#there isn't an easy solution

[kiragecko]

The only other thing I'd like to add to this wonderfully thorough description of the problem is:

fandom is bigger now.

25 years ago, I was able to remember the names of at least a quarter of the authours in my fandom (that I'd been able to hunt down through web-rings and google searches. ME!

(I am very, very bad at names - my favourite cousins and now-husband all answered to 'Other Vic' for a while because I mixed their names up so often.)

20 years ago, I was almost able to keep up with the X-Men category on fanfiction dot net - skim through every new fic on a regular basis and see if they interested me. And it was a 'big' fandom!

15 years ago, the Batfandom was so spread out - on livejournal, dreamwidth, tumblr, ffnet, and the new ao3 (I even found some authours through deviantArt!) that it always felt like I knew most of what was happening around me.

Now a days, I'm a drop in the ocean. There is more fic than I will every be able to read. There's no way to form relationships with all the authours that I'm reading. I would DIE! So I reread the people I know, a lot.

And not knowing the authours has a ripple effect. I'm not great with tone. Or talking. I enjoy reading works written by other neurodivergent people who may also be bad at tone. In the past, I would carefully check the water with my first few comments. Do they understand humorous exaggeration? Playful complaints and yelling about emotions? Do they prefer being built up, or being cheered on? How do I communicate with THIS authour, specifically? And are they interested in doing the work to understand me?

Now, there are too many authours! I can't keep track of that! So I have to leave more generalized comments. If I'm overwhelmed by emotion, I can't just yell at them for making me feel. I've hurt people that way! If there was one really squicky thing, and even though I loved the rest my feelings are all entangled, I don't have a relationship strong enough to get into that with this person.

The comments get shorter and more general. So relationships don't get a chance to form. And I don't learn new authours' names, and everything feels even bigger, and ...

It's GREAT that so many people are into fandom, and it's accepted! It's just hard to form community in this vast ocean.

feedback and fic in fandom (3 f's of our own)

This conversation about feedback on fic says everything I’ve been wanting to say better than I could say it. But I’ll go ahead and try anyway.

Over the last five years or so there have been some great discussions around the rise of commodification of fanworks and decline of fandom community. This commodification looks a bit like enshittification of the internet: a cool site exists; its popularity makes someone realize they can get money from it; it has more and more ads; the site adds features to drive engagement, including The Algorithm; the things that made the site cool start to fall away. The site exists now as a vehicle purely to get clicks, and the people on it are on it solely to get clicks—to make money, to be successful, for some kind of social cachet.

AO3 doesn’t have advertisements. It’s not making money. But what is happening to fandom is proof of concept that enshittification changes the way we as humans engage. A cool website in 2004 was often a community space where you could meet people, have conversations, find cool things, and make cool things. A cool website in 2024 is either a content farm that will continually feed you enough content to hold your attention, or a social media site where your participation will come with stats to show you whether you are holding the attention of others.

AO3 wasn’t built to be a community space. It doesn’t have great functions for meeting people and having conversations. The idea was that, because fandom community spaces already existed, AO3 would serve the part of that community where you can find the cool things and store the cool things you made. It was meant to be a library in a city, not the whole city itself.

But it was also never meant to be a website in 2024, a content farm constantly generating content solely for your clicks and eyeballs and ad revenue, or a social media site where the content creators themselves vie for your clicks and eyeballs.

The most common talking point when people discuss the enshittification of fandom is the folks out there who are treating AO3 as that first kind of enshittified website: the content farm. This discussion is about how people treat fanfic as a product for consumption.

The post that kicked off the discussion on @sitp-recs’s blog was about someone who wasn’t getting very many kudos or comments on their fic, and was feeling pretty demoralized about it, then joined a discord server and found an entire channel dedicated to people loving their fic. But those on that server had never come to share that love with the author, which the author found really discouraging.

There are more and more stories like this. Someone on tiktok pulls a quote from a fic on AO3 and makes a 10-second video with them staring at a wall, the quote pasted at the bottom, music playing over it. It has 100,000 hearts, and 100 comments with people gushing over the fic, which has 80 kudos on AO3. Overall, people notice more and more hits on their fics, but fewer and fewer comments or even kudos. Fewer and fewer people seem to feel the need to interact with the author, instead treating the fic like a product to be used and discarded—which the enshittified internet (a stunning feature of late-stage capitalism!) encourages. The fandom community is dying, these stories conclude.

