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panharmonium · 4 years

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just some thinky thoughts about fandom platforms and community that i didn’t know what to do with, so i wrote them down.

[tl;dr - tumblr is weird, pan misses (certain aspects of) Ye Olde Days]

tumblr is such a weird platform.

like. i love my blog as a personal repository of stuff i enjoy, and i’m definitely thrilled to have met the people i’ve met on here - some of them have even become my friends outside the internet, and that’s been absolutely lovely. but in terms of actual functionality when it comes to trying to engage in a fandom...it’s still weird.

i know people will probably get tired of all the “BACK IN MY DAY” fandom analysis posts that float around on this website, but even having been here for years now, it is still really hard for me to adjust to a place that makes it so impossible to find any kind of actual fandom community spaces.

for me, i didn’t even start using tumblr until i was in my mid-twenties, and that was only because tumblr was where most people from LJ had migrated. i’d been Doing Fandom for over a decade prior to that, on other platforms (fandom specific sites/archives and then LJ), so i ended up here kind of out of necessity - the great fandom migration was already mostly complete, by the time i moved.

so i got here, and i got settled, but fandom on tumblr has been so different from fandom as i experienced it anywhere else, and that’s not the fault of any of its users; it’s just an inevitable function of the way this site is structured.

it is SO HARD for us to connect with people on here!

just, as an example from my own more recent life - i’ve been doing a lot of merlin stuff lately, right? that’s where my head is at and that’s what i’m having the most fun with and i would love to be more interactive with people about it, like - to have folks to geek out with about it, you know, to do the things that fandom is for - and if i were on, say, livejournal, back in the day, i would know where to go to do those things. there would be specific spaces built for just that purpose. LJ comms were places where everybody who was interested in a particular thing could go for the express purpose of posting and discussing and interacting about that thing! people still maintained their own personal blogs, but they also belonged to whichever LJ communities reflected their interests. LJ comms and fandom-specific sites were fandom hubs - it was so easy to find what you were looking for.

this functionality doesn’t exist in any meaningful way on tumblr. big, moderated groups/communities aren’t a thing tumblr truly supports. there’s no way for me to go join the “merlin” comm and just be in community with a large group of people who just wanna talk about merlin. the limited “group blog” functionality on tumblr is so non-conducive to actual usage that community spaces like those just don’t really exist, not like Back In The Day.

fandom on tumblr is so very decentralized. the way things are set up here forces all of us to just make posts on our individual blogs, which then might get picked up and put on other people’s individual blogs, maybe. you can’t like...make something (X) Fandom related and drop it in the (X) Fandom LJ Comm like “hey look, something fun to talk about!” you could put it in “The Tag,” but anyone who’s been here for any length of time knows how useful doing that actually is. and you could post it on your individual blog, but it won’t necessarily reach anybody who might want to geek out with you, not if you’re not already followed by someone in that fandom.

and the only other option is to invite yourself onto someone else’s individual blog, which is a) inefficient, when you’re looking for wider community, and b) not something a Painfully Reserved Person is wont to do.

the analogy that works best for me is this: pre-tumblr, fandom hangouts were community spaces. they were cafés with a sign hanging out front saying “star wars here!” or “kanan/hera here!” or “X here!” if you wanted to geek out about a particular thing, you would go to the café and meet a bunch of other people there.

nowadays, if you want to geek out about a particular thing, you have to barge into a stranger’s house. and not everyone is comfortable with that.

the lack of real, threaded comments is also just...i don’t know how to express how detrimental this is to communication and community. i mean, i understand that tumblr’s entire “reblog” system doesn’t really allow it to be a thing, but tumblr’s entire mechanic as a fandom platform has to be questioned, in that case.

how impossible is it to have a conversation on here, the way tumblr is set up right now? i mean - let’s say you make a post, right? one person reblogs it and adds their own text to it; another person reblogs the original version, but says something different in the tags. a third person doesn’t reblog it at all, but hits “reply” on your original post. a fourth person “replies” also, but to the second person’s reblog, in response to the additional content.

NONE OF YOU ARE HAVING THE SAME CONVERSATION. none of you are even aware that the other conversations are happening. the idea of trying to build an actual cohesive fandom community like that is just...impossible. it can’t happen.

when i reblog posts on tumblr, i feel like i’m a dragon collecting a little hoard of shiny things she likes, only i never actually see another person, because i live in a cave.

everybody here lives in a cave.

and like...this is just philosophical, i guess, but. tumblr’s focus on “follower count” and notes is also a thing i don’t really know how to handle.

having people “follow” me makes me feel weird. seeing that people are “following” this blog exerts a bizarre external pressure, as if my little house here could ever be for anybody who isn’t me. it prompts a tiny 'but should you?’ in the back of my head when i post about something that isn’t what all those people came here for, which is ridiculous, because this was never supposed to be a blog for any fandom in particular; it was just a blog for me. i was the only one here when i started, and i literally never did anything to try and get people to come here and join me. it happened accidentally, because bigger blogs than me picked up some star wars stuff i made and passed it around.

