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]

Ah, yes, I really feel that: having to be in public mode all the time, and always thinking about how anything you write could be misinterpreted if it gets out of the small circle you meant it for. "Rewarded for drama" is definitely the antithesis of anything meant to enable community building...

[razia]

Yes, and those so called rewards are one of the staples of modern social media, so it's basically impossible to run away from them. And since people get rewarded for drama, they're more likely to go after people's private tweets and spread them all over social media. The only way to stay away from that is to adopt a total passive stance, where you simply never show your opinions, and still, someone mind find a way to drag you into the dirt by accusing you of following someone who's "problematic", or liking problematic content, or whatever.

There's this trend in fandom where people will tag their mutuals (every time I see the word oomph I lose a few more brain cells) in a tweet saying something like "you follow this problematic person :/" and then you see a bunch of those mutuals apologizing for it on the replies, like they've made a grave mistake that must be immediately corrected, and my god if that's not tragic, people crawling on their knees to appease the OP lest they be cast out from the circle of The Good Ones. It's also an addicting power trip for the OP, which just reinforces the behavior.

I know I'm dunking on Twitter a lot, lol, but I think Twitter is a good showcase of everything wrong with social media today.

[vriddy]

Yeah, I was kinda away from fandom (just a reader on AO3) for about 10 years and it's been a bit of a culture shock coming back. I've seen people on private discords agonising about whether they were bad for liking something (a show, a fic, art, whatever) associated even remotely with someone "problematic" and it was heartbreaking to see them work themselves into a knot because they were so afraid that it meant they were "bad" themselves and/or would be thought bad by association.

Then they celebrated someone losing their job, after the person said they enjoyed darkfic and her (tiny) employer got targeted by the twitter mob, hah. Terrifying.

I block freely whenever I see someone anywhere saying "huh did you know that person is problematic" just for following someone or reblogging/retweeting something. Thankfully, I'm starting to find "my people" aka people who know how to use the back button, so it's easier not to worry about it as much, but damn. Yeah, Twitter sure is something else! We're not all meant to share the same pen like that, haha.