I agree. 100%. Both of the stories above have happened to me—viral tiktoks about my fic, secret discord channels to follow and discuss my fic—and let me tell you, it fucking sucks.

But from these observations about fandom enshittification, the discussion continues in a very odd direction. The solution to the death of fandom community is our favorite enshittification buzzword: engagement. We should engage the authors. They’re producing these products for free. We consume them at no cost. We must demonstrate our gratitude by paying them back.

It’s as though the capitalist consumption that the enshittified web encourages is so ingrained within us that we must think in terms of payment, in terms of exchange, transaction. Or as though, by forgoing payment, authors are some kind of martyrs defying capitalism, and the only way to honor their great sacrifice is comments and kudos.

Indeed, the discourse around this sometimes does veer away from capitalist rhetoric into something that smells almost religious in desperation. Authors are gods who bestow us mere mortals with the fruits of their labor benevolently, through love; the least we can do is worship them. Meanwhile the authors adopt the groveling sentiment of starving artists: I produce great art; I only humbly ask that you feed me in return.

These kinds of entreaties make my skin crawl for a number of reasons. I’m not a god. I’m not writing because I love you. I don’t expect your worship or even your praise.

I think the thing that disturbs me the most about it is that it suggests that authors (or, if the OP is feeling generous fan work creators) are the most important people in fandom. I’ve even seen posts stating that without creators, fandom wouldn’t exist—as though readers aren’t just as important. As though conversations where people discuss characterizations and plot points and randomly spin out interpretations and ideas and thoughts related to canon are meaningless. I’ve even seen people scramble to include folks having these discussions as “creators,” as though realizing that these people are necessary and integral to fandom communities but unable to drop the idea that the producers are the ones who are important. As though that person who just lurks can never count.

Is this what community is? When you join the queer community, are you expected to produce a product of your queerness? If not, must you actively participate and give back to the queer community in order to be considered a part of it? Or is it enough that you are queer, that you exist as a queer person and want to be around others who are queer, you want to be a part of something? What is community, anyway?

The problem with people raising the authors above everyone else in the community and demanding that tribute be paid is that they are decrying the “content farm” style of 2024 website out of one side of their mouth, but out of the other side are instead demanding that AO3 become a 2024-style social media website. Authors are influencers. “Engagement” and clicks are the things that really matter. They are in fact suggesting that the way to solve the commodification of fanfic is by “paying authors back” with stats.

Before anyone comes at me with the idea that comments aren’t just “stats,” I will clarify what I mean. There are literally hundreds of posts on tumblr alone claiming that any comment “helps” the author. Someone replies that they are shy to comment. Someone else replies that incoherent keyboard smashes, a single emoji, or the comment “kudos” are all that is required to satisfy the author, all that is required as tribute—all that is required as payment to keep this economy healthy.

I’m not condemning the comments that are keyboard smashes or emojis or a single kind word. I receive them. They make me happy. If anyone wants to leave such a comment on my fics, I’m really grateful for it. But this is not community-building. This is a transaction. In @yiiiiiiiikes25’s excellent response in the post linked at the beginning, they point out that “you have a cool hat” is something that is “perfectly nice” to hear from someone—and it is! We all want to be told we have a cool hat! But as they go on to say, what builds community is interactions that are deep and specific, interactions that are rich in quality, not in quantity. A kudos or a comment that says only ❤️are lovely things to receive, but they don’t build community.

My reaction, when I see people begging for kudos and comments as the only means by which to keep fandom community alive, is very close to @eleadore's. I want to say, “No. Readers do not need to comment or kudos. Believe not these hucksters who claim to know the appropriate method of fandom participation. Participate as you feel able, or not at all; nothing is required of you.”

I’ve been told before (several times) that I’m not qualified to participate in such discussions because I am an established author who has some fics with very high stats. It doesn’t matter that I have also been a new writer with almost no one reading my fics. It doesn’t matter that I still write in new fandoms where no one in that fandom knows me. It doesn’t matter that I, like any human being, still care about receiving recognition and attention and praise.

