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

[krait]

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:

[vriddy]

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...??

[krait]

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.

[mekare]

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.

[krait]

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.)

driveby comment-stalker here hello

[a_flyleaf]

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.