Something that's been confusing me about 'recent' changes in fandom:

[hmpf]

fandom seems to have moved to livejournal almost completely, even for those things that aren't necessarily best served by LJ. In fact, very little except the pure socialising part of fandom - which is, of course, an important part, no contest about that! - is *really* best served by LJ. Forums are better suited for discussion, since they allow discussions to stay in the public eye, and thus stay *active* longer, whereas on LJ a discussion will drop off people's friends page pretty quickly, turning discussions into quick, transitory, blink-and-you'll-miss-them things. (Sure, those people who noticed and joined the discussion when it popped up on their friends page often keep at it for days - but on a forum, a new contributor might discover it months after it started, and bring it back to the top by posting to it, and *everyone who contributed until then would notice*, and the discussion would be revitalised. A good LJ discussion goes on for days; a good forum discussion can go on for months.) And archives are much more suited for presenting fan-made content, esp. fanfic, because they don't require the potential reader to first learn about the individual LJs of three or four dozen writers and then search those LJs for fic; also, archives usually allow searching for different categories of fic, *and* they keep stuff accessible. Etc.

But, my general reservations about fandom's near-complete move to LJ (and f-locked LJs, for that matter) aside, my issue here is mainly with fanfic. I find the posting of fic to LJ and *only* to LJ, as seems increasinbly the practice in fandom, a bit antisocial, to be honest. (After turning into one of the official naysayers of Life On Mars fandom, I am now working on discrediting myself in fandom at large... ;-)) And I don't *understand* the attitude behind it, either. I mean, *why* would people not want their fic to find the widest possible readership? And how can they not care if it will still be easily accessible to new readers in a year or two?

The cynical part of me can't help wondering if there's a tendency to move away from fandom as a community and treat it as merely a tool for instant, personal gratification. I.e. as soon as you've posted a fic to your LJ and received an amount of feedback for that fic, you move on to the next fic for which you will get feedback in turn, and old fics become uninteresting simply because they don't generate large amounts of feedback anymore - so why bother keeping them easily accessible? That readers who come into the fandom later might still want read those older fics just doesn't matter, because the gratification to the writer is negligible, and the reader's gratification simply doesn't figure into the equation.

As I said, it's the cynical part of me that came up with that explanation.

Well, no matter what the reasons, it seems to me that the decentralised, dispersed nature of fandom on LJ is a good way to make sure that, instead of amassing a wonderful, huge collective treasure of fanworks for 'later generations' of fen to discover and enjoy, most of our work will simply disappear into obscurity and relative 'un-findability' fairly soon after it's posted.

Am I the only one who finds that perspective a bit sad?

(Also, I dislike the tendency for fandom to happen in a - however slightly extended - big 'NOW' for the personal reason of often being stressed out of my mind. The fact that fandom - discussions, fics, everything - seems to happen so quickly now, and requires you to constantly stay on top of things because you'll never be able to *find* the good stuff again if you don't notice it immediately when it's posted is a considerable additional stress factor. Which is sad, because I'd much rather 'do' fandom at my leisure, and I'm a naturally slow person. So, instead of 'doing' fandom at my own pace, I tend to go into hyperactive fannish phases when I manage to keep up with things for a few months, and then drop out of everything completely for months in turn. Needless to say, that way I hardly know what's happening anymore, and miss most of the good fic, debate etc.)

I've been out of the meta game for ages, so I don't know if this has been discussed on metafandom, recently or at all. If anyone remembers related discussions and can point me there, that would be much appreciated. I'm mostly interested in the question of why people aren't interested in keeping stuff accessible, because that is something I really, truly do not 'get'. So, if anyone can explain that mindset to me... I'm really curious about it.

Comments

[bistokids.livejournal.com]

I can only speak for myself, obviously, and my experience is limited pretty much to two fandoms. As far as discussion goes, forums are generally ideal, but as we've found in relation to the end of LoM, when feelings run high on a particular issue, it can be the wisest course of action to take the discussion over to LJ rather than fanning the flames and risking splitting a forum. I know this has come up within the Harry Potter fandom too, so I imagine there are other examples. In this respect, LJ and forums can complement each other nicely.

As for fanfic, I think you have a very valid point. I've only written in the Professionals fandom (which is long established and has fantastic archives) and LoM (which is very new and doesn't' but I hope that ultimately this will be addressed). I've found it easy enough to access previous fics through tags, though.

I think LJ is ideally suited to new writers, or writers who are experimenting with new fandoms, because of the instant feedback. This is great for boosting confidence, as well as learning from others (for instance, through accessing mems pages of writers I admire). As yet, I haven't archived anything in Pros because I don't feel ready to enter that arena. When I've honed my skills to the extent that I feel confident in myself as a writer on a larger stage, I shall start archiving for posterity!

Withdrawing to LJ

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

>it can be the wisest course of action to take the discussion over to LJ

Well, we could have withdrawn to a nice, small and private forum, as well. ;-)

(I'm actually a member of a group that did just that, i.e. withdrew to a small, private forum after a huge influx of newbies with an attendant extreme change in fannish 'style' in an older fandom, about five years ago.)

As for archiving - I think you're plenty good enough to archive your stuff *now*! ;-) But then, we don't have an archive yet in LOM fandom... but we're working on that, honest. ;-) And when we're done, we'll be pestering you until you submit your stuff. Mwahahahahaaa!

[pat-t.livejournal.com]

oh my. well, I only speak from the HL fandom, but this is a subject I have brought up multiple times. On yahoo group lists and in LJ. *But* on the other side.

Usually it starts with someone grumbing that people are posting on LJ and not on lists. Okaaaay. So lets take a look. How many times are the lurkers posting? Hmmmm. None! The groups are dying because people are sitting on their butts waiting for someone to entertain them. The lists only work if they are interactive .

If you look at some of the lists - they have hundreds of people as members. But only a handful - and I do mean a handful post. You don't know how many times I have tried to start a discussion on a list only to be met by dead - earth shattering *SILENCE*.

Or how many times a fic has been posted and met with *NOTHING*. Except when the author doesn't post there next time and you get an abundance of bitching and moaning. Where were those people at when questions were being asked, discussions were being suggested, fic was being offered?

