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

[pegasus143]

Honestly the thing I dislike most about social media is how difficult it is to find that one incredibly specific thing that you lost. Like, let's say you remember a post that mentioned a specific character, location, and random fun fact. If you try and search those things together on any social media site, you're not going to get any results, even though the post containing all three of them is right there on the site!

On ao3, you can kind of get that to work, since you can search for specific combinations of tags (assuming that the work author tagged those things), but other social media sites don't let you search tags in specific combinations. This also can lead to some issues -- let's say you have a favorite character in a fandom, but they're not a fandom favorite. If you go in that character's tag, here's what you're going to find:

1. Posts about the fandom favorite that are tagged with every character tag (you could technically eliminate these by blocking the tag for the fandom favorite, but you usually enjoy posts about this character -- just not, you know, when you're looking for posts about a different character)

2. Pretty pictures, gifsets, incorrect quotes, etc. -- all the stuff that's easy to make and pretty (or not-so-pretty, but you know what I mean) to look at

3. Character analysis, meta, fics, etc. -- the meaty content

If you're in a mood for only meaty content about this character... unless you know someone who's reblogged a lot of that sort of thing and has literally the best and most specific organizational system ever, good luck finding what you're looking for. You'll either be stuck in the character tag scrolling past stuff you don't want to see, or in some other fandom tag (such as meta) scrolling through stuff you don't want to see.

[feast_of_regrets]

This! This is the thing that gets me! I am forever in the mode of "Now where did I see that?" If you don't reblog something immediately to your own blog on Tumblr, hell help you ever find it again. And even then, did you reblog it more than 200 posts ago? Hope you remember a striking phrase to help Google site search your blog! (I know I saw a tool for seeing truly every post you've ever tagged something on your blog somewhere; I think I even reblogged it last time I saw it. Haven't tried it though.) And all of that is without factoring in changes in site policy (like the 200 post thing) that suddenly make old content a lot harder to find. Or purges. It's just very frustrating sometimes.

[pegasus143]

*sighs* Yes, the deletions. Those can be pretty unnecessarily frustrating at times. I have a love/hate relationship with tumblr's "read more" function because of it -- it's great for longer posts, image-heavy posts, or posts containing heavy or spoilery content, but I've also been in situations where I've come across a post that's been reblogged and turned into a really interesting discussion, which obviously made me want to read the full original post, but I couldn't because the original had been deleted. And obviously I think people should have a right to delete things if they'd like to, but also it can make any resulting conversations confusing, difficult to follow, and highly prone to misinterpretation and wank. It's almost like there needs to be a standard of "if the original post is no longer accessible to a new person who happens upon the discussion, then it needs to be brought on to a new post." But also, you can get into a lot of re-hashing of issues that have already been hashed out that way.

Another situation that I've been in was when I was looking to reference a behind-the-scenes fact from something that had been in a twitter thread of similar behind-the-scenes content. I actually got to the thread pretty easily, but the tweet I was looking for wasn't there. Eventually, I found a post where someone had linked to that specific tweet, but what I think happened is that the tweet in the thread right above the tweet I was looking for had been deleted, so the tweets below that one had gotten semi-unlinked from the thread (as in, they were clearly a part of the thread when I had the link to the specific tweet, but when looking at the thread from a link that had gone to the first tweet in the thread, all the tweets after the deleted one weren't there).

[feast_of_regrets]

Oh, yes. My flirtation with Twitter was brief and painful, and the difficulty in getting back to an original thread and finding it intact was part of that. It honestly stresses me out that so many really talented people are writing Tweet fic (and Tweet meta for that matter), because the nature of the platform is really that we're going to lose all that beautiful work. Even beyond user deletions; I fully expect Twitter to just make a random policy change that will break old links.

[pegasus143]

I don't really use twitter (I deleted the account that I had ages ago, and now only go there to check for updates on people I watch on youtube or if I'm following a specific link for something fandom-related). But yeah, I can see just how easy it would be to lose a ton of stuff there.

[razia]

Pillowfort seems to have an interesting way of dealing with deletions. If OP deletes it, the whole post goes with it. I have a PF gathering dust, so not sure how well it's been implemented, but it's an interesting feature. Of course, the downside is that you lose your reblogs of it, but I don't think we can have robust privacy settings without some drawbacks like these.

[pegasus143]

Yeah, that feature was actually one of the ones that seemed like a good idea. I've looked into pillowfort a bit using the test/preview account that they have, but I wasn't a huge fan of other aspects of the site design. The task of rebuilding a community there, especially when you fall into a niche portion of something that's not an uber-fandom, is also quite daunting, and something I feel like I'd probably be doing on my own.

[xmarksthespotwhereistand]

Let's keep in mind that archive of our own is not a social media and regarding it as such can lead to some unreasonable and not really constructive expectations. Archive of our own is very good at being an archive and doesn't want to also be the next big fandom social media and i give thanks for that everyday.

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

I have a semi-eidetic memory and I can remember a phrase or a keyword from an ask I answered 3.5 years ago but even when I search my own blog for it, it doesn't come up

you know what I end up doing? a google search for "keyword phrase" site:ao3commentoftheday.tumblr.com

I have to google my own blog smdh