Snowflake Challenge #13-15

[chacusha]

Challenge #13 - In your own space, rec three fanworks that you did not create.

Some random recs (all art) that are NOT Quodo (I might post a Quodo recs round-up in quodo later if I have time):

• I found this series of Disney princesses wearing furisode by Sunnypoppy -- I like the way the original colors have been incorporated in the kimono and how heavy/winter-appropriate the getup looks. The Elsa and Anna ones look great, and I'm also a fan of the short skirt and long sleeves on the Tinker Bell one, and the Pocahontas design just looks really nice/classy.

• This series of (watercolor + color pencil + digital, I'm guessing?) pieces featuring Star Trek characters as mermaids by Mackoonzie (mostly Enterprise characters but some DS9 and TOS as well) -- I really like the coloring and sea lighting, and the various designs/choices of sea creatures to use as the tails are great!

• Some belated Multifandom Doodle recs?? There was so much good stuff in the last round's collection, but in particular, I loved these ink portraits of Spock and Lando Calrissian by cherryontop, and the fantastic (animated!) pixel art by ElAurianBarkeep, especially Gotham at night and Trucy and Phoenix Wright on a bridge at sunset.


Challenge #14 - In your own space, do the Fandom Wrap Challenge.

What were your top 5 fandoms for 2022 based on the amount of time you interacted with them? Man, do people have five different fandoms they spend time with?

1. Star Trek, Quodo
2. Star Trek, anything else (mainly, TNG and DS9)
3. The Mana series, especially if playing Echoes of Mana counts. This year was a very good year for New Mana Content.
4. Bravely Default
5. Soulcalibur

What were your top 5 fandom spaces (Discord, Twitter, etc.) you experienced fandom in terms of time spent?
1. Dreamwidth, especially if fail_fandomanon counts (such a huge time sink!).
2. Probably Discord. I'm in a lot of fannish ones and it takes a while to get caught up on them every morning (the sad thing about living in a European timezone -- all the live conversations happen when you're sleeping).
3. Tumblr. Even though I'm trying to cut down, I still spent quite a while on this site.
4. AO3. All that fic reading...
5. DeviantArt? Reddit? Not sure. At this point, there's a steep drop-off anyway.

What are the top 5 things you did to contribute to fandom in terms of time?
1. Wrote fic.
2. Wrote meta. I'm also including under this collecting and sharing information with the rest of the fandom.
3. Drew art.
4. Consumed and commented on works.
5. Modded events/Discords?

What were your top 5 most appreciated fandom contributions? (i.e. in terms of likes, kudos, reblogs, comments, etc.)
1. Halloween Odo. The thing I posted in 2022 that got the most notes by far.
2. Every 16 Hours was the fic I posted in 2022 with the most kudos, comments, and bookmarks, and 2nd highest hits, so I'll consider that the most appreciated.
3. I made some Star Trek edits. Even though these two Quodo ones got the most attention, I'm kind of proud of this Gaila one.
4. This meta on Odo's morality (more readable version here) got a decent amount of reblogs and positive response. Also, my negative Discovery S4 review also got a surprising amount of people saying it rung true for them.

That's more than five and also a pretty good coverage of the ways in which I contribute to fandom, so I'll stop there. Also, oops all Odo (almost).

Have a Top 5 List you'd like to share?? By all means! Hm, let's try... top 5 media I newly consumed this year? I'm not necessarily fannish about these, but:

1. Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
2. Predator (1987)
3. Glass Onion (2022) (Knives Out 2)
4. If it counts, Sandman (TV 2022) (I've already read the comics.)
5. Disney's Z-O-M-B-I-E-S trilogy (2018/2020/2022)

Reviews forthcoming. A bit of a weird collection of stuff, I guess...



Challenge #15 - In your own space, opine on the future of fandom.

The prompt here focused on the Twitter explosion, so I guess I'll talk about platforms in a kind of rambling, disorganized sort of way.


I guess the main obstacles in fandom that seem to have become exacerbated now compared to when I was younger are things like:

1) The way external bodies/legislation are affecting the operation of fandom sites. This has obviously been a really big issue. Strikethrough and its sudden account deletions on Livejournal related to objectionable content accelerated the creation of AO3 and changed how fanfic is posted on the internet. And later, the reason why LiveJournal continued to decline as a fandom platform was partly because it was sold to a Russian media company and became beholden to Russian law, which badly affected the policies regarding freedom of speech and LGBT content. The reason why Tumblr imploded back in 2018 was because it had a panic over its app being rejected from the Apple store because app store reviewers were able to easily find pornographic content. U.S. law (FOSTA/SESTA is my guess (I think this made websites responsible for not removing illegal sexual content on their website, similar to how the DMCA also made platforms responsible for copyright violations occurring on their website)), advertisers, and Apple's soft app store monopoly have all created huge pressures to scrub sites of pornographic/adult content -- for fear of legal liabilities if children are able to view that content and because advertisers never like their ads appearing next to pornographic content.

