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]

*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.