And maybe that’s correct. I personally don’t think that billionaires have a place in deciding the direction of the economy, and--if we're really going to consider fandom an economy--in fandom terms, if I’m not a billionaire, or even a millionaire, I’m definitely in the infamous “one percent.” So, just as no one wants to hear Elon Musk say “money isn’t everything,” maybe it’s not my place to say “kudos isn’t required, actually.”

That said, I’m not the only one who has a problem with the stats-based discourse around fandom community. However, the main counter-response to this discussion I see goes something like this: you shouldn’t be writing fic for validation. If you’re writing for attention, you’re doing it for the wrong reason. Authors should write fic because they love it without any expectation of return.

This is, in my opinion, missing the point of what is meant by fandom community.

I wrote fanfic before I knew that fanfic, as a concept, existed. I read books; I wanted them to be different; I wrote little stories for myself with new endings, with self-inserts, with cross-overs, with alternate universes. I did it for myself in the 90s. It never occurred to me that anyone else would do this, much less that people would share.

As @faiell points out—creating and sharing are two different things. I created fics for myself, but I decided to share them in the early 2000s because other people might like them, too. And of course, I wanted to hear whether other people liked them. How could I not? I might decorate my home just for me and not for anyone else’s preferences, but when people come over and say my house is nice, how can I not enjoy that? And if a lot of people think my house is nice, which encourages me to post pictures of it online, isn’t it understandable I might do so with the hope that more people will say my house is nice? And, honestly, if no one is appreciating my pictures, I probably won’t continue to go through the trouble of taking them and posting them. I’ll just enjoy my house that I decorated without sharing, the end.

When I found out there were whole fannish communities where people discussed canon and tossed ideas around about it, made theories and prompts and insights into the characters, fics they had written and recs for other fics and analyses of fics and art based on fics and fics based on art—I wanted to be a part of that, too. Now, sometimes, I write fic not out of an internal need to do so but out of a desire to participate in that community.

The idea that we write fic only for the love of it, then post it only because we possess it, is a process entirely centered on the self. It’s fandom in a vacuum. The idea that we share this thing, that we feel pleasure if someone likes it but feel nothing at all if no one says anything about it, that it’s completely okay to be ignored and unseen—that’s not what a community is either. That’s some weird sort of self-aggrandizement through self-effacement—because yes, there is often a weird kind of virtue-signaling in this kind of discourse.

I say this as someone who has virtue-signaled in that way: “some people write for stats, but I write for myself.” It’s bullshit. Sure, I write for myself, but why post it on the internet? Honestly, said virtue has a whiff of the capitalist machine, which would like you to produce for the sake of production, work for the sake of work. The noblest among us expect no recompense for that which they give!

The reason that I’m bringing this back around to capitalism is that capitalism actively works to dismantle community. The reason that folks are out here pleading for “engagement” in order to “pay back” authors for the products they give us “for free” is because people no longer even have the language to discuss how to participate in meaningful community. And frankly, how to build back fandom community, in the face of enshittification, is getting harder and harder to see.

But I do think that if we value fanfic and the fanfic community, it’s really, really not constructive to judge whether someone’s reasons for writing fanfic are valid. It’s also weird to me that it would be considered wrong that someone’s reason for sharing fanfic is because they would like to receive some recognition for it, when in fact that seems to be the most natural reason in the world for sharing something so private and vulnerable with the world.

Let’s go back to that idea of how hurtful it is to find out your fanfic is trending on tiktok without anyone from tiktok saying anything to you about your fic, or how it can be painful to find out there’s a secret discord channel dedicated to your fic. The people who respond to that with, “Ah, but you shouldn’t be writing to get attention!” are missing the point. The fic did get attention. It got lots. Attention obviously wasn't why the writer was writing--they were writing to participate, and they didn't get to. At all.

However, if your conclusion is that the author was upset because these particular stats were not accruing under this author’s profile, thereby preventing them from achieving the vaunted status of BNF and influencer—I don’t know, maybe you’re right. But I don’t think that’s why I, personally, have been hurt by these things, and I doubt it’s what hurt the people in these posts either. They’re hurt because they want to participate, and they have been systematically excluded by the very people they thought were part of the community they thought they could participate in.