Why weren't they becoming involved then? Because that takes effort. And when people don't put effort into their fandom, their fandom dies. If they don't put effort into their list - the list dies. And that's what has happened.

I didn't post pics to my own fic yahoo list because I was becoming very hurt and frustrated when I spent *hours* capping and fixing colors and lighting and resizing and uploading only to be met with what seemed to be apathy by the members of the list. Almost 300 members and maybe 2 or 3 would come on and say they took the time to look at the pics I had spent an entire evening working on for their enjoyment. So I started posting to my LJ. And I got feedback. It isn't about *instant* gratification. It's about interaction.

Lists = talking to yourself and sending your stuff out into a big black void.

LJ = talking and interacting with friends.

And I'm still the owner and maintainer of a few lists. I urge people and cheer them on to come to the lists and become active members. But is simply isn't happening.

You only get out of the fandom what you're willing to put in.

Preaching to the choir ;-)

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

I still post my fic to lists (it's just not very noticeable, because I only finish a story every other year or so - less often, even.) Though, to be honest, even back in 1998/1999 I wasn't a particularly active list participant; I've always found the forum format more useful for sustained discussion. And my place for fannish discussion of choice is still forums - I racked up a post count of over 1000 in less than a year at The Railway Arms recently, and I'm also a mod at a German sf forum, where I have something like 1500 posts. So, not exactly inactive in those older modes of fannish interaction.

And I do get why people find LJ gratifying. What I don't get is why that would drive people not to archive their fic anymore, in so many cases. That's what my post was really about. Why doesn't it matter to more people that their fic becomes inaccessible to new readers if they don't put it somewhere where new readers may *find* it? I mean, it's not like it takes *that* much effort to post something to an archive (or even to your own website) after you've posted it to LJ... and it benefits both the fandom, by increasing its store of cultural artefacts, *and* the author, because occasionally you *do* get a small trickle of feedback out of it, even if it's only one e-mail per year or so. ;-)

As I said, I just don't get it.

[amonitrate.livejournal.com]

THough I enjoy LJ fandom, having come rather late to the active participation in fandom (after ten years as lurker) I do agree with some of your points. Especially the notion of the archive. TO compromise, I've set up an index post to my own writings, and put that on my LJ userpage. I guess that is akin to having a personal webpage, which has also been part of fandom for awhile, so that isn't so different than the old days.

I personally hate the format of conversations on email listservs and have always found it confusing, both in "real time" and when playing catch-up, so LJ seemed far superior to that. That said, even having never actively experienced the forum format, I do have to say I agree with your point about conversations being more public and getting bumped to the top.

Reply (oh, I suck at subject lines *g*)

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

>THough I enjoy LJ fandom, having come rather late to the active participation in fandom (after ten years as lurker) I do agree with some of your points. Especially the notion of the archive. TO compromise, I've set up an index post to my own writings, and put that on my LJ userpage. I guess that is akin to having a personal webpage, which has also been part of fandom for awhile, so that isn't so different than the old days.

You're right, that is basically the same as a website. And if everybody did that, and all those individual LJ fic indices were properly collected in a central place, I could live with that, too.

>I personally hate the format of conversations on email listservs and have always found it confusing, both in "real time" and when playing catch-up, so LJ seemed far superior to that.

I agree. Not a particularly big fan of lists; never was. As I said above to pat_t, they share a lot of the defects of LJ - with none of the advantages of LJ.

>That said, even having never actively experienced the forum format, I do have to say I agree with your point about conversations being more public and getting bumped to the top.

IMO, there's still nothing that beats a good, well-moderated forum for proper, in-depth fannish discussion. I've been very annoyed at Life On Mars fandom in recent weeks, but I do *adore* that the threads that so annoy me on the forum in question in that fandom are still active after, what, six weeks? There are discussions there that have 40+ pages by now... and there are *still* new participants arriving, adding their views and voices.

[6beforelunch.livejournal.com]

(via metafandom) Just speaking for myself here...

The reason I tend to stick almost exclusively to LJ for everything (meta, fic, art, vids, etc.) is because LJ gives you the most control over your fannish environment. I.e. with LJ, I can controll what I see to a greater extent than I can with a forum or mailing list. On LJ, if there's a person whose posts are consistently rude or vulgar or annoying or just boring, I don't have to friend them. Contrast that to a mailing list or forum where, unless the poster actually crosses a line (a line determined most often by the mods who aren't me), I just have to skim their posts.

Obviously, you still face that same problem with communities, but in the way fandom is organized on LJ, you could theoretically have no communities friended and still manage to keep up with a great deal of the discussion and fic just by friending the journals of people you like.

Now, of course, greater control over what I see also means I'm probably missing out on some great stuff, but that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make. YMMV.

LJ also fosters a greater sense of personal connection between fans, IMO, because a lot of people post about their "real life" in addition to posting fannish things. I don't think you get such a blurring of fannish and non-fannish posts on mailing lists and forums. I'll be honest, I get more fun out of seeing someone I consider a friend (or at least someone I have friendly feelings toward) post a great story or art work than a stranger. Doesn't mean I enjoy reading their story more because I know their cat's name, it just means that in addition to getting the satisfaction of reading the story, I like seeing them get feedback. I know them (to varying extents, I'm not claiming to be friends with every person on my friends list, that'd be impossible *g*) so I'm happy to see them do something good. Sort of like when I see an RL friend or friendly acquaintance suceed in something. Just makes me happy.

I so agree with you that it's a little sad that things are so transient on LJ. One reason I still maintain my fic site even though it would be easier to just rely on fic tags is that I want there to be an easy to navigate place to find my stories. And I want someone who's never heard of LJ or fandom to be able to stumble on it. I do hope that archives never become obsolete (and I don't see them doing so, they're still too useful). OTOH, LJ is easy (no HTML skills required) so I can see why some people don't bother with setting up personal fic sites. (Archives run by others, especially auto-archives, are another matter, and I really wish more people used those.)

So, um, I mostly agree with you about it being sad that a lot of fic tends to be exclusive to LJ these days, but I can understand why LJ is so popular with fandom.

I understand the popularity of LJ, too -

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

hey, I've been here for five years. I wouldn't be here anymore if I didn't enjoy it. ;-) I just think there are areas of fandom that would be better served if people didn't centre their fannish lives *exclusively* on LJ, that's all. There's nothing that says we shouldn't keep our social interaction here!