(When I was younger, the main external legislation threatening fandom was copyright and takedown notices. Thanks to AO3/OTW, though, this has largely disappeared as an issue for fandom.)

I was telling a friend recently that, compared to Tumblr and despite its own clunkiness, DeviantArt still remains a decent way to post art because its gallery functions and permalink URLs allow art (even very old art) to be stored in an organized archive and the entire site remains browsable even without an account. However, in trying to evaluate how good a site dA is for posting mature art (compared to Twitter, Tumblr (RIP), etc.), I took a look at DeviantArt's mature content policy and wowza, it is horrible. Explicit drawn sex is only allowed if it is behind a paywall(???), drawn art of aged up underage characters is forbidden, and so is "certain other fringe sexual fetish creations, such as incest, necrophilia, amputation, cannibalism, and other similar themes." Love that "other similar themes." This is a wild content policy, and one that I'm guessing is to largely remove the need to make judgment calls by drawing a very broad circle around corner cases and just banning everything in that circle entirely. Like, if it's objectionable enough that someone complained about it? Then it's gone.

Anyway, because of these increasing pressures from multiple angles to remove 18+ content from websites, I think the AO3/Dreamwidth strategy of eschewing a mobile app and being ad-free is one that is probably quite critical to the long-term functioning of fandom, where "fandom" here means more like... a specific large, flat community of fans/amateur artists/creators who tend to offer their creations to the public for free. Fandom is only one such community and there are many others out there, but fandom is a large one. And while fandom doesn't necessarily need to contain or be friendly to adult content in order to thrive, I think, insofar as fandom is a large, flat community of amateur creatives, it is extremely sensitive to the issue of/vulnerable to censorship and what society considers obscene or pornographic, and so it is not possible for fandom to completely ignore the issue of content policies and obscenity.

The issue of antis in fandom is also very much tied up in this debate too, as the kind of content that advertisers do not like and that legislators try to render illegal has a lot of overlap with the kind of content antis find objectionable as well.

I also think that both AO3 and Dreamwidth being quite "low-bandwidth"/plain-text-heavy websites probably helps a lot in keeping them safe bastions for 18+ content. It's hard to stumble upon or accidentally consume written porn as opposed to visual porn, just because text requires more effort and time to consume (although I think people should be careful about how explicit they make their summaries on AO3; on occasion I'll see a summary that's a snippet of the fic and I'll just be like... "You prrrobably should have picked a slightly more tame summary that conveys what the fic is about without making people read a violent sex scene just to see if they want to check out the full fic..."). And even though AO3 and Dreamwidth are text-based websites, this actually I think allows them to be pretty friendly to explicit fanart, more so than other visual sites that put in image previews automatically. Because site limitations or site etiquette strongly discourage people from putting large/sensitive images outside a cut, artists can post their explicit content pretty confidently while ensuring that only people who are happy to see that content will view it. Everyone wins.

A lack of recommendation/content discovery algorithms (more on this in the next point) also helps keep potentially upsetting/disturbing content from appearing to people unsolicited and without warning.

2) The exhausting rat race of engagement and content production. I've seen a lot of people on Tumblr complain about the phenomenon of fandom becoming a game of "content creators" producing content hoping for "audience engagement" and that this way of thinking about fandom is frankly exhausting and alienating? I think this is part of a general social media trend, which is that (1) media sites favor that posts are public and easily shareable by default, (2) media sites favor content that is easily-consumable (art that can be consumed in a few seconds, video about one minute long, humorous short-form comedy text posts that take less than a minute to read; all of the above rebloggable in a click or two), and (3) aggressive "content discovery" to make sure users have a never-ending stream of new and interesting content on the site. All of this is to maximize the sheer amount of time people spend on the site, presumably to convince advertisers and investors to pour money into the site... But the result of all of this is that (1) everything is just out in the open -- if you want to share your stuff, you have to share it with the whole internet (which is the point), (2) posts are subjected to social/viral spreading patterns where zero-uptake posts get even less uptake and highly catchy posts (with high "R" factor) get more attention, which, when combined with (1), makes going viral actually a kind of terrible experience, and (3) shallow forms of engagement are favored over actually communicating with people.

What this means is that we get this dopamine hit of notes/"engagement", but get none of the actually rewarding things one might hope would come out of that -- friendship, connection, conversation, etc. I was just reading a book that describes easily quantifiable metrics (e.g. on social media) as a kind of non-consensual gamification of activities of daily life, and that unfortunately is the way that social media websites are going in order to remain financially viable. The goal of these websites is to get as many eyeballs on as much content as possible; the goal of people on these websites is to go viral or to "grow" their engagement year after year. But in all cases, there is very little attention paid to whether all of this effort is making people happier or healthier.