Sure, if those folks from tiktok and the discord server all came and showered the author with kudos and comments that said “kudos,” the author might have felt satisfied enough with the quantity of this recognition that they would continue writing. But in the end, this still does nothing to address the problem of fandom community, in which the deep, meaningful recognition, interactions, and relationships in fandom are getting harder and harder to have and to build, as a result of how people now expect to engage in online spaces.

So, how to address the problem of fandom community? You probably read this long, long post hoping that I had an answer, and for that I must apologize. I don’t have solutions. My intent was to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. I wished to outline the problems that I’m seeing in what was hopefully a slightly new or at least thought-provoking way, rather than offer solutions.

But, now that I’m talking about being prescriptive, maybe I can offer one suggestion, which is—maybe the solution to this isn’t about prescribing behavior. I do understand the irony in writing a prescription saying we shouldn’t prescribe people, but I’m going to write it anyway:

Maybe we shouldn’t be telling anyone the appropriate reasons for writing fanfic or for sharing it. Maybe we shouldn’t be telling readers they need to kudos or need to comment. If we’re going to go pointing fingers, we should be pointing at the institutions of capitalism that have made the internet what it is today—but I don’t think that’s going to solve the problem either.

But I do think that describing this problem, understanding what it actually is, not blaming readers for it and not blaming authors for it—I do think that helps. The discussion I linked at the beginning of this post is what I think of as the fandom I miss, the fandom that's now harder and harder to access, the fandom that is dying. That fandom was a social space where people had opinions and disagreed and went back and forth and gazed at their navels and then talked about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In the words of @yiiiiiiiikes25, it was a fuckin’ discussion about hats. And we’re hungry for it.

[knightofleo]

Angela Orosco Silent Hill 2

[nillisaie]

I saw something last night that really bothered me and it honestly probably shouldn't, but it did and it's how someone said they bought the Alastor pride merch even though they weren't ace themselves. And I couldn't figure out why exactly aside from the obvious me being crazy jealous and overprotective over the deer that I adore, but I think I figured it out

When I checked the website yesterday morning, it said that over 100 people bought that shirt. It's probably several hundreds now. And when I saw that number, I thought "wow, so many aces!" I thought all of the ace and aroace and probably aro too fans were buying it up in support, because they felt represented by Alastor like I did. But this person saying how they got it despite not being ace themselves made me realize that those 100s and 100s of people buying the shirt aren't all aces or aros or any aspecs. A good portion of them are honestly probably aphobes themselves who just want to sexualize the deer man who isn't interested. And that honestly hurts a lot. Just the thought of finally being able to hold this shirt honestly makes me want to cry, because it's the closest thing to being able to show my colors I can get without possibly outing myself and aphobes are buying it because sexy deer. It's honestly making me wonder if my attempt at saying I'm (aro)ace! by dressing head to toe in Alastor stuff is pointless, if people just see me as some fangirl instead of an actual ace in the hole like Alastor. If I wear this shirt, will people even know I'm wearing it because I'm ace?

[shallowseeker]

6x01

///

So, he HAS thought about this.

///

6x21

The only way for them not to be in danger, logically, is if the two of them not viscerally attached to Dean's head/memories. So, you'd think he'd have asked Cas to remove them from his own memories, too.

(And even that might not be fool-proof.)

But that's clearly not the case because...

[cosmogenous]

woops, you're pathologizing a normal human behaviour again

[iridescene]

I'll be the one to say it. HSR 3.0 was not unplayable, you guys are just dumb/lazy/quitters.

[yugiohmangaoutofcontext]

[musical-chick-13]

.

[denkilightning]

the way day of the departed and way of the departed could've been its own season 7 and it would be an excellent continuity addition. the way they'd only need to write in a spell to make wu like lost in time-space and make him a baby and everything would tie back into season 8 with no issues.

[sadlynotthevoid]

I want to read a LCF x Assassination Classroom crossover only for the sake of seeing OG!Cale interact with the principal.

They would fight and OG!Cale would win because he's such a little shit and fears exactly one thing— and manipulative assholes aren't that.

