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

[krytella]

On the "engagement" aspect: recently I've written a few nonfiction/essays for an independent website that does journalism and opinion pieces about a specific subject area. The site doesn't have comments, so you have to search around on social media to see if people are posting and engaging with articles. I wrote one thing that was controversial and got shared around a lot, and one that for some reason didn't. And after the one that didn't get a lot of discussion, I found myself thinking, "maybe I should've found a way to make it more controversial so that people would get into arguments with it." I think similar dynamics come up in fandom on platforms where people don't have strong social bonds; it's rewarding to stir things up because that gets you noticed, while if you're in a community where people talk and know each other you're more reticent to say things just to start something because you don't want to get in a fight with your friends.