State of fandom ?
So I'm in a bad mood, mostly because my city is kind of wrecked, which of course there is nothing I can do anything about. However, I've also been thinking about fandom a bunch recently, especially with the LJ flist redesign riling people up. Hopefully this won't be too rambling and will make some sense?
So I've gone through a lot of LJ feelings. Back when there were all those outages, I was very stridently in support of LJ, and then when LJ did some shitty things I was very bitter anti them, and now I am sort of ...indifferent, I guess? To the company. I get that they have some sort of vision they want to implement, and that certain segments of users, such as fandom, are not who they want on the site. Which is totally their prerogative, as they're a company and they want to make money. But basically, all of their changes and their vision are the opposite of what I use LJ for- they are ending paid accounts, and thus all customization and having lots of userpics, they are making that blinding white and blue scheme the standard scheme, they are letting you pay other users to promote your posts, and turning the flist into a tumblr like dash.
Aside from just being annoying, that color scheme tends to give me a headache, and my laptop, which is only about 2 years old and has 6 gb of RAM, gets fucked up by infinite scrolling and the new commenting pages, which I have turned off. Over the past few years, functionality of the site seems to have gotten worse, not better.
Regardless of that, which I'm guessing is partly a factor, I'm pretty sure everyone on livejournal has noticed that LJ is pretty much dying. My flist is much, much quieter than it was 6 months ago, or a year ago. I know people are moving to different sites, which is fine, but here's the thing: I have been on livejournal for 9 years, and the majority of that time, I've been on it for fandom purposes. I've been into fandom since high school, but back then it was basically just mailing lists and searching for people's personal websites where they hosted fic or finding archives. What I really liked about LJ was that it brought so much of that together in one nice package. Comms meant I could basically subscribe to all sorts of fandom stuff to be delivered via my flist, and the format encouraged much more communication and discussion than the vaguely intimidating prospect of going out of your way to email an author, which also, admittedly, seemed like a lot of work. So while I guess I can just go back to random searches for fandom stuff, I would really miss that community and just talking to people and flisters.
And I do have a tumblr, which is where a lot of fandom stuff is now. And IMO Tumblr is really good for posting graphics and fanart, and I really like it for bringing me a lot of fandom art and gifs that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. And it's good for when I need something calming and mindless when I'm stressed that doesn't involve interaction. However, it's not good for much else, like fic or personal stuff. I find it difficult to comment on things, it's rather unwieldy to keep things you're not interested in off you dash (though tumblr savior is exactly that), you can't make things private or flocked, and it's pretty impossible to have a conversation. Also, I find that the format pretty much encourages reposting other people's stuff ad-nauseum but not really sharing your own stuff (unless it's also graphics), or not so much stuff like talking about your day or sharing opinions. I mean, that does happen, but trying to follow a conversation thread is murder, and trying to see all comments on things is also a pain because it's usually all hidden in tags. So it doesn't really encourage me to do much more than lurk, and if it's the choice between reposting someone's long-ass story just to comment on it, and seeing it on my dash again, or just hitting the little heart button, the heart button wins every time. (And I don't know how people that write feel, but I post my silly graphics occasionally, and while it's certainly nice to see that a billion people "liked" what I posted, I'd much rather have 10 actual comments on something than 100 likes.) Also, I am big on fanfic, and following fic on tumblr, or finding it, or linking to it even is such a pain. (And there's also some other stuff I don't like about tumblr, but it's less relevant so I'm not going to get into it.)
And yeah, I cross-post pretty much exclusively from Dreamwidth, which is a great site/format for blogging and conversation, and has pretty much most of the stuff missing from LJ that I like, but there is not much fandom presence on it currently (except for like, fandom secrets and RP blogs I think)- my interactions on it are usually with personal blogs. (If any of my LJ flist is on there, feel free to add me.)
So I guess really what the point of this is, what is everyone else doing? Have people just all moved to tumblr? Is fandom hiding somewhere else? Are people giving up on fandom-y stuff? If you've moved to tumblr, are you having the same issues I'm having, and have you figured out how to work around them? Ugh. I just feel like lots of the things I like about fandom, like reading fic in one place and people's fandom opinions and meta and personal stories and all that are sort of disappearing, and I don't know if I'm just being dumb and behind the times and need to adapt or if there's something I'm missing. I don't know if this entry makes any sense at all.
