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

Re: Accessibility...

[chicafrom3.livejournal.com]

don't know the right communities for the fandoms they're interested in,

I'd put money on there being a comparable number of people who don't know the archives for the fandoms they're interested in. I should know, I'm one of them; I've gotten into new fandoms, checked Google to see if there was a fandom-specific archive, failed, and floundered helplessly.

And then gone to LJ, typed in the fandom of my choice into "Interests", and found communities dedicated to it. As far as I know, there isn't a Black Donnellys-specific archive around, and the FFN pickings are laughable to say the least; donnellysfic, on the other hand, was easy for me to find, it remains easy to navigate, I can sort through it by the characters I want, the pairings I want, the ratings I want, or the authors I want, and when I post my fic there I can be reasonably confident that a good chunk of the fandom is going to be offered the choice of reading it.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just horribly, horribly biased because I tend towards small fandoms. My biggest fandom is probably Doctor Who, which does have a "main" fic archive, whofic.com--but I don't trust the quality there, I have difficulty navigating the site, and most of the interesting fics will pop up on dwfiction or who_daily sooner or later.

In short: I've actually found LJ to be easier to use than most of the archives...for those of my fandoms that have fandom-specific archives.

Re: Accessibility...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Maybe it is a generational thing. I dunno. I just really like stuff nice and central, collected in one place. That place *can* be an LJ community, too - it's not the concept of communities-as-archives that I object to, but rather the fact that few communities really seem to be run dedicatedly *as archives*, i.e. with useful tags and memories and little or no clutter, etc. Although you may run into problems with the concept of communities-as-archives in big fandoms with big fic outputs, because (correct me if I'm wrong) the tags feature only allows you to go back 100 entries for each tag, which means that in a popular category, anything older than the last 100 fics will become inaccessible. But even that can be conquered by using the memories features, so, again - yes, I think communities *could* serve as a decent replacement for archives. If they were actually used properly as such.

Clarification

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

>Maybe it is a generational thing

By this, I did not mean age, but rather the style of fandom you got used to when you joined fandom. I'm still very influenced by older formats and ways of 'doing fandom' (joined fandom in 1998). Just thought I should clarify that.

Re: Clarification

[chicafrom3.livejournal.com]

I think 1998 was about the same time I joined online fandom? Probably. Roughly speaking.

I do think it's an experience thing, though; I've been lucky enough to wind up mostly in well-run communities-as-archive in my LJ fic experience. Were I in an overwhelmingly big fandom (like, say, Harry Potter, which scares the hell out of me) my experiences might (would...) be incredibly different.