lirazel | (no subject)

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Warning: these thoughts are very preliminary and more coming from a place of instinct than well-formed thought. I am happy for anyone to push back against anything I say provided you do it respectfully.

Hannah and I were talking yesterday (in a very un-nuanced way) about how weird it is that within fandom circles, there are fewer and fewer people willing to engage in commenting/meta-writing/actual fannish conversation (or hell, even reblogging of art on Tumblr), but more and more people who think nothing of paying for online stuff? I am shocked that this ko-fi thing has taken off--I guess I'm old school enough that the thought of monetizing fandom is horrifying to me.

I mean, I guess there's an entire cohort of people who never used the internet before Facebook introduced the like button and so don't know the joy of full-on fannish engagement. And those same people are accepting the commodification of...everything.

It's just really, really weird to see. I know there was a gap in culture between the pre-internet 'zine-and-conventions fans and then the very first fans who were using the internet before the world wide web and then again my generation who started using it in the late 90s and came up on message boards and mailing lists and such. But the gap between those earlier generation of fans (and by generation, I'm very much talking about "when you got involved in fandom," not what age you are) and the current one seems like a chasm. I just don't recognize how they do fandom, and I am actually pretty sad that none of them seem to want to do it the way we do it (only, you know, with greater diversity, etc. I'm not pretending like the internet in 2001 was perfect. It was much whiter and richer, and lots of things about accessibility have changed for the better since then).

I've just always really loved that fandom is a gift economy and that the gifts go both ways. That I write fic because I want to share it with y'all, and y'all respond and engage with it, and we all have a great time together. A "content"-based view of fandom where you just ~consume~ is just so repugnant to me and I don't want anything to do with it, and I know we're not going back to a livejournal kind of fannish experience, but I'm just...really not looking forward to further changes in fandom. I don't see good developments coming down the road, and I can't figure out if this is me being all Old Man Yells at Clouds or if I'm right and things just aren't as fun anymore.

And yes, this is partially about me getting fewer comments when I write fic for a huge fandom than when I write for a Yuletide-sized fandom, but also it's about a general feeling that people just don't view fandom (or even the whole internet) as a place of two-way interaction anymore.

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I don't think you're off base here, and I think it's probably tied to influencer culture and seeing that bleed into fandom spaces (at last - it took a long time, but you can't keep the Visigoths out forever). I'm less hoping that there will be pushback against this trend in fandom - for reasons I'll state in a moment - than that there will be a schism. I'm not hoping for the former because all the evidence I've seen over the last decade is that people like influencer culture and the commodification of hobbies. A lot of people say they don't, but: talk is cheap. Why do influencers stay influential? Because people opt-in to that space, keep watching their work, and sharing their work (even if to criticize it - which is also apparently a way of becoming an influencer). I think it's probably futile to hope that it will just go away as long as the internet is around and relatively wild. Even if it became more restrictive, I don't see the culture around this going away - there are plenty of influencers who dominate in authoritarian countries that try to squeeze the 'net, they're just curated by the ruling class.

But I do hope there is a schism - that if this takes over Tumblr or Pillowfort (it has a snowball's chance in hell of taking over places like DW), places for the fans like us emerge or persist in their space.

all the evidence I've seen over the last decade is that people like influencer culture and the commodification of hobbies.

+ 1. This this this. (Though it baffles me, especially in its Tumblr permutation: the anonymous ask.)

Oh, dude, the default to anon! Even when people are asking completely innocuous things! I can understand if it's a little invasive of a question (and of course it makes sense for trolls/haters), but otherwise, I don't get it!

I've been meaning to ask this more generally, but since we're on the topic of engagement: Do you get a lot of anonymous bookmarks? Sometimes I have two or three times as many anon bookmarks as regular ones.

I just looked at my stats, and I didn't know it, but yes! At least half of them are set to private. It had never occurred to me to check before!

Bookmarks? In Dreamwidth?! Say it ain't so!

No, on AO3. At least that's what I assume we're talking about.

Do you mean Ao3 bookmarks? I don't know all the reasons people set bookmarks to private but I use it when I want to mark a story and haven't read it yet. I didn't realize people could SEE that there are private bookmarks, that's not what i thought private meant!

Yeah, on AO3. You can't see who has it bookmarked privately, just that they do.

For example: if you just look at the bookmarks on a story, it might say 200, and then when you click on the number, everyone who has it bookmarked is listed. But if you go into your stats and look at bookmarks, you might see that there are actually 400 bookmarks. You can't look at who, you just know that 200 people have it bookmarked it privately. Does that make sense?

Interesting discussion on bookmarks vs. marked for later! I'm not sure where to jump in actually, since my comment is more general than responding to anyone specifically. In regards to people bookmarking my fic, it never occurred to me to pay attention to *how* they are doing it, and never considered any negative reasons for them to do it privately. I'm just happy to see someone has bookmarked it!

However, since we are considering reasons, and since there are so many antis who love to harass other fans, I can see why someone might do a private bookmark if they didn't want to advertise they were reading a particular kink, or pairing that perhaps the fandom has decided are 'wrong.'

Also... correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the 'mark for later' just lump all the stories together? If one bookmarks something, there is the ability to organize by fandom or any other tags and then later search for specific criteria. Someone who has a lot of fic marked for later (maybe several fandoms) may find it more convenient to be able to sort and filter them.

Just my 2 cents.

Yeah, I also never considered any negative stuff! Even if they bookmarked privately, I've done the same a few times, so I definitely wouldn't judge. I think you're onto something re: the antis and harassment.

