I wonder where the break happened that such wide swaths of younger fans don’t grasp fandom things that used to be unspoken understandings. That fic readers are expected to know fiction from reality, that views expressed in fic are not necessarily those of the author, that the labels, tags and warnings on various kinkfics are also the indication that they were created for titillation and not much more, please use responsibly as per all pornography. The ‘problem’ isn’t that so-called ‘problematic’ fic exists but that some of the audience is being stupid, irresponsible, at worst criminal, at best not old enough to be in the audience to begin with. And that’s on the consumer, not the author who told you via labels, tags, ratings, warnings and venues what their fic was about and what it was for.
I can’t stress enough how important this post is
Tumblr. Tumblr is what happened, with its never-ending scrolling, with its lack of nested contents (or ANY comments, when fandom sailed here from the old world), with its tags instead of membered communities.
Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.
When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.
“When authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers”
Well that reframed my view of every fandom I’ve touched for the last five years, and it explains a lot.
I really cannot emphasize how the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom. It turned fandom into a series of one-way relationships. Social media is extremely uninteractive compared to mediums like journals and forums.
Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.
But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:
That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!
You might be seeing this:
While someone else will see this:
Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.
Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!
Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!
Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:
Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.
tl;dr
Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans react to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.
And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:
The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds
Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):
This is an excellent read on Tumblr fandom, and encapsulates some of the things about the platform that give me pause before posting.
I think that what we’re experiencing now, as a reaction, is a resurgence of individual communities. More often than not these days, I see that individual fandoms or groups within fandoms have a Discord or other place to talk away from Tumblr.
I think that may also explain why some people tend to like more than they reblog. Reblogging means leaving yourself open to (often extremist/purity-motivated) criticism of your choices - or leaves the OP open to similar criticism from your followers, with you as the involuntary middleman whose reblog made that connection possible.
Likes and drafts are private - you can collect posts in a place where no one sees them but you. It doesn’t have to be a public statement. It can just be a thing that caught your interest for whatever reason, that you wanted to be reminded of.
I strongly encourage anyone who hasn’t already to read this essay on how web 2.0 has changed fandom
it’s not just tumblr, or twitter, it’s a fundamental shift in how people act online in the era of social media and algorithm-driven interaction towards advertising revenue