In this case, AO3 is more on the "bad" end of things than it was regarding external pressures. It too is geared very heavily toward "everything is visible and searchable", and it has tons of metrics (which the site allows users to sort by) that create Matthew effects and encourage that "chasing engagement" behavior. (There are site skins people have made to remove stats displays, but it might be nice if the site itself allowed people to set that as an option.) On the other hand, though, the presence of powerful search functions and the lack of social feeds and sharing equalizes the attention works get in the tag (rather than have the two settings of "essentially invisible" and "spreading virally"); the lack of advertising removes the need for unsolicited content-pushing. Overall, this isn't terrible for a site that is meant as a public archive, where things being public and easily searchable is the point.

Tumblr is of course terrible along this dimension. It is very hard to find posts (especially older posts) WITHOUT the viral/social spreading mechanism. Real-time notifications give that dopamine hit of "engagement" and act as constant reminders of what content is popular/unpopular. Everything is public if you want to use the website. While it gives the option to display posts chronologically, the default is "popular"/Tumblr's algorithm.

Dreamwidth still remains the best site on this dimension IMO. You cannot like or share posts. In order to indicate you've seen a post and appreciate it, you actually need to say that to the author. Comments are the only statistic that is really available, and a post having more comments doesn't necessarily mean "this post is likable/entertaining" but more like "this post made me want to say something in response." So there really is a much tighter coupling between the numerical comment count on a post and what you might hope such a metric means: how much engagement that post is getting.

DeviantArt is also not terrible here although not great either. I still don't understand how its search and recommendation algorithms work, so I'll ignore them. But there are various ways in which the site encourages people to actually engage with the work that they see. Probably most prominently is that DeviantArt does not have a "like" or "share" button but rather a "favorite" button and other mechanisms that collect art into galleries. Both of the latter features are essentially a bookmark/rec/explicit curation sort of mechanism, which is a much more active action to take than just passive liking/reblogging. It also puts effort into mechanisms that encourage people to welcome new members to the site and to provide concrit to inexperienced artists, which are deeper forms of engagement that treat other users as people, not "content generators."

Pillowfort is a hybrid between Tumblr and Dreamwidth, at least from what I've seen. It still has the reblogging mechanism, but it has more privacy features (and, relatedly, no advertising) and has mechanisms to support back-and-forth discussion better. I'm not sure how well it works, though, and with the funding model so up in the air, I don't really see it as the future of fandom, although I think it's at least got some good ideas of what building blocks are needed to make a fandom-friendly website.

The other thing I was thinking about was exchanges. One of the ways in which Dreamwidth is quite active/thriving is in the exchange scene. It used to be the case that kink memes were big, and some have managed to hang on, but they're harder to make work nowadays. It seems like multifandom exchanges have stepped in to fill the vacuum. I keep tabs on events that are posted in fandomcalendar, including ones based on Tumblr and Twitter and not just Dreamwidth. I've noticed that doing exchanges on Dreamwidth is much easier/a better experience compared with Tumblr/Twitter. Tumblr is an incredibly slow/bloated website and it has limited ability to search through or filter posts by tag; pagination is unreliable; limited HTML formatting options (including lack of expandable cuts) makes reading information in long posts a nightmare. Twitter (because of the post length limit) heavily relies on external links. Even keeping something as simple as the event schedule at the top of the page (which is the #1 thing I think people need to be able to look up, or maybe #2 after links to the AO3 collection/tagset) is not easy, not to mention other basic info about the exchange people might want. Meanwhile, Dreamwidth is lightweight, loads a static page quickly, provides tag lists upfront for easy searching, and powerful HTML options allows long posts to be organized in a very readable way.

So I think that Dreamwidth will continue to be the uncontested king when it comes to these kinds of fannish gift exchange events (especially of the multifandom variety). Unfortunately, most of the PEOPLE are on Tumblr/Twitter, so I often feel compelled to advertise my events there (and more people who sign up hear about it via those venues!), even though I run events through Dreamwidth only.

Thinking about the future of exchanges also made me think that I've seen exchanges go through a lot of changes since I've been doing them. Freeform exchanges centered around narrow tropey themes, flash exchanges, longfic exchanges, etc. Meanwhile, Yuletide is ancient and still thriving. I guess if I were to say what are the things that I think are maybe worrying about the long-term continuation of these multifandom exchanges, one thing that sticks out to me is that the exchange calendar is chronically quite packed, and I think this has been exacerbated by the creation of three 10k+ exchanges. This is a kind of problem that tends to kind of solve itself over time -- when the exchange calendar is too packed, exchanges tend to die and not get replaced and people hesitate before creating a new exchange. Running an exchange is a lot of mod effort anyway, so I don't think we'll get an issue where there's a runaway exchange calendar problem where the calendar just keeps on getting more and more packed.

