Musings on LJ and platforms for fandom

[tenlittlebullets]

Helloooo, LJ. I have been so neglectful of you. This is not because I have nothing to say, more that I do not have much to say that's conducive to regular LJ updates; real life is largely boring, and my fandom engagement is split between quick bite-size hits (i.e. Tumblr, black hole of the internet) and fucking gigantic undertakings like DW season 6 fixit fic and Curse of Fenric meta. The gigantic things will make it to LJ, eventually, they are just in draft form at the moment.

I don't think I'm the only one with this problem--sometimes it feels like fandom is drifting away and I don't know where the fuck it is anymore. I mean yes, there is Tumblr, and fic still lives on LJ + various archives, but what about random-ass medium-length discussion and squee? I don't see as much of it lately. These thoughts are of course prompted by LJ's fucking stupid overhaul of the comment system, which is only going to disperse fandom even further. Oh, LJ, all of fandom's righteous outrage over your various fuck-ups wasn't enough to drive us away completely, but lack of functionality might just do the trick; how ignominious would it be if a comment page redesign succeeded where the Summer of Strikethrough failed? Not with a bang but a whimper, etc. And where would we go from there? Tumblr is fun but it is just does not support discussion or conversations well, and fandom couldn't move there completely without amputating half of what makes it what it is. Mailing lists are dead, private archives and personal webpages aren't sufficient. Dreamwidth is a possibility, but I have this sneaking suspicion that there's been a gradual, unintentional leakage of fannish participation from LJ-based platforms in general due to their limitations: decentralized, not easily searchable, and time-based in a way that makes content inexorably drift into the ether after a while. (Another strike against Tumblr: it has all of those problems, on steroids.)

I wish forums were more in vogue--I might be biased because Les Mis fandom has been primarily forum-based for a while, and because when I got online fandom was primarily based around the trifecta of forums (for discussion and ephemera), fic archives (for... fic), and personal sites (for more durable content). I suppose the problem, in the age of polyfannish community and big user-content-driven platforms, is the lack of a central clearinghouse--a big site where you can use one account and one identity to participate in a bunch of groups with different interests. There was a brief period circa 2002 where fanfiction.net had pretty awesome forums, thus fulfilling two roles of the pre-web-2.0 trifecta, but then came the Great Porn Ban and general deterioration, which coincided (though not coincidentally, I'll bet) with the rise of LJ as a pan-fandom hub.

So I suppose what I really, really want is some sort of One Platform to Rule Them All: a site with LJ's approach of individual and community accounts, with cross-posting and sitewide tag search capabilities à la Tumblr, where an account maintainer can set whether to sort posts by recently-posted (like blogs/LJ) or recently-commented (like forums). While I'm dreaming, it would be awesome if each account could have sub-pages with different sort/update settings--e.g. a community with a forum (recently-commented first) and a fic archive (recently-posted first), or a forum with sub-forums, or an individual blog with a fic journal and an icon journal attached. If you really wanted it to take over the world you could allow maintainers to (a) enable a dropdown box to sort the display by author/post title/most commented/etc, (b) create de-facto categories/directories by requiring posters to choose one or more of a selection of tags, (c) let community members edit any post in a particular sub-section, thus enabling limited wiki-style behavior, and (d) add unmoving/static posts such as stickies, or even a whole page of manually-sorted posts that would somewhat resemble a personal website, without recourse to backdating.

And you know, on the face of it it doesn't look that much harder to implement than LJ or AO3. Except sitewide search, which will always and forever be a pain in the ass. There would be issues balancing customizability (of display, journal structure, posting/commenting/editing access) with ease of use, but you could lay down templates ("I want this bit to behave like a blog/forum/wiki/archive...") and let users decide how much they want to fiddle. The other bugbear would be flists/subscriptions... making it easy for the user to separate blog-style subscriptions from forum-style ones if desired, to subscribe to a sub-journal but not the whole account, to show/hide cross-posts and reblogs that come up multiple times, etc. In practice there would probably be all sorts of unexpected implementation nightmares, but it's fun to dream about.

Comments

[aralias.livejournal.com]

this is a good and interesting post. i have half a mind ot link it to paul cornell who talked about social networking just the other day. this is like that, but you're searching for a solution, rather than happy with the state of affairs (v fine, really).

i also wish that lj fandom wasn't dying as hard as it is - and there is still some of what i love about lj going on here, but much much less than there was in the day. i'm basically happy, really - the new comment box is not as good as the old comment box, but i'll live with it. the probelm si that if no one else is on your social networking site it's a bit of a wasted effort.

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

Eeep! I did an instinctive "duck and cover and blush at the thought of crossing the fandom/creator divide," then I went to Paul Cornell's blog and laughed a lot when I got to the part about perceived space and LiveJournal's illusion of... well, if not privacy, then at least obscurity. He is bang-on in pretty much every point in that post, even if I tend towards different platforms (more LJ/forums/Tumblr, less Twitter). The critical-mass-of-users issue, and Facebook being the VHS of a particular corner of the social-networking world, is extremely relevant to whatever the hell's happening to fandom: I can come up with pipe dreams for the perfect fan-interaction platform until the cows come home, but if you build it and no one comes, it's less attractive than a site with more problems and limitations that also has more users. In the case of LJ and DW, it's not just that DW is the Betamax to LJ's VHS, it's that once upon a time almost everything was on videocassette and adapted itself to that medium, and now we're scattering to the four winds, keeping the old format as our standby while we run off making three-minute Flash videos for YouTube and navigating MPEG and Quicktime and DivX vs XviD and arguing over the best lossless encoding to edit in.

