I am going to do the thing!
I want to post more. So, here is to more posts, less second-guessing, less editing *cough* and the five people left on LJ/DW that aren't in online RPGs.
I realized over this Dragon*con that I'm not remember the usernames of new fandom people as well. I've always had a pretty hard time with names (and faces) and fandom can be kind of an overwhelming place with so many active people that it can be confusing. I normally take a looooong time to get into a fandom, which can give me time to distinguish individuals as I go.
But I've been lurking around Inception for, gosh, over two years now, and I've still only remembered dozen or so names.
I think it's a little bit from the new fandom platforms. I used to remember people using a lot of visual cues, like their default user icon, their journal layout, etc. Tumblr users don't utilize userpics the same way, and the layouts are either super-plain or horrible.
But even more important, AO3! I think the layout to AO3 is fabulous and the downloading options are the best thing ever, but there is very little to distinguish the author while I read. Just the username on top, which I TOTALLY skim by sometimes.
I think there's a cultural shift that comes from putting the fic in a seperate place from the meta, the journal, the messy thought and the unbetaed flash fic. It's not necessarily a bad thing! AO3 is, for lack of a better term, a lot more cleaned-up than LJ. It's easier to find the fic you want and just zoom past all the other junk.
On the other end of the spectrum, tumblr is so jammed with junk that even when I know that people post flash fic or ficlets or dabbles and what-have-you on their tumblr, if I'm not constantly checking and saving (and I'm TOTALLY NOT) I won't find it again. It can feel that if it's not "clean enough" for AO3, it won't get archived.
There's a part of me that even misses the really messy ff.net days, when for lack of anything else, people basically wrote journal posts as Authors Notes at the beginning of their fic chapters. I would sometimes know a lot about the writer's personality, thought process and sense of humor (remember when authors used A/Ns to reply to comments? :D) before even reading the next chapter.
By contrast, AO3 notes tend to be fairly minimal, sometimes to frustration.
Of course, ff.net also had the "lack of distinguishing visual characteristics of the fic layout" problem, and I memorized very few writer names on ff.net, and I was never much active in fandom there either.
But at least people filled out their profiles on ff.net. On AO3 and tumblr, I may never know anything about anyone!
__
OH! I also want to post about LJ BNF culture. I had some really interesting discussions.
(This entry is also posted on Dreamwidth.org. Feel free to comment on either site. Although my dreamwidth background has space! Spaaaace!)
I realized over this Dragon*con that I'm not remember the usernames of new fandom people as well. I've always had a pretty hard time with names (and faces) and fandom can be kind of an overwhelming place with so many active people that it can be confusing. I normally take a looooong time to get into a fandom, which can give me time to distinguish individuals as I go.
But I've been lurking around Inception for, gosh, over two years now, and I've still only remembered dozen or so names.
I think it's a little bit from the new fandom platforms. I used to remember people using a lot of visual cues, like their default user icon, their journal layout, etc. Tumblr users don't utilize userpics the same way, and the layouts are either super-plain or horrible.
But even more important, AO3! I think the layout to AO3 is fabulous and the downloading options are the best thing ever, but there is very little to distinguish the author while I read. Just the username on top, which I TOTALLY skim by sometimes.
I think there's a cultural shift that comes from putting the fic in a seperate place from the meta, the journal, the messy thought and the unbetaed flash fic. It's not necessarily a bad thing! AO3 is, for lack of a better term, a lot more cleaned-up than LJ. It's easier to find the fic you want and just zoom past all the other junk.
On the other end of the spectrum, tumblr is so jammed with junk that even when I know that people post flash fic or ficlets or dabbles and what-have-you on their tumblr, if I'm not constantly checking and saving (and I'm TOTALLY NOT) I won't find it again. It can feel that if it's not "clean enough" for AO3, it won't get archived.
There's a part of me that even misses the really messy ff.net days, when for lack of anything else, people basically wrote journal posts as Authors Notes at the beginning of their fic chapters. I would sometimes know a lot about the writer's personality, thought process and sense of humor (remember when authors used A/Ns to reply to comments? :D) before even reading the next chapter.
By contrast, AO3 notes tend to be fairly minimal, sometimes to frustration.
Of course, ff.net also had the "lack of distinguishing visual characteristics of the fic layout" problem, and I memorized very few writer names on ff.net, and I was never much active in fandom there either.
But at least people filled out their profiles on ff.net. On AO3 and tumblr, I may never know anything about anyone!
__
OH! I also want to post about LJ BNF culture. I had some really interesting discussions.
(This entry is also posted on Dreamwidth.org. Feel free to comment on either site. Although my dreamwidth background has space! Spaaaace!)