But I do think the packed calendar does impact how much feedback works in exchanges get. People debate this a lot and it's hard to get any empirical data to corroborate this theory, but I think it does make sense that people have less time to read widely and leave feedback on works in an exchange aside from their gift because they are scrambling to finish up their work for the next exchange deadline. IDK, maybe this is just me? 😂

But it kind of reminds me of the social media trends and also the fact that I am super behind in the Quodo tag right now. While it's really great to get content -- and modern social media just throws SO much content at you -- I think the problem of the modern internet isn't "Am I going to be able to find enough stuff I'll enjoy to fill my free time with?!" so much as "WHAT of the amazing content out there on the internet should I be spending time with and how much time do I want to invest in engaging with that content?" And I think maybe a return to closed communities of a fairly small size as a place where you primarily consume content (or prioritize consuming content), mainly because you want to make/maintain friendships, might be the answer to that question. You're not going to get the absolute BEST stuff the internet has to offer from the members of those communities, but you might make friends by being responsive and supportive of those members' works and it's a small enough group that you can (hopefully) invest a meaningful amount of time into each person.

So basically, I guess what I would say as far as where I would like to see fandom go? I hope to see fandom move more in the direction of:

- Low-bandwidth websites. Text-heavy. Cheaper hosting, therefore a more viable funding model (i.e. not beholden to advertisers/investors). Investing a lot of time into one post is seen as more normal/typical, rather than infinite scroll through bite-size, 5-seconds-of-engagement posts. A norm of hiding large/potentially objectionable art behind cuts protects adult content artists and ensures a better browsing experience.
- Sites where you can choose to share your work with a limited audience. Both in terms of strict privacy features (like Dreamwidth's privacy settings) but also in terms of technically public content/content archives that in practice are difficult to find and so are essentially "private" (for example, public posts that a no-name account makes and can later lock if it starts to get too much attention; Dreamwidth communities where members can choose to members-lock their posts to that community -- while joining the community is technically an action that anyone can take so the content is publicly available, in practice, the number of people who will see that content is quite limited and visibility is dependent on remaining in good standing in the community (i.e. not being booted by the mod)).
- Prioritizing a small number of close friends over The Internet As A Whole. Both in terms of where you spend your time (e.g. giving feedback) and also whose engagement you find worthwhile and valuable.
- Focusing on a small number of fanworks/events rather than go All The Things! Goes along with first and third points. Rather than go full throttle on the production machine, maybe take the time to slow down and smell the flowers that already exist.

Discord is a very interesting site because I think it actually fulfills a lot of these criteria (text-based/low bandwidth, limited audiences, deep interactions, no metrics, etc.). I don't really like Discord, though, because ultimately, a lot of the content is just locked behind this closed site that you have to be logged into to view. Any interesting conversations/meta/ideas/etc. generated there are ephemeral and will disappear. Which is good for privacy but bad if you want to involve a whole fandom (including newbies) in an ongoing discussion. (Relatedly, Discord is a TERRIBLE platform for running exchanges IMO, because of the way important info gets easily buried with no public record e.g. of mod decisions/answers to questions. Yeah, you can use pins but like... if you're okay with people needing to click 3 or 4 times before they find the information they're looking for...) I think what Discord provides that no other site does, though, is the ability for multiple people (like, a whole community) to chat with each other informally, which actually does promote deeper friendships. I think the closest thing to this is Reddit, but its discussions are way more structured than Discord (like more post + response rather than formless conversation). Another issue I've had with Discord is that it's very difficult to tell how well-modded or non-toxic a Discord server's environment will be until it's too late and you run into a serious issue and realize you need to nope out of the server. And there's no easy way to delete all your messages when that happens, which I understand the reasoning behind, but it kind of nullifies the point of having a private/semi-ephemeral space IMO. If I'm no longer in that closed space, my posts shouldn't be there anymore either, lingering like some kind of ghost.

Anyway, I can see some potential for Discord being a good alternative to the pervasive trends in social media toward Extreme Publicness and shallow engagement, especially since high-quality group chat software just doesn't exist anywhere else. But overall, I continue to be hopeful about Dreamwidth as a platform that can survive long-term.

Comments

[chacusha]

Yep, the stability and easy readability of DW links is a really valuable feature of the site, especially for meta/discussion. I love Cranky Fandom Old spaces too -- they're really needed in this fandom climate.

And yeah, if I leave a server just because I don't vibe with it or don't have time for it, I'm completely fine with leaving my messages up. If I leave it because something has happened to break my trust in the judgment of the mod of the server, then I REALLY don't want my messages to stay up. o_o;