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hmpffandom 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
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.
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.
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Reply-o-rama, part one
Date: 2007-05-24 01:42 am (UTC)Yeah, I have. It's completely useless, I agree. *g* And, as I've said elsewhere in this thread, I was never a great fan of newsgroups and mailing lists, so I'm not nostalgic for older forms of fannish interaction in *general* - just for *some* formats/types of sites that I think *do* fit certain purposes better than LJ. (Lists, btw, aren't one of them, IMO!) Although of course an archive can be formatted in such a stupid way as to be virtually useless, and an LJ fic community *can* be formatted so intelligently that it serves as a perfectly good substitute for an archive. (See above for several replies in which I make that point in some more detail.)
>I think this problem has over the past few years basically been solved by delicious,
I have to admit to being a dinosaur: I have *heard* the name 'del.ici.ous' a lot in recent years, but so far have failed to understand what exactly it does and how it works.
>list-maintainers (as in the LJ-version: those people that maintain large lists of stories by kink/pairing/genre w/e)
Nice, yes, but again: decentralised and not all that easy to find, in many cases.
>and newsletters.
Often useless in big fandoms, unless equipped with a very good set of tags and memories - or unless you manage to *constantly* keep up with them.
>Also recjournals,
Well, there have always been recs pages, so that's nothing new. The problem with recs pages is that they preselect for you, and maybe you don't always *want* stuff preselected for you? Maybe your tastes don't fit those of reccers, maybe you're after a very particular kink, maybe there are authors that are really good but so obscure the reccers haven't noticed them yet, etc. Maybe sometimes what you really want is a central place with a huge store of fic that you can search according to your own very personal criteria. Archives provide that.
>memories, and tags! There are tags now, so that's easier, isn't it?
Tags are definitely an improvement, yes. But for large-scale use they have disadvantages (although these can be alleviated by using the memories feature, I will admit - check my replies to various people up-thread for a discussion of that.)
>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.
Heh. That is *exactly* the kind of highly specific, bizarre urge I occasionally get for fandoms I'm not involved in. I understand completely. And that is exactly what I don't know how to find anymore.
>it was no trouble to quickly bring up the HP/SS tag on delicious, add +time travel and get a nice selection of stories to read
Okay, I *clearly* need to learn how to use del.ici.ous. *g*
Re: Reply-o-rama, part two
Date: 2007-05-24 01:42 am (UTC)This is quite an interesting argument in defense of LJ, because, *in fact*, I've never been 'forced' to read as much stuff that isn't exactly the kind of stuff I'm interested in in fandom before I joined LJ. When you subscribe to someone's LJ because they wrote a story you liked and you're not sure they'll post the next one to a community you're reading, you in effect subscribe to their life.
Maybe I don't *want* to subscribe to 100+ people's lives? Or maybe I would even want to, if I had the time - but I don't *have* that time. My flist is completely unmanageable by now; it requires so much attention that I frequently just completely drop out of LJ for months on end just because it's too much of a strain to constantly stay up to date with everything and everyone. True, there are some 30 or so people on my flist that I know well enough to really want to stay up to date not just with their fic and meta but also with their toothaches, pets, and hard drive crashes. And the rest, the other 90 or so people, may well be people I *could* get close enough to and find enough common ground etc. to get interested in their toothaches, pets and hard drive crashes, too. It's not an issue of not being *interested* in making closer personal contacts with these people, but simply the matter of how many people can you *really* get close to in that way, and keep up with, before keeping up any kind of life of your own becomes impossible? There are only so many hours in the day...
So, to be honest, LJ requires me to read or at least skim a *lot* more stuff that I'm only tangentially interested in every day just to keep up with fandom than I *ever* had to in my pre-LJ fannish life.
>ff.net has something like 250,000 HP stories!
I admit that at a size like that you need more/better/more precise categories; and at that size of fandom/archive you do need recs lists, too, I think. But most fandoms don't have millions of fics, or even tens ouf thousands, but rather hundreds, or thousands - and that, with a good system of categorisation, is perfectly manageable by a good archive, in such a way that will enable readers to actually find what they want pretty quickly. I'm actually in the middle of setting up an archive with a few people from Life On Mars fandom, and we're discussing what categories to make right now. Categories are one of the things that really make or break a fic archive. ff.net isn't exactly great in terms of categorising fic - if you were able to, say, search for combinations of categories - Harry/Draco + angst + (list of other characters to include) + post book 7, for example - you'd be able to narrow the amount of fics down somewhat!
