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

[vriddy]

Right, I didn't think about the answer aspect as well. If you try to have a discussion with someone, you have to do it in public and bring their original post to the attention of strangers/your followers that perhaps the friend didn't really want to, or it's your answer that you don't particularly mean to shout across rooftops either... Everything is a proclamation, rarely a chat. Tumblr replies can help a bit with that but they're super unwieldy, have a tiny character limits, easy to miss answers, hard to have an actual discussion in there, etc etc...

I'm also worried about the discourse thing, as you've noticed with my BNHA post ;) I don't think they're gone. Some people I follow get some really unpleasant asks, but they have a tough skin so they're able to deal with them like it was nothing. I recall Pi having similarly unpleasant experiences when posting about controversial topics on ao3cotd as well.

[301beq]

Everything is a proclamation, rarely a chat
That's a really good way of wording it.

I think that's also why tags are so commonly used, and why prev tags is now used more than just screenshotting someone's post. It's quieter, and you're not taking up space in the post. Also, you don't know if the person whose tags you're screenshotting wants them to be seen and have the chance of it becoming popular