I have to admit I don't really 'get' the big problem having to interact with rude or boring people in other formats, e.g. forums, seems to constitute for some people. Firstly, only a very small percentage of people on a good forum will be rude or boring to the point where you *really* can't bear to get near their posts; and, well, it's easy to skim a single stupid post in a thread or even just jump directly to the next, more interesting one. And you can avoid threads started by people you don't like - nobody forces you to read every single thread. Some forums also have ignore lists so you can screen out any participants you really can't stand.

And, secondly, even a person I don't like may occasionally make a really good point in a discussion. I guess I'm very 'topic focused' and less 'social interaction focused' in my fannish life - I really am willing to listen to anyone who makes a good point, no matter if I personally like them or not. I enjoy discussion (of certain topics) a lot and am willing to engage in that type of conversation with absolutely anyone who doesn't insult me or bore me consistently. *g* I'm also very focused on certain types of fic, less on certain authors, and always eager to find new sources for those types of fic - this, also, is not exactly easy to do on LJ.

[chicafrom3.livejournal.com]

(Here via metafandom

I can only speak for myself, obviously, but as someone who posts fic exclusively to LJ, I guess my word counts for something?

My reasoning is fairly straightforward. Posting to my fic LJ and then crossposting that link around to communities is simple, easy to do, and allows me to expect that a good chunk of people have access to it. Anyone who is intrigued by my newer fic and wants to look at my older stuff can browse through the tags, the memories, or just through the journal itself as I don't keep any personal entries there, just fic and icons.

I used to post my fic on forums as well. But as I'm no longer particularly active on any forums, yeah, I'd feel odd about suddenly popping up on one just to share a fic. I used to post my fic on FFN, but to be honest, dealing with their formatting restrictions is a much bigger headache than it's worth.

I don't see how keeping my fic on LJ makes it that much less accessible than posting it to a forum or archive. As long as the issue of broken links are avoided--and that's just as much an issue anywhere else as on LJ--then it's still findable; I regularly find fics on LJ that were posted months or years ago, read them, necroreview, and go on my way.

Accessibility...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

>I don't see how keeping my fic on LJ makes it that much less accessible than posting it to a forum or archive.

Well, it's not *much* less accessible to people who are active in LJ fandom, know the communities, have some people from the fandom friended etc. But a *lot* of readers simply aren't active in LJ fandom (and I mean *really* a lot; we just don't see them because, well: they're not on LJ. But they're out there, in their ten and hundred thousands), don't know the right communities for the fandoms they're interested in, etc.

Speaking just from my own experience: I'm active in quite a few fandoms, and those that I'm really active in I also have a fairly good overview of on LJ. So, no problem there, or at least not *much* of a problem. *However*, I also enjoy reading in about ten or so other fandoms occasionally - not enough to investigate their structure and organisation in detail, but enough to check out central archives on a semi-regular basis. Anything that goes beyond that occasional checking of archives is, franky, too much work for fandoms I have only a marginal interest in. But I'm always aware that with the way fandom is organised now, I'm probably missing out on most of the really interesting fic in those fandoms (and I have fairly specific reading kinks in all of them, too, so only an extremely small percentage of fics suit my interests there to begin with). You say why don't I check LJ communities for those fandoms instead of checking archives? Simple: a bi-annual visit to a central archive affords me the opportunity to use the search function and check specifically for fics that fit my criteria. True, a *really* well-organised community that makes good use of tags and memories will have a comparable level of searchability. But for the time being, most archives still beat most communities in terms of navigability and searchability. Also, identifying *the* central fic community/ies in a big fandom you're not familiar with and only want to check for a certain type of fic every now and then is considerably more work than entering 'BigFandomName fanfic archive' in Google.

I so agree with you about archiving and the pace of LJ.

[trascendenza]

Here from metafandom.

Well, being as I'm a person who's incredibly *obsessed* with archiving and making my work accessible, I probably can't be very helpful. *g* But I do solely archive on LJ (well, I had a brief stint on FF.net, but eventually I gave up on that account).

I think the thing with LJ isn't that people don't *want* their work to be accessible; it's just that it's more work. It's day-to-day maintenance. There's no automated way to have your posts organized, which doesn't work well for people who just aren't organizationally-minded.

But I'm in the process of devising an almost frighteningly comprehensive tag list for my fic, in addition to memorying all of it, AND I'll be bookmarking it all on del.icio.us and do extensive tagging there, as well. And I'm sure there are other authors out there that would like to make their stuff more accessible but just don't have the time/energy/etc. to put into setting up an infrastructure.

God, I just wish more people would do fic indices/tagging/memorying. Even just one of the three (though preferably not solely tagging if any category goes over 100 entries). There are so many communities and personal fic journals that would be about 1,000,000% more useful if they did this.

Although, I have to say another reason I don't post to archives is not because of feedback, at all. In fact, to my numbers-hungry mind, it's MORE satisfying for me to post to an archive that tracks stats and tells me how many views I get per story. But the reason I like and continue posting to LJ is because of the friends network; fanfiction, in many ways, is how I interact and dialogue with people about the characters. I like chatting about my fandoms; coming up with crack plot bunnies; or just the general silliness that can happen in comment threads. It makes posting fic a more social experience, which keeps me coming back to LJ and forgetting about archives.

I do really, really feel you on the frenetic pace of things on LJ. It's really not my typical modus operandi and frustrates me a lot, because I can never keep up. For instance--people apologizing because they comment on a fic a week after it's posted. Um. Hello, feedback is *always* appreciated! And a lot of people are surprised when I comment on their old fic, but I'm one of those people who *will* look back through memories and tags to check out other stuff an author's done if I like them.

I wish more communities on LJ would use the sidebar links feature to link to current discussions (the page summary thing would also be a lot nicer if it were placed at the top of the page like a navigation bar). Or that there was a *way* to keep these discussions more in people's eyes even after they aren't on the most recent entries page. LJ has a transient nature that makes it very difficult to me to feel like I'm ever getting a full comprehensive picture of what's going on.

Oh, I love LJ, too, absolutely!

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

It's the best tool for fannish social interaction we've ever had, bar none.

