the passing down of fandom history

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

I've got a tiktok account where I post videos about how to use AO3. It helps people who are new to the site learn how to navigate and search/filter etc. and I also get to teach people who've been around for a while some new tricks they might not otherwise know. 

Yesterday, I someone asked about the Citrus Scale, so I posted about that. Which lead to posting about the FFN purges of 2002 and 2012. Which led to posting a brief and incomplete timeline of fandom purges. 

And somewhere in there, someone left a comment that said, "Wow. I hope AO3 never purges adult content."

And that's when I realized that so many people who are either new to fandom or new to AO3 have no idea how it came to exist or why it is the way it is. 

So I guess I'll add that to my list of things to make videos about? 

Brainstorm time: what do you wish your fellow fans knew about? What are cool tags or tropes or traditions or history that you think would be interesting to share? 

Comments

[lackadaisicalnereid]

Forums still exist - but they're not the main thrust of the kind of fandom that engages in ship fic anymore.

oh yeah, of course you're right, forums still exist, look at ME now being tumblr/DW centric. I just spent some time looking things up, and as far as I can tell - fanforum.com is still up, but I couldn't find any of the other forums that I know I participated in.

I honestly think the expectation that things be pan fandom really hurt new forums from existing

OH yeah I can see how/why that might happen.

One of the forums I participated in was an OTH forum, but then some people started watching Grey's Anatomy, and then even more people started watching it (oh, the pleasures of like, having an actual community) and then it became both a OTH and GA forum. But, And people occasionally chatted about other stuff, ofc, in the designated places, but there was no necessity to accommodate for ALL possible things, or any kind of 'universality'.

[thewickling]

I was thinking of battlespaces when I said this actually. Because that forum does have a lot of fic but it's more male and not ship fic orientated. It exists as a part of a separate fannish ecosystem.