exchange thoughts

[lirazel]

I've been seeing a lot of discussion on my flist reading page about fannish exchanges and people having really terrible experiences with them and it makes me so sad! Apparently there are a bunch of people out there with really terrible behavior who are ruining exchanges for other people, enough so that fans avoid specific exchanges or even exchanges in general even though they enjoy them in theory.


I myself have never had those kinds of negative experiences with exchanges. I have often received fic that was kind of meh, but it doesn't bother me much--I am extraordinarily picky about fic anyway, so it's no surprise that sometimes people don't write stuff that knocks my socks off!--but I have always tried to be gracious when I comment: to thank them for writing for me, to find a few things in the fic that I genuinely do love. I think I have done a competent job with this. I always want to make my writer feel appreciated because I genuinely love the gift economy so much! I love that someone else loves this fandom I love enough to write for it! There's so much to celebrate even if the fic didn't work for me!

I remember when I first started participating in exchanges lo these many years ago (2009ish? Maybe?), I was disappointed in the fics I received and I was (inwardly!) like, "Exchanges are a disappointment!"

But somehow I managed to shift my focus from receiving to writing and started to view exchanges primarily as mechanisms that push me to write things I would not otherwise write. Once I started looking at it that way, all my disappointment evaporated, and I still just flat-out enjoy exchanges.


But after hearing some of y'all's experiences, I don't blame you for your negative feelings about exchanges! Y'all have dealt with some crap!


I am interested in knowing whether any of you think there are some administrative things that could cut down on this kind of bad behavior. Are there things that those running the exchange could do differently that would make a difference?

Or is this, to your mind, an entirely attitude-based problem, just a case of people being jerks? I am genuinely interested in your thoughts about this!

Alternately, you can complain here about bad exchange behavior or tell me about how much you love exchanges or a specific great experience you've had with one!


I myself love them--I just really, really love how I always end up writing something I never would have written under my own steam. I've written some of my very favorite pieces for exchanges! Even some that didn't get much attention comment-wise just make me so happy! (For instance, my Seraphina fic has never had a wide readership, but I love that fic! I'm so glad I wrote it!)

Comments

[likeadeuce]

What is Yuletide chat?

[lirazel]

I honestly don't know!

[likeadeuce]

I think maybe it was an IRC chat in the old days, and might have migrated to discord? But not sure

[rekishi]

Back in the day it used to be an IRC chatroom that was active year round where people also hung out year round. It happened what generally always happens in these kinds of communities when there isn't a steady influx of people popping in and out (this can go one of two ways, the YT chat did not end up the good way).

But even aside from the year-round population, the chat is... Idk, as I said, I think it's some kind of mass hysteria. If you don't treat you're bad, if you only write 1k you're not living up to it while at the same time doing a whole toxic positivity that of course it's enough and it just....it just soured me on the whole thing.

I think it's a discord these days, but I'm not sure about the population and who all is there. I don't have time at the end of the year either way.

[likeadeuce]

Oh yes, I remember people talking about the culture of pressure to participate to the max!

[rekishi]

Yes, that is a good description of it, thank you!

Of course, no one would actually think it is like that even when you are in, but hindsight is 20/20 there.

I also remember that there was a lot of discussion of privilege at the time (this was pre-2010, so these were the days of the social justice warriors and the beginnings of the purity movement) and that it was very hard for them that I didn't get it - because all of them were American/Anglo-Saxon background and while I'm white, I'm continental European and our privileges do effectively look a bit different (it does not confer me any advantage to be Christian for example, let alone Protestant (ETA: which I'm not, I'm a lapsed Catholic), and it only confers an advantage to be white if you're the right kind of white, so if anyone was citing WASP culture to me I was like...no. which didn't parse for them - because of their American privilege I guess? idk). So all in all, it was definitely the wrong environment for me personally, but I really also think that the seasonal YT chat at the time was not the greatest place to be, in hindsights.

Whether this has changed I don't know, and of course this is only my decade old reflection on it with a lot more life experience now.

[likeadeuce]

Wow, that sure sounds like a wild thing to experience.

(For what it's worth I've always thought the 'Anglo Saxon Protestant' part of WASP went together -- I don't think Protestantism itself is necessarily seen as privilege, as there are plenty of poor and working class Protestants, esp in the South? WASP is more of a specific type of affluent white person who's not Jewish or Catholic or otherwise 'ethnic.' I can't imagine how this would have come up in Yuletide chat though!)

[lirazel]

Agree with your parenthetical. The vast, vast majority of black people in the US are protestant. They aren't getting any kind of privilege from it. And, frankly, neither are the poor white people who make up the more charismatic/Pentecostal side of Christianity--at least not before the Trump administration.

[rekishi]

2023 me agrees with you. pre-2010 (idk, 2008?) me had no clue and was confronted with the abbreviation for the first time and faced people who had different ideas.

[lirazel]

Oh, yes, it makes total sense that you would interpret it differently if you didn't know the context--and since you aren't USAmerican, there is absolutely no reason you should have known the context!

[rekishi]

It was definitely very weird.

Re: Anglo Saxon Protestant, I - in hindsight - agree with you. But, in my defense, I was in my early 20s and I had never heard about WASP before, so I was mostly like "wtf is going on here", because while a lot of US culture had made its way across, it was definitely not my culture (and still isn't, I just know more now). So I was trying to understand something everyone else had an intrinsic understanding of and who definitely was not looking at this as belonging together.

Re: How it comes up... Well, pretty much but people griping about something going on or there being a genuine discussion about privilege. As these things do come up elsewhere, this was not during yuletide season but another time during the year. In hindsight, my mistake was questioning it in the first place, but at the time, privilege - to me, I'm ESL and from a different cultural background - was not connotated with white privilege or whatever but more in the "having more money than" meaning of the word (and the concept was still relatively new on fandom spaces). So I was genuinely trying to understand. That was definitely a mistake.

[lirazel]

Boy am I glad I never encountered those communities. That sounds like the opposite of fun. What a joy-suck!

[rekishi]

Tons of peer pressure. Which I think simply happens in closed off communities. Which is why DW is the preferable option. Heck, even tumblr and twitter are better there, because while those of course also have echo chambers, they can't be closed off unlike, say a secret IRC chat or a discord server.

[lirazel]

The only closed-off communities I've participated in fandom-wise were password-required message boards and a couple of locked-down LJ communities. So I really don't have any experience with them, but I believe you that they tend towards that sort of atmosphere.

[rekishi]

I think it also happens generally, just think about cults.