(no subject)

[lirazel]

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.

Comments

[snickfic]

I have a couple of thoughts here, which are also largely instinctual, but are maybe kind of a reframing.

First, the thing about fandom now is that it's SO MUCH BIGGER than it was even when I met you 13(?) years ago, and that huge influx of growth means is that there are a lot of people now "in fandom" in some sense who were never going to do fandom the way we were used to doing it. If that was their only option, they wouldn't be here. And maybe you'd rather they weren't; maybe the rest of fandom would be better off without them. But I think the commodification comes partly from fandom being mainstream now. I would guess that the absolute number of people interesting in two-way communication and making things is probably the same or has grown, but they make up a smaller proportion of fandom than they used to.

Second, I don't really consider Ko-fi commodification in the same way I would, say, a commission (although I'm pretty sure commissions have been around forever, people were just quieter about them). Yes, it's money, but you're not exchanging the money FOR anything. This might not fit the technical definition of a gift economy, but it is still a gift, an expression of appreciation, not a payment in exchange for goods or services.

Third, I could write you essays on what gets feedback on AO3. 😂 But I don't think getting less feedback in big fandoms is necessarily a sign of like, larger trends of fannish degeneracy or whatever. It's just plain harder to find stuff you like in big fandoms, and people are more dependent on recs, bookmarks, and being able to sort by kudos, all of which privileges the early breakout hits. Whereas one of my best-performing fics of the past three years is a 1500-word rarepair femslash fic for Crazy Rich Asians, of all things, that I wrote for a flash exchange. (NOT Yuletide, please note; no built-in comment-culture audience here.) That ship has like 40 fics in it! The fandom is still Yuletide-eligible! Meanwhile, SPN fandom always sucked at feedback for me. Moving from Buffy to SPN was an unpleasant shock, and that was still on LJ! Then AO3 was even worse. Yes, I was writing rarepairs, but I wrote rarepairs in Buffy, too, and still got lots of readers.

Those are just some counterpoints that come to mind. That said, I do think fandom has gotten worse, partly due to antis but largely due to stuff that's much much bigger than fandom (granted, I suspect what's driving antis might also be a lot bigger than fandom). The big one is platforms, obviously. The internet as a whole has moved from longform text to microblogging to videos with no written text at all. And then there's like... instagram?? Even platforms that still exist have gotten actively worse for fandom, like tumblr, which according to my arty friends was the best art platform fandom has EVER had for a while there.

Between those two factors of antis and platforms, I'm hearing that some of fandom is going underground. I know someone primarily into art who says basically all the art and fic in her fandoms is being shared on private discords to avoid antis. She kind of forgets AO3 exists for months at a time. On one hand that makes me so, so sad, but on the other hand it kind of just feels like another turn of the wheel, you know? Fandom has a long history of hiding itself away in zines and private Yahoo mailing lists. And it's probably a pretty healthy shift, too. People are doing fandom in a way that works for them and feels safe, and if public fandom isn't it, then they will do it privately. It was a nice reminder that the fandom we're seeing isn't all there is, and that as a wise man once almost said, fandom will find a way. :')

In conclusion: I hear you, for sure. I have a lot of mixed feelings. But IDK, I don't think it's as bad as you fear, and I don't think the trend is inevitably downward.

[lirazel]

there are a lot of people now "in fandom" in some sense who were never going to do fandom the way we were used to doing it. If that was their only option, they wouldn't be here.... I would guess that the absolute number of people interesting in two-way communication and making things is probably the same or has grown, but they make up a smaller proportion of fandom than they used to.


This is a very good point! And a good thing for me to remember!

And it's not that I want all these other people to go away--I'm glad they're having fun doing their thing--I just wish I could find more people who like the old-fashioned way of doing things, and I feel like it's really difficult to find them!

