Comments | hmpf: Something that's been confusing me about 'recent' changes in fandom:

hmpf

Something that's been confusing me about 'recent' changes in fandom:

May 22, 2007 18:13

fandom seems to have moved to livejournal almost completely, even for those things that aren't necessarily best served by LJ. In fact, very little except the pure socialising part of fandom - which is, of course, an important part, no contest about that! - is *really* best served by LJ. Forums are better suited for discussion, since they allow ( Read more... )

archives vs. lj, keeping stuff accessible, changes in fandom, do we need a 'slow fandom' movement?, lj, fandom, fandom meta, forums vs. lj, meta, lj meta

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Re: Accessibility... chicafrom3 May 24 2007, 00:23:26 UTC

don't know the right communities for the fandoms they're interested in,

I'd put money on there being a comparable number of people who don't know the archives for the fandoms they're interested in. I should know, I'm one of them; I've gotten into new fandoms, checked Google to see if there was a fandom-specific archive, failed, and floundered helplessly.

And then gone to LJ, typed in the fandom of my choice into "Interests", and found communities dedicated to it. As far as I know, there isn't a Black Donnellys-specific archive around, and the FFN pickings are laughable to say the least; donnellysfic, on the other hand, was easy for me to find, it remains easy to navigate, I can sort through it by the characters I want, the pairings I want, the ratings I want, or the authors I want, and when I post my fic there I can be reasonably confident that a good chunk of the fandom is going to be offered the choice of reading it.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just horribly, horribly biased because I tend towards small fandoms. My biggest fandom is probably Doctor Who, which does have a "main" fic archive, whofic.com--but I don't trust the quality there, I have difficulty navigating the site, and most of the interesting fics will pop up on dwfiction or who_daily sooner or later.

In short: I've actually found LJ to be easier to use than most of the archives...for those of my fandoms that have fandom-specific archives.

Re: Accessibility... hmpf May 24 2007, 00:41:50 UTC

Maybe it is a generational thing. I dunno. I just really like stuff nice and central, collected in one place. That place *can* be an LJ community, too - it's not the concept of communities-as-archives that I object to, but rather the fact that few communities really seem to be run dedicatedly *as archives*, i.e. with useful tags and memories and little or no clutter, etc. Although you may run into problems with the concept of communities-as-archives in big fandoms with big fic outputs, because (correct me if I'm wrong) the tags feature only allows you to go back 100 entries for each tag, which means that in a popular category, anything older than the last 100 fics will become inaccessible. But even that can be conquered by using the memories features, so, again - yes, I think communities *could* serve as a decent replacement for archives. If they were actually used properly as such.

Clarification hmpf May 24 2007, 02:36:16 UTC

>Maybe it is a generational thing

By this, I did not mean age, but rather the style of fandom you got used to when you joined fandom. I'm still very influenced by older formats and ways of 'doing fandom' (joined fandom in 1998). Just thought I should clarify that.

Re: Clarification chicafrom3 May 24 2007, 04:10:31 UTC

I think 1998 was about the same time I joined online fandom? Probably. Roughly speaking.

I do think it's an experience thing, though; I've been lucky enough to wind up mostly in well-run communities-as-archive in my LJ fic experience. Were I in an overwhelmingly big fandom (like, say, Harry Potter, which scares the hell out of me) my experiences might (would...) be incredibly different.

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