It's just not the best place for keeping our creative output. And I just don't understand the 'either or' mentality regarding LJ and other places for posting fic. I mean, why not post first to LJ (for the instant feedback, for the great discussion and interaction etc.) and then post to a couple of archives, too? (Rhetorical question for fandom-at-large, not addressed to you specifically, because you do seem to understand where I'm coming from.)

And, using tags and memories intelligenly, a reasonably useful archive could even be hosted on LJ, as a community - it's not so much the independent website format that I'm after here, but the idea of an easily searchable, central place for all or at least most of the fic in a fandom.

[neverenoughjam.livejournal.com]

It's not that I want my stuff to be inaccessible. I want to control it, as 6beforelunch says. I do post my fic in forums/archives other than LJ, but this is MY space and I control what I post here. Maybe someday I'll write a story not acceptable by the guidelines/rules in some archive; I can post it on LJ. Maybe I write an unpopular story, and would prefer to screen out the outraged flamers in favor of people with something constructive to say. I can do that on LJ. For me, it's all about the control. :)

Okay, that's an argument I've seen a few times, too -

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

and one I have to admit I don't 'get', either. Why is control such a big issue nowadays? (Or has it always been, and I just never noticed?) What's the horrible thing that could happen if you put a story in an archive? Because I honestly can't think of anything horrible at all that could happen, except perhaps for the archive to go down, eventually. But the same could happen to LJ, couldn't it? It's a big site, but, who knows. And if it (the archive) does go down, well, who's to stop you from posting your stuff elsewhere? In fact, who's to stop you from posting to several places at once, just to make sure at least *one* copy of your story remains accessible somewhere in the wide world of the web? Redundancy and backup...

And whether you receive a flame on LJ and then screen it out, or in an e-mail from a reader who read your unpopular story at an archive, whose e-mail address you can then assign to your spam filter ;-) - where's the difference? You can never screen out negative comments *before* you get them. (Besides, would you *really* want to? You'd never know the true reaction to something you wrote if you were somehow magically able to only receive the positive reactions. But that's a rather more philosophical issue that doesn't really belong here, I suppose. *g*)

>Maybe someday I'll write a story not acceptable by the guidelines/rules in some archive; I can post it on LJ.

Sure. But is that really a good reason *never* to use an archive, even for the stories that *do* fit the archive's rules? Not all of my stories are available in archives, either - one of them is too dependent on weird formatting to ever be archived anywhere. But that doesn't mean that I can't at least put *most* of my stuff in public archives. (And I usually add a link to my website in the header of the story, so that people who are interested enough can go there and find the stuff that isn't in the archive.)

[lim.livejournal.com]

And I don't *understand* the attitude behind it, either. I mean, *why* would people not want their fic to find the widest possible readership?

Well, maybe they're shy. Or maybe they don't know about those other places. Or maybe they feel like LJ is a safe little corner where they can post up their scribblings but publishing to archives is a bit scary and final. Or maybe, you know, fandom is a lot bigger these days. Fandom is huge these days. Not everyone can cope with that many people. I can't, certainly. It's too much; I get all stuttery and weird and clam up or spin out. Not everyone is seeking the widest possible audience. Some people (er, like me! *g*) really just want to geek out with some friends and love their pairing and just play.

A lot of people are happy to post to their own journals but never peeped a word on lists. It's a lot less pressured in some ways, because people subscribe to you, you're not just imposing yourself upon a thousand people's inboxes just to ask if anyone recorded Dr Who last night (some people take this even further and are too shy to post links to their discussion in spaces designed precisely for that, but for me this is a bridge too far, really).

And how can they not care if it will still be easily accessible to new readers in a year or two?

I think it... I think it kind of is! Easily accessible, I mean. Easier than trying to navigate groups and stuff. And not all archives are...have you ever used trekiverse (http://www.trekiverse.org)? My god. Ow. Anyway, I think this problem has over the past few years basically been solved by delicious, list-maintainers (as in the LJ-version: those people that maintain large lists of stories by kink/pairing/genre w/e) and newsletters. Also recjournals, memories, and tags! There are tags now, so that's easier, isn't it? Lots of people use them. I think it is pretty easy...

OK, for example: I had a sudden irrepressible craving to read some Snarry time travel epic slash the other week. God knows why, you know, I'm not even in HP fandom; I know hardly anything about it. But I didn't need to know about HP fandom specifically; it was no trouble to quickly bring up the HP/SS (http//del.icio.us/tag/HP/SS) tag on delicious, add +time travel (http://del.icio.us/tag/HP/SS+time_travel) and get a nice selection of stories to read.

And there's the newbieguide, which is very handy for navigating new fandoms (which really we all ought to link in our userinfos, hrm), and there are 130+ newsletters, which, again, if you just pop over to delicious and tap in newsletters+fandom (http://del.icio.us/tag/newsletters+fandom), google "fandom newsletters", there's Haven Links (http://www.selenayhaven.com/newsletters01.htm) right there as the first result.

Or to just look for rec journals, if say, I wanted to read SGA recs from 2005, I'd tap in Stargate:Atlantis+2005 (http://del.icio.us/tag/Stargate:Atlantis+2005), and voila! So it's a different approach to centralised lists, but it has many positives, I think. Much more customisable, really, is the thing. Filters. You don't have to put up with things you're not into and, well, when there's 200 people on the list, it's easy to put up with the odd bit of stuff you're really not into, but when you get to the sort of huge numbers of some of the really popular fandoms, like, say, god, Harry/Draco is just one ship in Harry Potter but I just looked at one LJ comm (harrydraco) and there's nearly 4,000 members. ff.net has something like 250,000 HP stories! I can't cope with that quantity of information without a) going mad or b) going elsewhere.

Anyway, here's a really great post by Sophia Jirafe about LiveJournal (http://sophia-helix.livejournal.com/307952.html) and fandom and some of the issues you've raised here are discussed pretty thoroughly in the comments (and I note that at the time she wrote that entry, there were only a few, very small, newsletters and no delicious).

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I agree. I really don't think it's that hard to find older fic on LJ. It certainly would be if people never posted to communities and there were no rec journals or delicious or newbieguide, but there are all those things.