Principal Asano (whatever his name was) would have an aneurism trying and failing to intimidate him.

This brat (because any version of OG!Cale would kick his ass, but teenager!OG!Cale would be funnier) not only isn't affected by his bloodlust (he grew up around Ron, that was rather pathetic), he can see through his manipulations and plotting as if he was reading a book— an easy one, at that—, and had been going in circles around him since he entered through the door!

What is worst, he has been switching back and forth between almost calling him out and playing dumb since he tried to use one of his usual tactics with him. He's laughing at him inside— he knows it.

He ends up giving Asano a nervous tick.

So, AU where teenager Og!Cale transmigrates to AssClass world— maybe he appears near Karasuma's colleagues so he has to deal with him (because whatever God that delivered him knows that kid needs a responsible adult around)— and proceeds to take it really well. Can't say the same about some people (cofcof Asano cofcof) who fucked around him and now find out.

Meanwhile, Karasuma is very busy with his job, the supersonic octopus, getting his teaching license, and the strange kid with self-esteem issues that crossed worlds— who's now living with him.

Curiously, helping Cale to accommodate to a whole different world and society is the less difficult task out of all of them. The hardest part so far was explaining him why his happiness and reputation isn't a "good price to pay" for someone else's wellbeing.

(Although the talk about "why exposing yourself to any nocive substance was a bad idea even if you have a great tolerance or immunity to them, and therefore, is forbidden" had been a close one. Seriously, why does he knows how poisoned food tastes like?)

[the0ther-side0f-dawn]

.

[2pen2wildfire]

Hot take? Maybe? A lot of things that people call men gross for are actually just normal things but women are being held to a higher standard so they get mad about the unfairness of it. Like farting? Normal bodily function. Spitting on the ground outside? Bitch I don't want phlegm stuck in my throat I'm not gonna swallow it. Peeing in the shower? It's literally a shower you are actively cleaning yourself as you go (peeing in the bathtub is a different story, I don't wanna marinate in piss). Like I'm sorry but these are literally just normal human things to do and I'm sorry that you're being held to an arbitrary inhuman standard but holding other people to the same standard is not the solution here.

[miabrown007]

girl who sucks at making OCs needs to make a DnD character send help

[violetdisasterzone]

the absolute drought of nuance present in comment sections on tiktok will never cease to surprise me. just when I think I've seen the worst of it and blocked enough of the right people, I'll stumble into a post that appears to have summoned an entire army of righteous echo chamber commenters to make me question my sanity. why is critical thinking so hard for people

[add1ctedt0you]

AU where the core's transfer doesn't happen, but wwx loses nonetheless his core too. Both coreless jc and wwx go to jyl who decides that it's a good time to say fuck and they run away. While the war goes on, the yunmeng siblings start a journey of healing/ or becoming their worst self

[pinkautist]

had to unfollow and artist i enjoyed bc they talked about how they use ai and took the stance of, "people need to stop attacking me for it bc it's been really helpful to me as a disabled artist 🥺 we should be standing together as artists not trying to divide ourselves 🥺" you know what else ai does? YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE AI DOES??? IT USES ENOUGH ENERGY TO KILL OUR PLANET MUCH FASTER THAN ANYTHING ELSE WE CAN DO ENERGY-WISE.

i am a disabled artist too. my cognitive and mental disabilities that make burnout a substantial roadblock aside, i can have frequent and extreme pain in my wrist (sometimes out of nowhere, sometimes as a result of drawing) that makes drawing an extremely painful and slow process for me (this is due to hypermobility probably). sometimes i draw in spite of the pain, and sometimes it's enough to have me taking long breaks. as a result of the combination of disabilities i have, i am an extremely slow artist. sometimes i struggle with having intense motivation to create, but no actual inspiration because of things going on in my head. and it's a struggle because i desperately want to create, but nothing is coming to me, which makes me feel really bad. and in spite of ALL of this, i still will not use fucking ai to "soothe the uninspired motivation" or to "create in spite of my pain". i will not hand my humanity over to ai because of such trivial reasons. ai could never do what i can, because creating is about the process, not the end result. i feel accomplished in a way that using ai could never provide when i see a piece coming together, something that i've created from nothing. ai will never provide that feeling.