memorizingthedigitsofpi | the passing down of fandom history

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?

Current Mood: shocked

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

thewickling

Sometimes I think about the fact that there's no one fandom history.

When AO3 was becoming a big thing, I was asianfanfics - which apparently was born from a similar situation. That took me until this year to learn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asianfanfics . So I guess I was there for a different slice of fandom's beginning.

On that is an entirely different branch from the Archive.

I'm not sure where I am going with this but I guess ....

While knowing fandom history is great, I wish people didn't treat it like a monolith. That the branch of history the Archive exists on should be the one people know. After all even now, the Archive is only one narrow slice of fannish activity.

From:

lackadaisicalnereid

I *so* agree with this. My fandom trajectory was, in rough terms: lurking on harrypotterfanfiction.com and then posting some fics, (oh and I just found out by opening the link that HPFF is shutting down - but luckily, they're importing everything to AO3 - but I digress). Then I got into One Tree Hill and spent time on some forum (I honestly don't remember where) and then we migrated to a new forum that was specifically about OTH (whoever hosted all of this, you were amazing). After that - with a bit of overlap in 2008 - I started spending tons of time on fanforum, mostly in the House fandom. I went to LJ when I joined the Vampire Diaries fandom much later.

And like, from what I remember it - fanforum was HUGE? And we all talk about LJ all the time, especially on Tumblr and Dreamwidth (I don't do Twitter, so I have no idea what goes on there)

TLDR:

So many things get lost or seem to be getting lost? In your case, you talk about fic archives that aren't AO3 and their history, and I keep thinking about how I forget about forums, which I perceived as a huge deal back in the day. I mean, I spent at least a year really actively posting on fanforum, and I myself haven't thought about it in YEARS.

Let's not forget forums <3

From:

thewickling

I used to mod forums! And all the ones I used to be a part of are gone. Even the one that swore to stay up only as an archive after it disappeared is gone.

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

I honestly think the expectation that things be pan fandom really hurt new forums from existing. That things have to be for everyone really hurts small archives or forums from springing up.

From:

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'.

From:

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.

From:

independence1776

That things have to be for everyone really hurts small archives or forums from springing up.

Absolutely. One of my primary fandoms is Tolkien and pretty much only a handful of our archives are still around and an even smaller amount are active. I've seen, both openly and implied, the attitude that there is no point to posting on those archives because AO3 exists.

And yeah, my time in post-Prequels Star Wars was on a forum. It still exists-- it's connected to what once was the main fan site-- but it's dead quiet compared to what it used to be in the mid 2000s.

From:

thewickling

the attitude that there is no point to posting on those archives because AO3 exists.

That's so odd. Posting on a small forum has its own pros and cons. The only benefit posting only to AO3 has is that the potential for more views is higher. I honestly think a lot of people would be happier on smaller forums than on the AO3 if they were still fairly active.

From:

independence1776

It's basically that because AO3 exists, nothing else needs to. It's not an attitude I understand either, but my fandom home is a Tolkien-only archive. So I'm not exactly unbiased when it comes to small sites that actually have a community.

From:

sabcatt

I think it's slightly more complex than a simple "we have ao3, so we don't need anything else" attitude. I really think there's a combination of factors at work that are making AO3 the "home base" of fic fandom rn.

First of all, running your own archive is hard. (I can't say how hard, I've never done it, but I can only presume it takes significantly more time and effort than using one someone else has already set up.) In the Olden Times, because there were no alternatives if you wanted to have a place to post fic (or discuss your fandom, or whatever), people had to put in the effort to (learn how to run, and then) run their own fansites, forums and archives. However, these days, because there are so many (well, I say so many, I really mean like... four, hah) social media sites that are, if not welcoming to fandom, at least not exactly hostile, there's no longer such a necessity/incentive for people to run their own sites to engage in fannish activity.

Also, the development of major websites towards ease of use (social media's endless search for New Users makes them very "pick-up-and-play", unlike the Wild West days of the Old Net where "engagement" wasn't the sole goal) means that many people who are used to the "new" net have never had to learn HTML and CSS, let along stuff like java, javascript and SQL. (I personally only know HTML and some CSS, I'd be totally lost trying to create and code an archive.)

There's also been a massive influx of people into fandom who have simply... never experienced dedicated archives and forums. The initial post reflects on the fact that many people in fandom at current aren't really aware of "fandom history":

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.