And while a lot of people have spiders blocked on their journals, a lot of other people don't, so someone searching for fic on Google will generally come across quite a bit archived on LJ.

[danceswithgary]

I would never have started and would not be writing today if not for LJ. I freely admit that I do depend on feedback to assist me in my writing and to keep me motivated. I'm shallow like that.

I would not comment as extensively as I do if not for LJ.

The CLex recs lists I maintain would not exist if not for LJ. What is easy for me to maintain on LJ would be a nightmare on a website. Updates to the list can be found easily on the Master list and by turning on tracking they can be emailed to fans.

I do post everything I've completed to SSA and thus to the forums that support it. I also crosspost to 7 LJ communities as well as maintain comprehensive tags and a linked index entry at the top of my journal for my 2006 and 2007 fiction.

As a dedicated recc'er I have been working on getting fiction archived to SSA or any other archive in addition to LJ because it is disheartening to see some incredible pieces of fiction vanish along with an LJ. I've willingly offered myself as someone who will format a fic for archive on SSA if needed.

That said, it saddens me to see people complain that by posting to LJ exclusively that someone is doing the fanbase an injustice. I'd rather see people writing and posting to LJ than not posting at all because they don't want to spend time formatting fic for archives or websites when they don't feel comfortable doing it. Getting the fic out there is what's important.

Getting the fic out there...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

>Getting the fic out there is what's important.

Well, yes, *exactly*. But posting it in a very small, very private corner of the web where nobody but ten friends will see it - is that really 'getting it out there'?

I do understand that some people feel shy, and I don't have any issue with that. I do have issues with laziness and disregard for the readers and the community. I'm *not* saying the the shy people are lazy or feel disregard for their readers, but I do think that there are people out there who post only to LJ for those reasons, and not out of shyness.

There have always been shy people, and there is never a way to ensure that everything that's worth reading really will reach an audience; heck, Kafka wanted his manuscripts burnt instead of published after his death! If Max Brodt had complied with his wishes, there'd be considerable less Kafka around now.

But I'm not saying we should all be Max Brodts and force shy writers to publish more widely - I'm willing to live with a certain amount of loss. But what appears to me to be happening on LJ is on a larger scale than could be explained by just a few shy people trying to keep out of the limelight. It seems to me - I may be wrong, I'm only human - that there is a real, massive trend towards going more and more private in one's fannish experience and production. And that I find fairly disquieting in its implications.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

And I don't *understand* the attitude behind it, either. I mean, *why* would people not want their fic to find the widest possible readership?

Personally, I post my fic to my personal site and to LJ (and the Pit O'Voles, every now and then). I post links in communities whenever possible. I have never put anything in other people's archives anymore aside from challenges, and didn't much to start with.

Yes, wider submission would = wider readership. But I want to know that I, myself, can take down most of my fic if I need to for some reason. Fic posted to archives is at the mercy of the maintainer, who may drop off the face of the 'net, or who may not respect removal requests.

So there's one possible reason. If I didn't have a personal website, my fic *would* only be on the Pit and my LJ (I am very multifannish and tend towards small fandoms; most of my fic isn't appropriate for the vast majority of archives, as well).

[rushin-doll.livejournal.com]

From metafandom

Two things. In order of brevity!

First, I think you're operating under an assumption which may not be entirely warranted: that people write fic for a general audience. While I think this is true in many cases, I also think there's a growing movement toward writing for smaller and smaller (and more and more specialized) communities (I rambled about this in my own journal (http://rushin-doll.livejournal.com/7697.html)). LJ has been huge in facilitating this. Maybe it's not a good thing (since it raises barriers to entry into those specialized communities), but I'm not willing to say it's bad yet.

Second, I think that there are some significant advantages to the short life-cycles of discussions in LJ to go along with the disadvantages. One of the big ones is that the topics worth discussing come up over and over in many different contexts. And in each one, no one is expected to be familiar with what has come before. In some ways this is bad: it means you retread the same ground over and over. But in some ways it's very good: you're not locked into the conversational material that's come before.

Consider for example: in a lot of forum discussions the initial post could spark several different conversations. The first reply or two generally locks in only one of those as the one being undertaken. While in LJ the topic will likely come up again and one of the other conversations can be had, on a forum where you have the single thread those other conversations are likely never had. With organizational unity comes the silencing of voices. Some people won't get involved in a thread because the discussion has veered off in an uninteresting (to them) direction.

Of course by decentralizing things (a la LJ) you also tend to end up repeating yourself an awful lot. Because we don't have expectations that you've read other similar discussions, we can't just say "go read what I said there".

I think that ultimately the part of me that wants to know everything that's going on is upset that we don't have things in a more forum-like environment, but the part of me that wants to encourage dynamic and growing and evolving communities is glad that things are so decentralized.

I love discussing how interfaces shape interaction,
Ana

Replies

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

>First, I think you're operating under an assumption which may not be entirely warranted: that people write fic for a general audience.

Well, no, I've noticed that that isn't the case anymore. I just *regret* that it isn't, and think fandom would be a nicer place for *more* people if it still were. And, as someone who's an archaeologist, a literary student, a sometime ethnologist, and a collector and archivist at heart, I feel that the cultural artefacts of this community (i.e. fandom) are worthy of being preserved and widely disseminated, for the joy and, sometimes, enlightenment they could bring vast amounts of people. Fanfiction-as-a-conversation and fanfiction-as-an-ephemeral-community-activity, that's all nice and well, but so much of this stuff is good enough that it *deserves* to be collected, preserved, and turned into the kind of cultural heritage that is available not just to immediate participants at a certain moment in time, but rather to later 'generations' (in fandom those may be just people who join a fandom six months after a certain fic has been posted - but they might also really *be* a next generation, if we take measures now to preserve stuff well enough that it will still be around in ten or twenty years).

Now, I am aware of the problems with the idea of preserving an ephemeral culture, something that is essentially a process. But - fanfiction, no matter how much it is created in a certain context, *is* written culture, and as such it is eminently preservable and able to be enjoyed by 'future generations'. So, this isn't *really* like mounting a butterfly, thereby killing it.

>While I think this is true in many cases, I also think there's a growing movement toward writing for smaller and smaller (and more and more specialized) communities

Exactly, and I find that worrying. Or maybe not really *worrying* - but sad, yes.