This entry has traveled in time from DW at: http://redcirce.dreamwidth.org/128803.html. You can comment here or there using OpenID!
sharp sticks
So I've gone through a lot of LJ feelings. Back when there were all those outages, I was very stridently in support of LJ, and then when LJ did some shitty things I was very bitter anti them, and now I am sort of ...indifferent, I guess? To the company. I get that they have some sort of vision they want to implement, and that certain segments of users, such as fandom, are not who they want on the site. Which is totally their prerogative, as they're a company and they want to make money. But basically, all of their changes and their vision are the opposite of what I use LJ for- they are ending paid accounts, and thus all customization and having lots of userpics, they are making that blinding white and blue scheme the standard scheme, they are letting you pay other users to promote your posts, and turning the flist into a tumblr like dash.
Aside from just being annoying, that color scheme tends to give me a headache, and my laptop, which is only about 2 years old and has 6 gb of RAM, gets fucked up by infinite scrolling and the new commenting pages, which I have turned off. Over the past few years, functionality of the site seems to have gotten worse, not better.
Regardless of that, which I'm guessing is partly a factor, I'm pretty sure everyone on livejournal has noticed that LJ is pretty much dying. My flist is much, much quieter than it was 6 months ago, or a year ago. I know people are moving to different sites, which is fine, but here's the thing: I have been on livejournal for 9 years, and the majority of that time, I've been on it for fandom purposes. I've been into fandom since high school, but back then it was basically just mailing lists and searching for people's personal websites where they hosted fic or finding archives. What I really liked about LJ was that it brought so much of that together in one nice package. Comms meant I could basically subscribe to all sorts of fandom stuff to be delivered via my flist, and the format encouraged much more communication and discussion than the vaguely intimidating prospect of going out of your way to email an author, which also, admittedly, seemed like a lot of work. So while I guess I can just go back to random searches for fandom stuff, I would really miss that community and just talking to people and flisters.
And I do have a tumblr, which is where a lot of fandom stuff is now. And IMO Tumblr is really good for posting graphics and fanart, and I really like it for bringing me a lot of fandom art and gifs that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. And it's good for when I need something calming and mindless when I'm stressed that doesn't involve interaction. However, it's not good for much else, like fic or personal stuff. I find it difficult to comment on things, it's rather unwieldy to keep things you're not interested in off you dash (though tumblr savior is exactly that), you can't make things private or flocked, and it's pretty impossible to have a conversation. Also, I find that the format pretty much encourages reposting other people's stuff ad-nauseum but not really sharing your own stuff (unless it's also graphics), or not so much stuff like talking about your day or sharing opinions. I mean, that does happen, but trying to follow a conversation thread is murder, and trying to see all comments on things is also a pain because it's usually all hidden in tags. So it doesn't really encourage me to do much more than lurk, and if it's the choice between reposting someone's long-ass story just to comment on it, and seeing it on my dash again, or just hitting the little heart button, the heart button wins every time. (And I don't know how people that write feel, but I post my silly graphics occasionally, and while it's certainly nice to see that a billion people "liked" what I posted, I'd much rather have 10 actual comments on something than 100 likes.) Also, I am big on fanfic, and following fic on tumblr, or finding it, or linking to it even is such a pain. (And there's also some other stuff I don't like about tumblr, but it's less relevant so I'm not going to get into it.)
And yeah, I cross-post pretty much exclusively from Dreamwidth, which is a great site/format for blogging and conversation, and has pretty much most of the stuff missing from LJ that I like, but there is not much fandom presence on it currently (except for like, fandom secrets and RP blogs I think)- my interactions on it are usually with personal blogs. (If any of my LJ flist is on there, feel free to add me.)
So I guess really what the point of this is, what is everyone else doing? Have people just all moved to tumblr? Is fandom hiding somewhere else? Are people giving up on fandom-y stuff? If you've moved to tumblr, are you having the same issues I'm having, and have you figured out how to work around them? Ugh. I just feel like lots of the things I like about fandom, like reading fic in one place and people's fandom opinions and meta and personal stories and all that are sort of disappearing, and I don't know if I'm just being dumb and behind the times and need to adapt or if there's something I'm missing. I don't know if this entry makes any sense at all.
This entry has traveled in time from DW at: http://redcirce.dreamwidth.org/128803.html. You can comment here or there using OpenID!
sharp sticks