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

[kaysa14]

you're never in your own space, you're always speaking in a big courtyard full of people where someone else might hear you and answer

That's something I totally feel but hadn't really conceptualized like that yet. I do think of my tumblr blog as my own space (even though I only reblog stuff), but when others don't write their own posts, checking out their blog doesn't really feel like I'm checking out their space, it feels more like just a collection of posts. If that makes sense? And while posts have the username on them, I often look at the content without connecting it to a person. Which is on me I guess, but still.

The void/courtyard aspect is also what's keeping me from posting on tumblr or twitter. Right now I'm giving writing updates in this one discord's writing channel. Which is mostly dead, but at least the courtyard there only has a few active people that I actually know somewhat.

[vriddy]

I think discord definitely has the smaller courtyard feel! And you can always delete your messages too, which isn't always possible once people have decided to take your post away on say tumblr. Like, the courtyard is the entire user base for twitter or tumblr... maybe even the entire world since everything is public by default. A discord server feels a lot more human-sized to me, in comparison...

Glad the analogy somewhat made sense!

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

we're all visiting each other's curated libraries but none of us are talking to the librarian