>One of the big ones is that the topics worth discussing come up over and over in many different contexts. And in each one, no one is expected to be familiar with what has come before. In some ways this is bad: it means you retread the same ground over and over. But in some ways it's very good: you're not locked into the conversational material that's come before.

But you also can't build on it, can't develop it. But yeah, I mostly agree with you on the pros and cons of discussing on LJ. (Though forums can have exactly the same advantages - it depends on how big the forum is, and how it is managed.)

>on a forum where you have the single thread those other conversations are likely never had.

In my experience, this is not true. People on good forums will join discussions and add new viewpoints, push the discussion in entirely new directions, even months after a discussion started.

>I think that ultimately the part of me that wants to know everything that's going on is upset that we don't have things in a more forum-like environment, but the part of me that wants to encourage dynamic and growing and evolving communities is glad that things are so decentralized.

See, and I'm just wondering why it shouldn't be possible to have the best of both worlds.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

One thing I love about LJ is that it's all in one place. I don't want to have to go to LJ to read my flist, then to some archive or twelve to read fic, and then to a messageboard for discussion, etc. I like it all in one place.

I do post my fic on archives sometimes (though I'm lazy about it because they don't offer me much; archives tend to be very low on feedback), but as I said to lim above, I also don't think it's inaccessible on LJ.

[nikojen.livejournal.com]

A hearty "Amen" from the peanut gallery. I was away from fandom for a while and apparently missed the mass exodus to LJ, and I've been struggling to figure out the right way to "do" fandom in this new environment since I got back.

Do you friend every single LJ that sounds mildly related to the fandom you're interested in (and end up getting the same information cross-posted six ways from Sunday every time anything noteworthy happens), or do you just subscribe to the most active ones and hope nothing interesting happens on the others? What to do about multi-fandom fic communities like 30Kisses... subscribe and put up with a higher noise-to-signal ratio on the f-list on the off-chance that someone might post something great in one of my fandoms, or not? Or maybe I shouldn't bother trying to keep track of fic journals at all and just pick a few reccers to spoon-feed me the good stuff. And that's just dealing with comms. Friending individuals is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

And no matter how you work it out, there's still the issue of "NOW"-ness that you mentioned. I've pretty much given up trying to friend the main fic LJ's in most big fandoms (*cough*SPN*cough*) because they invariably swamp everything else that comes across. I'm sure I'm missing some awesome stories, which is pretty sad for a completist like me, but I just don't have the time to keep up with it all as it's coming across. (Hell, it took me an hour just to write up this little comment. =P)

<*Phew...* Sorry, bit of a rant there, and not saying anything you didn't already say more coherently anyway. ^_^>

Anyway, this is *the* big reason why I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the FanArchive movement is a success. Any archive that could get a decent percentage of LJ-writers to put their stuff into a central, *searchable* archive would be heaven.

[ithildyn.livejournal.com]

A hearty "Amen" from the peanut gallery. I was away from fandom for a while and apparently missed the mass exodus to LJ, and I've been struggling to figure out the right way to "do" fandom in this new environment since I got back.

Same here :) I wasn't out of fandom, but I never realized that the reason my lists got so quiet was because everyone came here. Finally stumbled upon that fact last year.

[pink-bagels.livejournal.com]

Hmmm....I'm of the camp that finds lj significantly superiour to lists and forums for fic, simply for the fact that when I want to read something I can usually find it pretty easily--I just hit the 'interests' search on lj and usually find what I'm looking for--and I personally find it a fantastic way to archive fiction. Having over the years lost tons of work thanks to a computer crash and improperly done back-ups, not to mention site closings and forum closings, having the freedom to hold all of my work in one, solitary archive that can be catalogued and easily edited is a dream come true. If I want to tweak how my journal looks, I can do so, and it doesn't take me the hours upon hours a website usually does. And no one will bitch about how it doesn't work in their browser and so on because the stories are read on *their* livejournal, which is made to their own specifications. It's a beautiful personal preference tool :D.

I myself don't feel the need to have a lot of feedback and I do enjoy writing mostly for myself as opposed to others. This may or may not be a good thing, I just know that it works well for my own creative process :P. In all honesty, I've gotten a lot more feedback on my writing in livejournal than other venues. I find forums and lists quite overwhelming, actually, and I often feel intimidated on them and fearful of posting. I don't want to be laughed at for missing some list or forum unwritten rule, a fact that has happened all too often to me in the past. I've mostly avoided these faux pas in livejournal. Livejournal, for me, has a kind of split personality. I like the intimacy my livejournal provides while at the same time it maintains its distance because it is my personal space and thus a place within my own control. I understand that other people's journals are also their personal space, and thus, livejournal can be a bit of a voyeuristic domain, a kind of conglomeration of people sharing themselves in ways that you wouldn't have seen before on lists and forums. Personally, I like this. It's a constant reminder that the people whose fic and ideas we are reading are in fact real people with real lives, not some fanfiction chugalug who is there solely for the lists' and forums' gratification. It can be rather humbling at times, and also rather scary, which is why I opt for the arm's length approach when thumbing my way across the internet highway--which is where my love for that intimacy starts to break down. Sometimes, I just don't want the TMI from someone who is in actual fact a total stranger and will always be a stranger. But then, I can always just check their memories section for fics, or put the links to them in my own lj archive. The whole world need not be my friend :P

Why do people keep bringing up lists? ;-)

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

I certainly didn't, in my post. Never found lists particularly useful.

>I'm of the camp that finds lj significantly superiour to lists and forums for fic

I agree that LJ is better for fic than lists or forums. Forums and lists aren't a great way to archive fic. *Fic archives* are a great way to archive fic. ;-)

(I'm keeping this short because I've said most of the stuff I could say already somewhere above in the comments, and I need to go to bed now, the birds are beginning to sing outside!)

[rahirah]

I make a point of posting my fic to my website as well as to my journal, and in fact I purposely don't add fics to memories on LJ because I'd rather people read them on my website.

I agree. LJ isn't the perfect fit for fandom.

[angelofsnow.livejournal.com]

Don't get me wrong, I'm having a great time using LJ but I agree it's not the perfect fit for fandom.

