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

[sarken]

I'm at the point now where I just make a fresh post with whatever point or counterpoint I want to make because I don't want to spread the horrible idea, but then I either have to be careful about including context or I have to deliberate exclude context. More often than not, I choose the latter and I think that's to the detriment of the broader conversation.

Are people on Tumblr weird about that? I know if you do that on Twitter, you risk getting into subtweeting territory, which can cause its own sort of drama.

I do wish it were more acceptable to just link to the discussion so you aren't spreading it directly, but you are still giving context and and people can confirm you weren't misrepresenting what was being said. However, links are super impermanent on modern social media, where URLs are often name-base and name changes are common. (We won't even discuss the problems posed by the discussion being spread over reblogs, replies, and tags, making it hard to get a good picture from one link. Comment sections on more blog-like sites are often terrible places, but at least the terribleness is collected in one place!) I honestly don't know how many people bother to follow the links if you do provide them, either because the experience of following links in social media apps is often deeply unpleasant, or just because people are kind of lazy and won't read things that aren't placed directly in front of them. 😩

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

oh I DEFINITELY vagueblog. a LOT. XD

but since I run a fandom/ao3 blog and the vagueblogs are all fandom/ao3 related, I've got plausible deniability that I was just thinking about a topic and just decided to post about it. That's also why I tend to frame my posts as independent thoughts, unrelated to other things that might be going on

that said, the times when I make it super clear that I'm responding to someone or something else, I only get a handful of people pick up on it (and those ones tend to think I'm funny, which is nice)

as for the ephemeral nature of modern social media? if I think about that and all of the conversations and debates and content and and and that disappears on a daily basis... I'd never stop crying.