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

[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.