I think the reason people like it is the Friends Page acts as a newsfeed so they get updated on what's new daily. Also LJ's communities are very helpful in creating niches within fandom so you can read only what you're interested in. A lot of LJ's success in fandom is the ease of setting up an LJ vs. starting a personal website. And the high learning curve of LJ that discourages younger fans participation and keeps some FF.net fans away.

But at the same time, I hate LJ fandom. It is incredibly hard to find older fic. Most communties don't even use tags and they're imperfect at best. Searching for fic is a joke. There is no search. Most people set up their LJ so search engines can't archive it. I have to manually click through to find new fic. Fic isn't organized or posted with any consistent headers. It's not in uniform easy to read formats. The comment system works well however.

The pace of LJ is insane! If I have a busy week and can't read my friends page - forget it! I missed that week in fandom. So much gets posted each day that I can't keep up. I can't access my LJ at work so I don't have the endless time to read and comment like others do. For instance I've been trying to keep up with the Fanlib wank this week because that interests me but there's so much I don't have the time to read. I think I have 12 webpages open in my browser now full of wank to read. And that's after reading 8 pages already.

My hope is the new archive that's being created may address some of these issues.

[melange1.livejournal.com]

I write fic for myself, mostly. I post some of it, but it doesn't get that many reviews, and it doesn't bother me. And most of my fandom doings are between me and my group of friends, so. Maybe that is being anti-social, but it suits me just fine.

[kerosinkanister.livejournal.com]

Via metafandom.

In a lot of ways I actually prefer LJ for reading fic because we can engage in a discussion. Of course that doesn't happen with every author and every story but a lot of the archive sites make it difficult or impossible to have an actual dialog, perhaps beyond replying to my review. Some allow personal messages but I find those sometimes intrusive like with email.

Having said that one of my frustrations with LJ is the fact that so many authors make it much more difficult than necessary to find their work. Sometimes stories are scattered between memories and tags and sometimes the only way to find the work is to scroll through the journal 10 or however many entries at a time. Some stories are flocked for no apparent reason. A masterlist that's findable is helpful, but that breaks down if the author is very prolific.

With an archive it's easy. Find an author you like? Click on their name and you've got access to every story they have posted on the site.

[danamaree.livejournal.com]

I've been on LJ almost 7 years now. And I've developed the skill and different techniques to stay on top of things (tracking, memorising, archiving, tags, etc, etc).

So, I don't have any of the problems you brought up, but it took me a while at the beginning to work out how to use LJ to best enjoy the fandom experience, and back in 2001 we didn't have many of the tools (like tags, or tracking) to keep up.

I think it just might be a matter of practice.

I much prefer LJ to yahoogroups.

[(Anonymous)]

Here via metafandom.

This is an interesting post because I was on livejournal for a couple of years, then got myself banned by LJ Abuse due to a political disagreement about the acceptability of breast-feeding in public (which does seem faintly bizarre, as I find myself mentioning it to make clear that I didn't actually do anything wrong to get banned.... but, anyway) -

I wrote a story on livejournal, MirrorM*A*S*H, that would likely never have got finished if not for the immediate feedback of livejournal: certainly I wouldn't have got as much fun out of it as I did.

But mostly I was using livejournal to post, not stories, but links to stories as I posted them to my website.

Then I got banned.

Suddenly, I don't get comments any more. I have a new journal on greatestjournal, but fandom is very much on livejournal: and having discovered that a fan can be permanently exiled from livejournal by going up against Six Apart's company policy, I do find this somewhat scary - it's a centralization and control of fandom by a single corporation such as has never occurred before, to my knowledge. Granted Six Apart appear uninterested in controlling fandom - but I'd truly hate to see what would happen if FanLib succeeds and FanLib and 6A do a merger.

Jane Carnall
janecarnall.greatestjournal.com

That's a really good point, actually.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

And one that hasn't been raised in this type of debate much so far, I think. (Or at least I can't remember seeing it raised, but then, I *have* been out of the loop.)

And, wow, even just speaking on a personal level, that banning thing sucks. I'm deeply sorry to hear about it; I can only imagine how frustrating that must be for you.

Here via metafandom

[athelyna.livejournal.com]

I've been lurking in various online fandom things for different fandoms for probably about 9 years now, and livejournal makes it very uncomfortable for me to think about de-lurking. LJ's often feel like someone's personal space, and I feel really uncomfortable just randomly popping in and leaving feedback on something posted in a personal journal. I wouldn't even post this comment, but for the other people who have already said they're here via metafandom. Unlike forums, where lurkers are normal and their are threads for people to introduce themselves, I don't know how many authors expect strangers to click random links or look at other peoples friendslist. Umm, to explain that last statement, someone will make a post to a community, I'll look at their personal journal to see if they have anything else that interests me, then I'll look at their friendslist figuring people they've friended will likely have similar interests and post similar stories that interest me. That seems like a lot to explain to someone just to say "Hey, I thought your story was awesome."
Finding fic is also difficult. I've mainly been reading Stargate fanfic lately, and discovered the LJ community pretty much by accident. It's much easier when authors include a header post with links to all their stories, broken out by fandom and pairings, but not everyone does that. Tags help, but if I'm looking for a specific pairing or a gen story, it can be hard to decide if I should click the x/y tag or the fic tag, as the x/y tag may have random meta or rants that I don't care about while the fic tag brings up everything the author's ever written. Then there are the multi-part stories, where I can find the newest part, but there are no links to previous sections. It's much easier as a newbie in a fandom to go to 1 large archive, and search by story type or character, with all chapters of a fic in one place.

[gemmi999.livejournal.com]

I just started writing fanfic seriously a month ago, and I almost exclusively use LJ to host my fic. Part of it is the instantaneous reaction, the ability for people to comment and for me to get those comments and see if the story works or not, but that's only part of the draw.

Most of the reason why I post on LJ is because that's where I was introduced to fanfiction, it's where I discovered such things existed, and, well...it's the place that feels most like home (as cheesy as that sounds).

I like LJ because I write in multiple, multiple fandoms, most of which don't have central archives. Or if they do have archives, their archives I don't particularly like and don't want to use or even browse. Like Wraithbait--I find their search feature awful, and it takes forever to find a decent story. I'd just rather ignore the entire archive.

