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

[dressure]

Honestly, what kills me the most is just how damn present I have to be all the time in those social medias.

I feel like if I want to participate, ESPECIALLY on Twitter and Discord, if I am not right there at the second something happens, it's just... not possible to go back easily to the topic. On Discord, any server will have moved on from the topic you want to talk about, and you will have to go onto 200+ messages just to SEE what they were talking about. On Twitter, you won't see shit in a time-matter and now you have a weird vague tweet for 14 hours ago, another one from 3 hours ago, and then three days latter you will see another tweet from three months ago that actually was the pivot to anything.

Like... that's so tiring. I don't WANT to be engaged in fandom all the time, and when I do, I feel like I got to play catch up with a bunch of bullshit just to see some damn headcanons, and that is IF the algorithm let's me see them in the first place.

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

I've always been one to sort of stay mostly in my little corner of a fandom with my friends and my ships or fave characters. I've never tried to keep up with the actors or the behind the scenes or the powers that be etc. If I see that stuff, that's fine but it's not something I actively seek out. I wouldn't even know how to do so if I wanted to :(

[osteophage]

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.

[dressure]

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.

[osteophage]

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

[assignedgothatbirth]

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!