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]

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.)