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

[hmpf]

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

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Re: Reply-o-rama, part two

[hmpf]

>You don't have to put up with things you're not into

This is quite an interesting argument in defense of LJ, because, *in fact*, I've never been 'forced' to read as much stuff that isn't exactly the kind of stuff I'm interested in in fandom before I joined LJ. When you subscribe to someone's LJ because they wrote a story you liked and you're not sure they'll post the next one to a community you're reading, you in effect subscribe to their life.

Maybe I don't *want* to subscribe to 100+ people's lives? Or maybe I would even want to, if I had the time - but I don't *have* that time. My flist is completely unmanageable by now; it requires so much attention that I frequently just completely drop out of LJ for months on end just because it's too much of a strain to constantly stay up to date with everything and everyone. True, there are some 30 or so people on my flist that I know well enough to really want to stay up to date not just with their fic and meta but also with their toothaches, pets, and hard drive crashes. And the rest, the other 90 or so people, may well be people I *could* get close enough to and find enough common ground etc. to get interested in their toothaches, pets and hard drive crashes, too. It's not an issue of not being *interested* in making closer personal contacts with these people, but simply the matter of how many people can you *really* get close to in that way, and keep up with, before keeping up any kind of life of your own becomes impossible? There are only so many hours in the day...

So, to be honest, LJ requires me to read or at least skim a *lot* more stuff that I'm only tangentially interested in every day just to keep up with fandom than I *ever* had to in my pre-LJ fannish life.

>ff.net has something like 250,000 HP stories!

I admit that at a size like that you need more/better/more precise categories; and at that size of fandom/archive you do need recs lists, too, I think. But most fandoms don't have millions of fics, or even tens ouf thousands, but rather hundreds, or thousands - and that, with a good system of categorisation, is perfectly manageable by a good archive, in such a way that will enable readers to actually find what they want pretty quickly. I'm actually in the middle of setting up an archive with a few people from Life On Mars fandom, and we're discussing what categories to make right now. Categories are one of the things that really make or break a fic archive. ff.net isn't exactly great in terms of categorising fic - if you were able to, say, search for combinations of categories - Harry/Draco + angst + (list of other characters to include) + post book 7, for example - you'd be able to narrow the amount of fics down somewhat!

>I can't cope with that quantity of information without

And I can't cope with the speed of LJ. And the amount of information, too. I'm actually terrified of checking my flist because there's several dozen posts on there every day.

>Anyway, here's a really great post by Sophia Jirafe about LiveJournal

Thanks. That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, I think. Will definitely check that out.