Also... correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the 'mark for later' just lump all the stories together? If one bookmarks something, there is the ability to organize by fandom or any other tags and then later search for specific criteria. Someone who has a lot of fic marked for later (maybe several fandoms) may find it more convenient to be able to sort and filter them.

A very good point!

Out of curiosity: Why do you bookmark rather than "mark for later"? Is there an advantage to bookmarking?

I don't know how 'mark for later' works but I don't really see an advantage to using 2 different functions.

Oh, I'm the total opposite. I do not like having the stories I have loved and want to reread again and again in the same place as stories I haven't read yet. They belong to two such different categories that I need two different functions for them. (Also I interpret bookmarks as recommendations, so I don't want to recommend something I haven't read yet.)

Okay?

ETA: I started using private bookmarks when people were saying that they use bookmarks as recommendations. I kind of just want to be able to mark things without having it be some huge thing that people make judgments about and as I said, if it's a private bookmark nobody's going to 'take it as a recommendation''

Edited 2022-10-04 22:05 (UTC)

It's so interesting how when we come to it determines how we use it. Like, you said the MFL feature wasn't working well when you first needed to mark for later, so you used bookmarks that way, which makes sense. Using a private/public distinction for bookmarks makes a lot of sense as a work-around too. Whereas I have never used the recommendation feature because by the time it was introduced (not so very long ago?), I had been using the bookmark feature for that since, like, 2009.

I mean what's long ago in fandom years I've been using it for ages but that does help me explain why people don't use it or why people seem to me to be willfully misinterpreting boom.arks

Huh. I don't see the willful misunderstanding? The old fic archives I was on back in the early 2000s had interchangeable bookmark/favorites features, and if they were public, I always assumed they were for marking your favorites, and if they were private, they were just for you. Other people may have used them differently, but the way I always used, say, ff.net (not the only fic site I used, but obviously the most cross-fandom one) was to go through the fandom till I found a fic I liked, then read that author's favorites, then read the favorites of those authors, etc. etc. That was literally how I found any good fic at all in a given fandom.

I took that experience to AO3 and I do the same thing, and it has served me well. That's just...how I find things that are worth my time on big sites. Find my favorites' favorites.

If there's a mark for later function and bookmark function (as there was when I started using the site so long ago), it seemed to me that one was for my personal use and one was for public use.

However, the recommendation function does complicate all of that, because now there are three ways to mark a fic. If you use the mark for later as it's intended to be used, and then you use the rec feature as it's intended to be used, then...what is just a regular bookmark with no rec for? It certainly becomes confusing!

Or maybe it's all purposefully designed to let people have multiple options for each different kind of "marking."

[eta] I'm getting the feeling that you're mad at me, and I'm not sure why? Did I imply that you shouldn't use the site the way you want to use it? If so, I apologize--that was not my intention and I should have written more carefully. I feel no judgment about it. It just honestly hadn't occurred to me until the past few weeks (when I saw a similar discussion on Tumblr) that people use it differently than I do. I was just trying to explain my reasoning.

Edited 2022-10-04 22:49 (UTC)

I'm not mad at anybody, it's just having people say 'oh that person bookmarked a fic but didn't kudo it, how rude' or 'people are private bookmarking things they must be up to something sneaky' makes me just not want to interact with things at all.

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"I don't know how 'mark for later' works"

I guess the main advantage of "mark for later" over bookmarking to read later is that you can easily get a fic off your "mark for later" list by clicking "mark as read." And the fic will stay on your history page, even if you have taken it off your "mark for later" list. So it's an easy want to find specifically the stories you've marked to read later.

"but I don't really see an advantage to using 2 different functions."

Oh, I see! Thanks for explaining. I hadn't really thought about the advantages vs disadvantages of bookmarking to read later - I appreciate your mentioning this.

I think basically whenever I first was on Ao3, Mark for Later didn't work very well, so I just started using anon bookmarks. And I either flip them to public when I'm done or I delete them, depending on whether it's something I want to save.

Oo, I can see how that would work well. Thanks for the insight!

I'm less hoping that there will be pushback against this trend in fandom - for reasons I'll state in a moment - than that there will be a schism.

I think you're right that this is more likely and probably more desirable. Those of us who feel some sort of through line with the heritage of western media fandom (I have always thought of those 60s housewife zine-writers as my fannish ancestors) can do different things, and the people who have only experienced the post-social media internet landscape can do their thing.

people like influencer culture and the commodification of hobbies. A lot of people say they don't, but: talk is cheap. Why do influencers stay influential? Because people opt-in to that space, keep watching their work, and sharing their work (even if to criticize it - which is also apparently a way of becoming an influencer).

You are correct. There are a bunch of people who unironically love the influencers; there are a bunch of people who hide their love behind "irony"; and then there are a bunch of people who really do hate-follow. I don't understand any of those things, really--the parasocial relationships I have tend to be with, like, podcasters (Sarah Marshall, Michael Hobbes, Audrey Gordon) or YouTubers (Lindsey Ellis, ContraPoints) whose whole schtick is being deeply thoughtful about cultural trends. Those are the people I'm drawn to, and I find more standard kinds of influencers actively off-putting. But I am in the minority, I think!

Anyway, that was far afield of the point, which is that I think your observations are all correct.

We definitely get to keep AO3 though - and if we don't, we'll build something new just like it.

Those are the people I'm drawn to, and I find more standard kinds of influencers actively off-putting.

You and me both!

True! AO3 is a miracle! And by miracle, I mean, "Something a whole lot people worked very, very hard to create."

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