There have been archives that did things well: Area52 is one of them. But they are few and far between.

astolat wrote an entry about an ideal archive, and I think LJ should be the company that makes it. With this whole FanLib thing going on, if anyone is going to profit off of fanfiction, I'd rather it be someone whose been there the entire time, supportive like.

And okay, this is my first coment with regards to ANY meta conversation, so hopefully I'm not too redundant.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Wow am I late to the party.

I don't have much to contribute here (and will make an effort to read through all the comments later and with great interest) but, well, you know how reluctant I was to get a livejournal for fear of it being clique-ish and scary. Now I've jumped in I enjoy it and all, and I've made some really great friends. But it's a very different experience. It is clique-ish. I've ended up on the wrong end of a political debacle or two (well, only one that really stands out) but having had that happen to me on forums as well, I'm not sure that livejournal is really any more cliquey. Except I think it's easier to become a "known person" in a specific forum maybe?

Either way, I strongly agree that forums make for more focused long-term community bases. But they don't make for such great personal friendships. I think that one thing LJ does offer is a chance to read many longer review and meta-type thoughts about shows which don't always surface so much on forums. People don't tend to all post long, meandering reviews of an episode so much as pick up on points and debate them with each other. But then again...that's a generalisation.

I guess I'm noticing that there is a style of discussion on LJ that I enjoy - the finding of long interesting theses on characters and plot and in-universe ideologies which perhaps show up more regularly here than on forums.

But when it comes right down to it, I post on a Star Wars forum and it's actively keeping me hooked and interested in Star Wars. I'm involved mostly in BSG fandom on LJ and while I don't love the show any less, due to the skew of my flist (mostly friends not BSGers because I worry about friending someone else's personal space when I don't know them, and also no guarantee the BSGers will be posting about BSG during the hiatus as they would be on a BSG specific forum), LJ doesn't keep me interested and involved in BSG nearly so much. Unless it's currently on.

So. Yeah. That's my very unclear line of thinking! ;)

[fluterbev.livejournal.com]

Hi! I'm here via metafandom.

I don't *understand* the attitude behind it, either. I mean, *why* would people not want their fic to find the widest possible readership? And how can they not care if it will still be easily accessible to new readers in a year or two?

This is a question I've seen raised a time or to in my own fandom (The Sentinel). For me personally, it's all about what motivates me to write, what motivates me to share (a separate issue), and about my personal comfort levels.

I write fanfic for The Sentinel. I archive some of my stories on the big slash archive we have (852 Prospect), some on my own website (although that is largely defunct at the moment, and in the process of being redesigned), and an increasing number in public posts in my LJ. I also archive some fics in friends-locked posts - hence restricting my readership of those particular stories solely to my friends list.

Basically, I love to write. It's my hobby (I've got reams of stuff under my bed that proves I've done it for years in splendid isolation!) and I would do it whether or not I posted the finished product anywhere on the web. I do post a lot of what I write in one or other of the locations I mentioned, but I hugely prefer doing so in LJ - not out of a need for gratification, but because I know that there are people there who will enjoy it (or so they tell me!) and with whom I can have a very satisfying bit of communication. Apart from the pleasure I get out of writing, my participation in fandom is mostly about having fun with my friends - and posting stories in my LJ seems to encourage that :-).

Having said that, I don't presuppose that most readers in the fandom will want to read everything that I churn out, hence the fact that I post different things in different places. Most slash readers in TS read at our main archive, 852 Prospect. I have never been all that comfortable with a big readership, myself, so I tend to only archive stories at 852 Prospect which I feel most confident about - which is emphatically not all of them. The rest tend to stay in my LJ, accessible to those who bother to go looking. Some remain friends locked, because I don't feel ready to expose them to a wider audience in any venue, and some things never make it to the web at all. Like I said, it's all about my comfort level.

[starwatcher]

.
Hi! Are you the Hmph I knew from the HL Rysher forum? :::waves::: (I was StarWatcher there, without the 307, but I couldn't convince Yahoo that I was the same person, so tacked on the number.) Good to see you again!

I, too, mourn the loss of the forums -- the way the Rysher forum was set up (and the two following ones that Flounder ran) -- in that format. When I moved to Sentinel, I looked and looked for a forum in that style, and never found one. I liked that threaded look. I found mailing lists a poor substitute; without the headings under separate threads, it was hard to follow who was responding to who in what topic. But I got used to them. I resisted LJ for quite some time but, if a discussion gets going, it is easier to follow with the thread format, and I spend less time now on my mailing lists.

The new HL forum, after HolyGround was hacked, is impossible for me to navigate -- it's like each discussion is in a different room, and I have to click on each separate "doorway" to see if anything new is happening in that room. Personal frustration level out the roof, so I gave up. My personal feelings are irrelevant, but I think my reaction points out a universal truth -- people will go where they're comfortable, and ease of use increases comfort. At this point, LJ is top of the "ease of use" stack for many people, so they gravitate to LJ.

As for fic in archives -- I can only speak for my current fandom (The Sentinel). We have two large archives, one each for slash fic and one for gen. The slash is a full archive; the gen archives only those fics that don't have a website, but has author pages with links to offsite fics. Both have a "what's new" page, so it's easy to keep up with current postings.

In The Sentinel, most fic is eventually announced or posted at one of the archives, even if it first appears on LJ. (fluterbev, above, once did a study; in one year, over 80% of the new fic announced at the slash archive had its origins in LJ -- but the authors DID archive after a final beta or whatever.) The exceptions are the "experimental" fic, or those we judge "too short" to bother -- drabbles are fun in LJ, but they don't necessarily seem archive-worthy. <g> The point is, writers do want exposure for their fic; if we authors (Surprise! I'm writing too!) feel it's appropriate, we'll archive and/or announce on mailing lists.

Of course, I can't speak for other fandoms; maybe there is a drop-off in archiving in some instances. I would think that it might help to speak up on the mailing lists in those fandoms -- make a push to encourage authors to archive, and/or to announce and link their LJ fic on the mailing lists.
.

Hi!

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

And yes, I am 'that' Hmpf. *g* I have no idea why I didn't reply to your post when you made it; 2007 often did that annoying thing of swamping me with work and other stuff rather suddenly, so I assume it must have been one of those cases.

Always glad to meet another ex-forumlander!