But fandom history, such as it is, doesn't just include the details of website purges and the Citrus Scale, but also the very fact that there were (and, in some cases, still are) thriving communities (on a significantly smaller scale than the current social media free-for-all) on smaller websites (such as dedicated fandom forums and archives) or within larger websites that allowed for smaller communities to develop (such as LiveJournal and its successors, and then going back even further, GeoCities). People simply aren't aware that these communities existed, so it's not all that surprising that they're not conceiving of them being possible alternatives to our current social media-centric setup (which, as Pi reflected on in "modern social media sucks for fandom", has a loooooot of pitfalls and downsides).

Sorry for the essay, haha, (and especially sorry if it comes across as a lecture—I am very much with you on the appreciation of small sites, just adding my analysis of why they've fallen out of fashion,) but I think that simplifying the lack of smaller sites and communities down to "people are content with AO3" misses a lot of historical context of the development of both AO3 and fandom in general, especially over the last 10 years. People are (demonstrably, if you pay attention to all the yelling) not content with the way things currently are—it's just that many of them don't currently have models of alternatives so they're attempting to reinvent the wheel, without (if you'll excuse me belaboring this metaphor) even knowing what a chisel is.

From:

independence1776

So… I'm a Fandom Old. My first fic on ff.net is months away from being old enough to vote in American elections. I know all of what you said; I've discussed it in other places.

I'm an active member of Tolkien fandom and I was talking specifically about the attitude in Tumblr Silmarillion fandom that the Silmarillion Writers' Guild (which has been around since 2005 and its owner and mods just switched archive software to Drupal to make sure it stays viable) is not valuable because it's not AO3. I might be misremembering this, but that is more or less what someone told the owner of SWG, that since AO3 exists everyone should be using it instead of smaller archives. This was not a case of someone needing or wanting to build something and not knowing how, but someone refusing to use something that already exists simply because it wasn't AO3. And they weren't the only person I saw with that attitude.

From:

kentucka

I wouldn't know all the reasons people have for not "crossposting" fic anymore (another term I haven't heard in a while), but I know mine would be
- having a single place where I'd need to update a WIP or a re-edit
- collecting views/kudos/comments in a single place

Back in LJ days - and I still see this on tumblr - we'd post in a comm and just link to the one master post on the personal/writer journal. Crossposting spreads the word and actually increases chance of views; it's sad if people just assume the community of a forum completely overlaps with the users going through the AO3 tag.

From:

mozaikmage

I think single-fandom forums have been replaced by fandom-specific Discord servers in terms of their function in the fandom ecosystem, actually! They serve as spaces where internet users with nothing in common but their fandom get together to discuss their interest in even more specific fandoms.
Although Discord servers have their own differences and downfalls compared to forums: Private instead of publicly perusable by lurkers, the whole over/under 18 nsfw channel Stuff, linkrot when the Tumblr and Twitter posts people share in them get deleted or their URLs changed, 2000 character limit for messages, etc etc, there is no expectation for a Discord server to be pan-fandom. I've even seen servers dedicated to single rare ships in the sports anime fandoms I'm in.

From:

thewickling

I enjoy Discord servers but for some reason I can't put my finger on getting involved in a Discord server feels like a lot more effort than getting involved in a forum. Maybe a part of it is that there's a little less anonymity unless you're willing to make different Discord accounts.

Discord I also think is bad as a platform for sharing fic. You could post fic directly to Discord but that's ephermal so a lot of people end up sharing links to gdocs or screencaps and that's not really accessible.

I do think Discord ends up as a good place to find community if you're willing to put yourself out there and really get involved.

From:

catgang

Discord servers as I have experienced them are just big groupchats. I'm not the most familiar with the forum style of internetting, being a bit young to have really gotten any before social media took over, but everything feels much more fast paced on Discord. Even with notifs off there's this kind of demand for your attention - like everyone is talking at you that's hard to shake. For me that's why they feel like so much effort compared to (for example) this comment thread where I can peruse at my leisure.

From:

thewickling

Yes that's it! Because Discord has more of a chat format even if you can divide up channels - it always feels like I am entering in the middle of a conversation.

Discord is very chronologically sensitive. I don't feel weird replying to a dreamwidth post a week later but if there was a topic on Discord I wanted to talk about - I would feel like the conversation was over already

From:

xmarksthespotwhereistand

That things have to be for everyone really hurts small archives or forums from springing up.
Reading this has been so revelatory to me, i've been thinking about it for days. I find myself having fallen into the same trap, wanting to preserve fannish culture and yearning for fannish communities and forgetting the specifics of tgese cultures and communities. I can't add anything, just thank you.