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

[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!