Something that's been confusing me about 'recent' changes in fandom:
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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Yeah, I have. It's completely useless, I agree. *g* And, as I've said elsewhere in this thread, I was never a great fan of newsgroups and mailing lists, so I'm not nostalgic for older forms of fannish interaction in *general* - just for *some* formats/types of sites that I think *do* fit certain purposes better than LJ. (Lists, btw, aren't one of them, IMO!) Although of course an archive can be formatted in such a stupid way as to be virtually useless, and an LJ fic community *can* be formatted so intelligently that it serves as a perfectly good substitute for an archive. (See above for several replies in which I make that point in some more detail.)
>I think this problem has over the past few years basically been solved by delicious,
I have to admit to being a dinosaur: I have *heard* the name 'del.ici.ous' a lot in recent years, but so far have failed to understand what exactly it does and how it works.
>list-maintainers (as in the LJ-version: those people that maintain large lists of stories by kink/pairing/genre w/e)
Nice, yes, but again: decentralised and not all that easy to find, in many cases.
>and newsletters.
Often useless in big fandoms, unless equipped with a very good set of tags and memories - or unless you manage to *constantly* keep up with them.
>Also recjournals,
Well, there have always been recs pages, so that's nothing new. The problem with recs pages is that they preselect for you, and maybe you don't always *want* stuff preselected for you? Maybe your tastes don't fit those of reccers, maybe you're after a very particular kink, maybe there are authors that are really good but so obscure the reccers haven't noticed them yet, etc. Maybe sometimes what you really want is a central place with a huge store of fic that you can search according to your own very personal criteria. Archives provide that.
>memories, and tags! There are tags now, so that's easier, isn't it?
Tags are definitely an improvement, yes. But for large-scale use they have disadvantages (although these can be alleviated by using the memories feature, I will admit - check my replies to various people up-thread for a discussion of that.)
>OK, for example: I had a sudden irrepressible craving to read some Snarry time travel epic slash the other week. God knows why, you know, I'm not even in HP fandom; I know hardly anything about it.
Heh. That is *exactly* the kind of highly specific, bizarre urge I occasionally get for fandoms I'm not involved in. I understand completely. And that is exactly what I don't know how to find anymore.
>it was no trouble to quickly bring up the HP/SS tag on delicious, add +time travel and get a nice selection of stories to read
Okay, I *clearly* need to learn how to use del.ici.ous. *g*
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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.
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I'm in pretty much total agreement with you about LJ (except I miss mailing lists, which I'm better suited to than forums), and I'm also in agreement with the suggestion to try del.icio.us -- I went from being basically cut off from fandom for years because I can't deal with reading LJ, to suddenly being able to find stories in as many fandoms as I wanted. I'm still cut off from most discussion, but at least I've got the fic (and the vids, for that matter).
If you're interested, I wrote up a tutorial a few weeks back for fans wanting to learn about del.icio.us, which I'm told was useful for folks, even people who'd been using it for a while (the interface isn't all that intuitive at first glance). The preliminary overview and brief tutorial are here: http://aka-arduinna.livejournal.com/9837.html , and the detailed, step-by-step tutorial is here: http://trickster.org/arduinna/delicious.html.
(I've also got a couple of LJ-related essays up on my essays page, which are cranky and probably overdone, but heartfelt. *g*)
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