but of course, on tumblr, making connections gets conflated with follower/note count, and understandably so, because besides having a higher follower count (aka wider distribution), how are people ever going to reach the other people who are into the same thing they are?

for instance. let’s say you’re brand new to tumblr. you want to get involved in X fandom. there’s no community space here where a new blog with no followers can go and share their stuff with the right audience and meet all the other people who are also sharing their own work. unless you start messaging strangers, your tumblr time is pretty isolated.

whereas - i remember on lj comms, back when people would post as a newcomer, it would be like, ‘hey i’m so-and-so and i love xyz and here’s a picture i drew of x character!!!!’ - and people would actually respond to that. people responded to everything! like. tiny 400 word fics would have 30 comments, and all those people were talking with each other, not past each other, on the same page.

just for fun, while i was typing this up, i went through a month’s worth of posts on an old lj comm i used to frequent. not a single one of those posts was comment-less. every single post, even the tiniest, most insignificant one-line musing, had some amount of discussion attached to it.

whereas now - i don’t know if this is just confined to tumblr, or if it’s a general cultural shift, because even on AO3, i sometimes see people who have written massive sprawling epics and the comment field is just a desert. i once saw the exact same fic posted on ff.net, where it had 20 comments - and then on AO3, where it had zero.

and like, say what you will about ff.net (there’s...plenty to be said, certainly XD ) but commenting patterns were observably different there. and that’s all part and parcel of a bigger discussion, which isn’t really within the scope of these notes, except to say that it’s probably the source of my forever grudge match with AO3′s kudos button, which i realize is an absurdly silly thing to say and i’m smiling at myself even as i type this, but - i gotta be honest - i hate that thing! i can’t stand it! XD

i say that in the most good-natured way possible, obviously; this is fandom, after all, and it’s all for fun, and i love AO3 in every other way, so this is more a minor annoyance which makes me laugh at myself than anything else - but i say again - in the most fun-loving, self-deprecating way possible - that little button is my archnemesis. XD

i totally get why other people love it! it’s a completely reasonable way to feel! but for me, personally, coming out of an environment where the reward at the end of making something was getting to gush with somebody else, make a connection, talk about the thing that gave us So Many FEELS - the kudos button is so. sterile. and. empty. it doesn’t fulfill my urge to connect with people or share fannish enthusiasm in any way. i’d almost rather not even see kudos on my account, honestly, because it makes me feel more disappointed than anything else - like, “oh, man. look at all these missed fandom conversations we could have had.”

and obviously, this is in no way meant as disparaging to people who use the kudos button liberally. it is ALWAYS lovely to show appreciation for someone who wrote something you liked, however which way you are able, if and only if you are so inclined. nobody is obligated to leave feedback - lurkers are a perfectly accepted and long-celebrated fandom tradition; i belonged to that tradition myself, for most of my fandom life - so showing appreciation in any form is already going above and beyond. nobody needs to be harangued with “YOU SHOULD’VE COMMENTED” or “YOU SHOULD’VE REBLOGGED” - none of that stuff is required to participate in fandom; nobody owes comments or reblogs, and creators have to be okay with that. we can discuss and/or lament the structural factors that encourage or discourage participation, by all means, but ultimately we have to recognize that nobody is actually required to respond to things we make. it’s fandom. we’re all here by choice, and people’s participation levels are their own business.

and anyway, i know that lots of authors actually love getting kudos on their work, so my experience isn’t universal, by any means. it’s just a function of my own personal background, and the communities i used to run in - i speak for no one but myself and my own fannish life.

and besides, the entire debate about kudos/comments and like/reblog disparities doesn’t come anywhere near the underlying issues. it’s sometimes framed as “people not participating in fandom appropriately” (and that’s completely unfair; there’s no wrong way to do fandom when you’re not hurting anybody) as opposed to “what is it about our platforms that encourages or discourages participatory fan culture.” like - the only reason we even need to talk about the importance of reblogs vs. likes is because tumblr makes it so darn hard for a person’s stuff to be seen by the “right” people! reblogs are the only way for someone’s work to spread, and even then it’s kind of like throwing a handful of darts at a board and praying one of them will land in a well-connected spot. if a platform like tumblr were set up differently, we wouldn’t even need to have this conversation - there would be places to post your work where people would be specifically looking for content like what you were making. you could make those fannish connections more easily.

*** important to note, too - it’s always worthwhile to remember when reading these “back in the old days” nostalgia posts that pre-tumblr spaces had drawbacks of their own. livejournal was not some fannish utopia, by any means. there were, however, a few structural things from that era that i think were helpful influences on fan culture, and their absence here makes me miss them.

but anyways. those are just some thoughts. and now i’m going back to my regularly scheduled posting, because i DO enjoy this place, even if the platform can be somewhat lacking sometimes - we still have to find a way to have fun, right? that’s the entire point of being in fandom in the first place.

#i've always felt like tumblr was sort of a bizarre place for Fandom Central to have landed anyway #though i do think it's been amazing for graphics editors; gifset-makers especially #i do wonder where we'll end up next #whenever the next big migration hits #anyway back to regularly scheduled posting!#i've got episodes to get through #gotta keep up my momentum so i can GET TO THE END #:D #fandom

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