>I can't cope with that quantity of information without
And I can't cope with the speed of LJ. And the amount of information, too. I'm actually terrified of checking my flist because there's several dozen posts on there every day.
>Anyway, here's a really great post by Sophia Jirafe about LiveJournal
Thanks. That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, I think. Will definitely check that out.
Re: Reply-o-rama, part two
Date: 2007-05-24 06:53 am (UTC)Well! You don't have to. I mean, I just don't do that. I don't friend people that I'm not, you know friends with, and I get my fic from communities or delicious, because yes, absolutely, I can't keep up with a billion people. I'm utterly hopeless at people and lives and things; I can't even remember my own anniversary, to my partner's yearly dismay. I'd be a positive wreck (even MORE of a wreck) of neuroses and social anxiety if I attempted to keep up with everyone's life. (And again see above re: not doing brilliantly in crowds.) Does anyone actually do that? I don't think anyone does that. It's ok to just do the fan bits, I think. I know I'm not sitting there writing my post about our local by-election with a wicked gleam in my eye: POP QUIZ! For ten points! WHICH village in Rossendale did lim compare unfavourably to a commuter's armpit? Tie breaker! HOW many times did lim frell her hard drive in March? You know, I just don't think that's happening. Or maybe it is happening but no one should pay attention to that sort of madness, honestly.
I understand completely. And that is exactly what I don't know how to find anymore.
Yes, get a delicious. And also check out techn orati (http://technorati.com). You can subscribe to tags (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=272&q=subscribe) as well, now, so you don't have to friend a person to get notified of their updates. Or I actually track using livebookmarks (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/livebookmarks.html). Do you have Firefox? They're an inbuilt RSS feedreader, like LJ's flist, but in a bookmark. You can also use delicious to subscribe to tags to create a sort of super-customised flist. Look at this example zvi_likes_tv (http://del.icio.us/subscriptions/zvi_likes_tv). You can see that this person, zvi, likes Stargate:Atlantis, polyamory, and Ronon and wants everyone's content tagged as such. I have subscribed to people (http://del.icio.us/subscriptions/limicious) instead, and narrowed down their content to just what I'm interested in.
I'm actually terrified of checking my flist because there's several dozen posts on there every day.
You shouldn't be terrified, mate! That's awful. LJ is a content aggregator, not an ordeal! I know there's a lot of terrible guff talked on LJ sometimes about everyone's duty to everyone else and lots of comparisons to some kind of horrendous turkey buffet where apparently we're all meant to be standing around perpetually thanking each other for ghastly casseroles or something but I'm sure it's all really just made up by people with nothing better to do. I used to get all overwhelmed by the omg!pressure but I don't think we have to do any of that really. I think it's ok to just, you know, read a bit of fic, send up a few squee-signals, try to be nice when our friends are unhappy, have immensely geeky rows about that one scene where he is TOTALLY CRYING... I don't think there's a quiz, or that you have to keep up with anything that you can't manage.
Re: Reply-o-rama, part one
Date: 2007-05-30 09:10 am (UTC)I'm in pretty much total agreement with you about LJ (except I miss mailing lists, which I'm better suited to than forums), and I'm also in agreement with the suggestion to try del.icio.us -- I went from being basically cut off from fandom for years because I can't deal with reading LJ, to suddenly being able to find stories in as many fandoms as I wanted. I'm still cut off from most discussion, but at least I've got the fic (and the vids, for that matter).
If you're interested, I wrote up a tutorial a few weeks back for fans wanting to learn about del.icio.us, which I'm told was useful for folks, even people who'd been using it for a while (the interface isn't all that intuitive at first glance). The preliminary overview and brief tutorial are here: http://aka-arduinna.livejournal.com/9837.html (http://aka-arduinna.livejournal.com/9837.html) , and the detailed, step-by-step tutorial is here: http://trickster.org/arduinna/delicious.html (http://trickster.org/arduinna/delicious.html).
(I've also got a couple of LJ-related essays up on my essays page, which are cranky and probably overdone, but heartfelt. *g*)