memorizingthedigitsofpi | 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's interesting because as someone slightly younger whose first fan experiences were on Instagram (yeah. i know. it wasn't great, and the absolute absence of warnings on anything were uh. Interesting!), and who then migrated on Tumblr (and couldn't get into Twitter), it feels like I've never had the personal/actual talking parts of fandom.
But yeah, for me on Tumblr sometimes reblogging things isn't what I like doing because even if I do have somewhat of a tagging system for my blog... it's still kinda showing everyone who follows me the Thing if they haven't blocked a specific tag. That and it's a lot like screaming into the void sometimes. (I'm also realizing maybe on Tumblr I like using tags to ramble because it feels more like whispering to myself than, like, the actual post.)
Twitter ? That thing scares me. It doesn't feel like there's a lot of context to anything on it, you can't have nuance in 240 characters, and I am afraid of posting literally any kind of fanart over there because of this.
(I'm not sure if I'm even on topic at this point i am very tired)

The most sense of community and actually discussing stuff with people online I've had was on a roleplay forum in 2014- I've kept some lifelong friends from back then. There were both the roleplay and longer posts and a real time chat box! It was great. Discord, to an extent, have given me some Actual Discussion Time but only in one or two specific servers.

Honestly ? This is why I decided to join Dreamwidth when you started talking about it because. uh. I wanted to try out actually talking to people for once. Which is something I've barely done in online fandom spaces simply because... there wasn't really a way to, unless my friends are into the same thing. I'm glad I found someone who encourages me on my fanfic endeavors irl, and also likes the elder scrolls and laughs with me about my wacky headcanons. I don't think I've found any place where something like that could happen yet.

I can't even imagine fandom on Instagram. And the fact that there are people who do it on pintrest and tiktok just blows my mind. I get that humans are great at adapting things to serve their own purpose but... damn.

I hope you like it here on dreamwidth. It's a very different kind of space to the major socials. Much slower and quieter which is good for someone like me who needs a bit of asynchronous communication and can't keep up with the pace of things. :) Also, I can't tell you how much I've missed having a place that is mine

Fandom on Instagram is... well, when I was active, it was Reposting Without Credit : The Social Media. Big fan accounts rarely credited, and when they did, most people wouldn't go through the "trouble" of giving the actual artist a follow. That, added with the "art takes time to make", usually made reposting accounts more viable than art accounts unless you were able to churn out art really fast. (And as far as I know it's still like that, but I'm not on there enough to be certain). Couple that with the inability to put content warnings before they did their "slideshow" update, and... sometimes people attempted to put them in the "location" bit, but that didn't hide the picture.

Keeping up with the insane pace of things is hard yeah. For me also, I'm not in any US time zone, so a lot of stuff happens while I'm asleep.
For now at least I'm going to see how to customize the journal a little (even with my nonexistent coding ability it looks like there's some themes i can pick from ?) and go from there haha

modern social media sucks for fandom

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