Personally I'd be delighted by a return to forums, but I've always tended towards serial monogamy where fandoms are concerned, and I understand that big subject-agnostic platforms like LJ/Tumblr have a unique draw for more polyfannish types. And you know, I'm not sure how well it would work for Doctor Who fandom, which is huge and full of bitter divides in preferences and opinions. Half of me wants to see what LJ/fanfic fandom's answer to Gallifrey Base would be like--okay, fine, half of me just wants to watch uptight GB types shit themselves over the inevitable wretched hive of slash and fangirling--the other half is cringing at the thought of the RTD v. Moffat/Ten v. Eleven/New v. Classic/various ship wars that already break out in doctorwho, fandomsecrets, and any other place with general DW-fandom discussion. The Balkanization makes me sad, because goddammit I want to discuss all the things without the acrimony of the general comms, not have separate places to talk about different eras or pairings. But it is also useful, because it allows us to let our hair down and assume everyone who's there is there for the love, not to shit on our favorite things and tell us we're Wrong On The Internet.

[ulkis.livejournal.com]

[quote]Personally I'd be delighted by a return to forums, but I've always tended towards serial monogamy where fandoms are concerned, and I understand that big subject-agnostic platforms like LJ/Tumblr have a unique draw for more polyfannish types.[/quote]

I'm a polyfannish type who's never really felt comfortable on lj simply because while I don't mind blathering on in other people's comments, has never really felt compfortable going to my own lj page and being like HERE IS MY OPINION COME LOOK AT IT. Which is ridiculous because I post at forums like TWoP where probably a whole lot more people see my posts than many of the ljs I've visited, but forums give that feeling of "one of the crowd." Which is my long-winded way of saying that yes, I like forums for discussion better than lj. The one big advantage of lj-like blogs are that it's easier to control the atmosphere, but if you have good mods on a message board it's not hard to replicate that on a forum either.

I feel like ALL the places I visit nowadays have slowed to a halt. (except for tumblr) I don't know if it's just that I've gotten older and so the people I've posted with have become less net-centric, have found new places to post, or what. It makes me grumpy because it is so hard to find new places to post that a) have serious discussions b) polite disagreements (for the most part) c) and yet don't take it too seriously at the same time. sigh! If you ever buildfind that dream platform let us know. :)

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

while I don't mind blathering on in other people's comments, has never really felt compfortable going to my own lj page and being like HERE IS MY OPINION COME LOOK AT IT

Yes--this is one of the things Paul Cornell brought up in his blog post, the difference between broadcasting and replying to an existing conversation. Specifically how Twitter allows one to do both.

Personally, of late I've felt less and less need to post "here is my opinion/what's going on in my life/what's on my mind" on a regular basis, hence the lack of LJ updates. Or rather, if I have worthwhile things to say about fandom I'd rather do it in a community space than my personal journal. If I had my way, I think my personal space would consist mostly of durable content like what's on my website, but I'd also have better on-site access to my community participation than what LJ gives me, instead of having to trawl through comment notifications in Gmail. (So, possible addition to the wishlist: give each user a page with their history of community posts and comments, and allow them to choose whether it's public and if so, to remove individual items from the public feed.)

[brouhaha.livejournal.com]

I've been discussing this same stuff with a lot of people recently (enough that I considered actually trying to get together a team of people to create something like this) but I realize sadly that I'm not *in* fandom enough to justify putting time into it. I just, like you, don't want to see fandom reduced to Tumblr. I like Tumblr a lot and I use it all the time, but it does limit participation.

I do wish forums had stuck around too. I do still post on a Manic Street Preachers forum that is perfect to contain most of that small fandom.

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

Yeah, small fandoms do better with forums, don't they? I realized halfway through my reply to aralias that Doctor Who fandom does have forums and a large fanbase that exists primarily on them. It's just that they're absolutely terrifying and I tend to block their existence out of my mind.

I would totally spend nights and weekends working on a new platform for fandom (and not just for fandom--the sort of site I'm imagining is like a Giant Collision of All Web 2.0 Things). Unfortunately I don't have enough experience coding large projects to get it off the ground myself, and this would have to be a highly scaleable large project. AO3 is an encouraging sign that fandom can do this sort of thing, and successfully crowdsource the technical side with a mix of experienced and newbie coders, but it is not very scaleable due to the tag-wrangling system. It works for their purposes, I suppose, but any social-media platform that wants to get the critical mass of userbase will have to be ruthless about vetoing implementation/maintenance nightmares, even shiny crowd-pleasing useful ones.

[todaysgoneby.livejournal.com]

I couldn't agree more with this post. I have been contemplating this myself a lot too. I had been away from LJ for a long time, but have come back in search of fandom. "The black hole of the Internet" just isn't doing it for me.

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

Alas, even on LJ fandom's been awfully quiet lately. :/

[todaysgoneby.livejournal.com]

I have noticed this as well. I miss the good old days about 7 years back. It was flourishing. And so was my creativity.

[collectingbees.livejournal.com]

Case in point: I had previously written a really awesome comment, went to make it on the new comment system, it fucking froze and I lost it.

What a piece of shit.

[bushwah]

If you haven't linked this to the people who are trying to build a post-Tumblr fandom social network, please consider doing so, with or without a revamp. It's good stuff, and there's more in the comments.

Also somehow this post was posted twice -- the other one being https://tenlittlebullets.dreamwidth.org/1062902.html. This one has all the comments though.