well, only as a lurker) but you're definitely not wrong