#I miss the days of webrings and livejournal and individualized internet forums

[pouncequick]

Something I sincerely mourn on a daily basis is the disappearance of fan spaces from the internet. I'm going to use "athlete" here, but this really applies to any kind of content creator.

It's genuinely really amazing how fans and athletes can interact so much now, and I think it has lead to athletes being much more aware of how much people love them (which might not always be a good thing, because of the extra pressure it adds, but we'll call it a good thing for the moment). But both fans and athletes need private spaces.

Athletes need space to have personal lives, play around with things in the gym, and have successes and failures that aren’t hyperscrutinized by fans the moment they happen. They deserve privacy.

Fans also need space to react, be excited, disappointed, and have frank conversations about things they love/hate/hope will change without the expectation that everything they say is going to be seen by the people in question.

Having lots of thoughts, feelings, and opinion is what fandoms are really all about, and fans are incredibly engaged in the things they love, but they’re engaged in a different way than the athletes (or authors, actors, etc). Just like a athlete should get to choose if and when they release a video of a thing they’re playing around with, fans should be able discussions about how much they hate thing Y in an athlete’s routine without worrying about the athlete reading it and being upset because they love thing Y, or they’ve been working on it forever and they just can’t get it and now people are piling on them about it.

When athletes and fans don't have their own spaces to exist in, and the only places for them is the same site, two things happen on both sides. On the fan side, one is this--parasocial relationships develop hard, fast, and intense, with fans losing sight of the natural boundaries. The other option is that fan conversation is completely stifled, with fans only saying shallow, positive things because whatever they say will get back to the athletes almost immediately.

On the athlete side, you have people either removing themselves from social media in general--it's the only way they can escape the commentary, the critiques, and the unwanted deluge of interactions. Or they see and react and comment on absolutely everything, something that rarely ends well.

None of those things are healthy for the people involved, and none of them help the sport. It makes things worse for everyone.

One of the absolute worst things that has happened to the internet is the shrinking of it down to just a few sites, meaning that people can't have their own spaces to exist in. Everyone has to be together, and then an algorithm sees that two groups are both interested in the same thing and shoves them together, even when for both of them to grow and develop and be happy, and for the thing they love to go and develop, they need their own spaces.

It's like all the plants in the garden a right next to each other, so the roots are tangled and no one cared what conditions the individual species need to flourish. The lack of separation in fan and creator spaces is killing fandom and creativity.

The idea that you would even think to slide into an elite gymnasts DMs a few days before nationals and suggest major routine changes is just wild to me. Honestly just the idea of sliding into any gymnasts DMs really.

Please can we go back to an age when fans didn't want the blorbos to notice them?