You remember how there used to be two kinds of fandom? One was (grossly generalizing) mostly dudes, and they were all about collecting facts and going to cons and...I don't know what else they did. But they were very separate from the mostly female and queer side of fandom that was much more into transformative works of all kinds whether that was fic or meta or vidding or whatever. And while there was some overlap--particularly, for me, in my early Star Wars days--they kind of functioned as separate ecosystems? I would like a situation more like that, where the lines between different ways of doing fandom were more clear. Not as a gatekeeping thing, because I don't really want to gatekeep. Just as a way of...finding my people. If that makes sense.

But I think the commodification comes partly from fandom being mainstream now.
Absolutely.

Yes, it's money, but you're not exchanging the money FOR anything. This might not fit the technical definition of a gift economy, but it is still a gift, an expression of appreciation, not a payment in exchange for goods or services.

I think you're right that there is a difference. I think I have just never fully adjusted to the idea of giving strangers on the internet money. It just feels weird to me!

Thank you for sharing your experiences re: feedback with me! Mine were quite different--going from Buffy to kpop was not much of a shock for me, because even though the circle of writers/readers was smaller in kpop, it was still mostly LJ people who were really heavy commenters. Since I left that fandom behind, I literally had not been in a fandom until I got into The Untamed, which is a completely different beast. But you're right that that could be more about size than about the nature of fandom itself.

And YES re: platforms! I still hold out hope that some kind of platform will slowly gain steam that is more text-based and more fitting for in-depth conversations. But if it does, it will be going against the tide of the entire internet (not just fandom), that's for sure.

I just wish it weren't happening on Discord! I do not like the platform! If we all went back to secret locked-down message boards, I would be 100% fine with that! I don't mind the secrecy of it all (in fact, one of my major beefs with contemporary fandom is how Out There it is). I just specifically can't deal with Discord. But I guess if I wait another ten years, another platform will come along...

as a wise man once almost said, fandom will find a way. :')

Lol! True!

Thank you for sharing! You've given me a lot to think about!

[snickfic]

I'm glad that very long comment was helpful, haha.

But I guess if I wait another ten years, another platform will come along...

Honestly I doubt it'll take that long. Another five years at MOST, based on the speed of social media innovation and fannish platform adoption. (Plus I expect discord to start cracking down on explicit content, especially images, any day now. Fandom doesn't often flee its home to chase the shiny new thing. Usually it's pushed.)

[lirazel]

Fandom doesn't often flee its home to chase the shiny new thing. Usually it's pushed.

Very true.

I'm not seeing a possible platform in the wings for this next round of fandom moves, though. I feel like the next platform will be just as bad as Discord (if not worse), though I still hold out hope that the one after that will be one I like!

[yourlibrarian]

Also here via vriddy, and wanted to add that many things I thought of seeing after reading the post are things you've mentioned here, such as changes in the number of people involved, the mainstreaming (and also the style and focus of platforms people first engaged with) and the influence of other things happening online which bleed into fandom spaces.

If anything, the move to privacy controls seems a return to me of what LJ had long offered and which DW has improved upon. It's just that a lot of fandom sees this as "new" and haven't learned anything from history.

I'd agree about any sort of tip jar function, which does not seem that different to me from people sponsoring other people's paid accounts, offering them gifts and so on which went on quite a bit in the LJ days. A forced exchange is a different thing.

However my experience with Buffy and SPN are reversed. There was certainly a fair amount of response in both, but I still remember the shock I felt at seeing pages of comments to a number of fics being posted when I first joined the fandom in 2006. Part of it was likely the decline in activity in the Buffyverse compared to the surging activity in SPN. But I found the same was true for my own meta posts as with fics I read.

All of which is to say that there can be such a lot of different experiences even at the same times in the same fandoms.

[lirazel]

the move to privacy controls seems a return to me of what LJ had long offered and which DW has improved upon.

It's a very heartening development!

Part of it was likely the decline in activity in the Buffyverse compared to the surging activity in SPN.

Yeah, that makes sense as an explanation.

All of which is to say that there can be such a lot of different experiences even at the same times in the same fandoms.

True!