#number search

[abisalli]

some panel redraws with young just us

[0bir]

the cutest big man locker and the most dedicated big man fan ive seen tbh like oh my god

[say-hi-intrepid-heroes]

on today's episode of I Learned Something New:

[fashionsfromhistory]

Dress Owned by Lydia Williams Lyman (Mrs. Robert Treat Paine)

Emile Pingat (Paris, France)

1885-1890

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Accession Number: 56.849b)

[sanders-sides-uncorrect-quotes]

"average house has 61 spiders living in it" factoid actually just statistical error. average house has like 5 spiders in it. Spiders Virge, who keeps 30,000 spiders in his room at all times, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[dragongirltongue]

We're not calling it Season 1, it's either series 14 or season 40. Resetting the count now is like how comics started releasing new number 1 all the time.

We're loving Ncuti Gatwa as the doctor and the direction they're taking things but like, no this is not season 1, season 1 aired in the 60s.

[tremendouskoalachild]

you can say the review bombers, outrage youtubers and right-wing grifters didn't "really" cause the cancellation but you can't expect them not to be emboldened by it. it's gonna be so much worse if lucasfilm ever bothers to have another black lead, queer creator, or poc cast and you know it

[alwaysbewoke]

My goodness!!!

[arkarti]

I'm sorry in your last Willry post...the..the hair grab???? HENRY GRABBING WILLIAM'S HAIR, LIKE THAT???? Dead. You have killed me off. Congratulations, the Fazbear franchise dies here because you keep killing off those poor restaurant workers with their hot bosses.

yes, the hair grab was very important to me 😳 jkahgjk glad u like it

help, that is the funniest way to die tho. rip in peace anon 😔

[magnoliaspringdesign]

[scopophilic1997]

scopOphilic_micromessaging_1093 - scopOphilic1997 presents a new micro-messaging series: small, subtle, and often unintentional messages we send and receive verbally and non-verbally.

[loz-the-noob]

Updated photo of the Jellycat gang for 2024!

[worstloki]

it doesn't work :( he doesn't wanna talk :(

[identifying-cellphones-in-posts]

Super slow day at work so I identified and labeled every recycled android we have in our parts bin.

Isn't it beautiful

[destinationtoast]

*waves shyly* Hello!! First off, I absolutely adore all of your stats and get excited when you post new ones -- thank you so much for all that you do!

Secondly, a friend and I have been discussing fandom longevity lately, and I wondered if you have thoughts? Subjectively, it seems to us that new fandoms tend to have more quick bursts of fandom activity when a new season/movie/book/etc comes out that fades quickly with time, whereas older established fandoms have more staying power. I'm curious if you have any insight about whether this is objectively true in most cases or not, and as to whether or not the type of canon source material matters (eg show-based fandoms vs book-based fandoms). I hope you're having a great day <3

Hi there, and thanks! :D This is a great question, and one I have been having a bunch of conversations about lately.

I share this subjective experience -- it sure seems like the attention span of fans and lifespan of fandoms is shorter than it used to be, when I think of how quickly people stop talking about a bunch of newer movies and TV shows these days. And then I see some of the older fandoms like Harry Potter still producing a ton of new fanworks, and I think, "Wow, maybe new fandoms just don't have the staying power of older ones." At the same time, I also question how objectively true/simple that story is for a few reasons, including:

Memory bias: When we look back on the past, the fandoms we remember most are usually the ones that lasted a long time. So our estimates of past fandom longevity may be overly generous.

Changes to fandom size: Maybe any changes to fandom lifespan are mostly due to some other change, like fandom size... Attention is more splintered these days than it used to be across more streaming services/etc, and I think there are more, smaller fandoms than there used to be. Maybe if a fandom doesn't get really huge, it's just not likely to last that long.

For TV fandoms -- changes to canon release schedule: most TV shows used to have seasons that lasted most of the year, so they had a lot more reason to stay in the public mind longer. Now many seasons are shorter and sometimes drop all at once. Perhaps if we compared popular TV procedurals with 22 episodes/season from now vs. ~a decade ago, we'd see similar patterns of fandom activity?

I've been thinking about ways to try to gather quantitative data about the changes, and testing out a few methods. A few ideas I've had:

Look at the Tumblr official lists of top fandoms and see whether the top fandoms tend to leave the top 20 rankings faster now than they used to. (The Tumblr rankings go all the way back to 2013 on a yearly basis, at least -- I'm not sure how long they've been releasing the weekly lists; those may have started later.)

Look at AO3 fandom activity after new canon infusions - how quickly does activity drop off after a new movie/book/video game release, or after a TV season ends? How has the rate of activity dropoff changed over the years? (And how much of that seems to be explained by other factors, like fandom size?)

See how quickly AO3 authors/creators tend to migrate to new fandoms, and how that's changed over time - many authors tend to be active in multiple fandoms, so we'd have to define what it means to migrate to a new fandom, but I think we could do so in a way that would allow us to look for changes.

Look at Tumblr, Twitter/X, and/or Reddit activlty after new canon infusions - same as AO3, but on a platform where people are posting shorter content and there's more of a discussion. (This data would be harder to collect, though.)

I'd love to also hear other ideas. I think I'm going to need some volunteers to help gather data if I do any of the above, though... Readers, if you'd be interested in helping to gather data for an hour or more to help investigate this question, please reply/DM and let me know! And/or join the new fandom-data-projects community.

Also if any readers know of anyone else who has looked into this/similar questions, I'd love to hear about it!