Signal Boost

[blue_meridian]

This is a thing that happened:

So, I got to the bottom of why I was getting such weird comments on a relatively obscure fic of mine-it’s required reading in a class being taught, and one of the assignments is to leave a comment on the required reading which is more critical than constructive so that the professors know students are “engaging” with

Comments

[kellifer_fic]

The goal of the assignment is to achieve significant immersion and success in the fanfiction community.

What? That's just... odd.

leave a comment on the required reading which is more critical than constructive so that the professors know students are “engaging” with the texts in a way that isn’t just “YAY I LIKED IT.”

I don't... why should they have to post that publicly instead of bringing this 'criticism' to class? They are being required to basically flame/bash a story that they might have no concept about or knowledge of the source material. I don't know how that in particular is 'successfully' engaging with fandom because it means it's very obvious that these people are getting forced to read this stuff and are obviously outside of fandom. The authors can also delete these comments.

[blue_meridian]

As I said in a comment over on DW, I think there was some wide eyed naivete at work here in terms of class leads maybe thinking only about what they would do and how they would react without taking anything else into consideration. Clearly they needed much more guidance than what they got and someone greenlighted it possibly without even reading the proposal.

[marbleglove]

Yeah, that is crazy. It is not, alas, unprecedented. Some years back a professor of comparative religion (who really should have known better) at my local university assigned their students to attend and participate in a variety of local religious services. It wound up being quite disruptive.

[blue_meridian]

Oh my, I can just imagine!!

[cinderella81]

Yeah, I saw this last night. I checked the list and thankfully none of my works are on the list, but I have friends who are ... I'm hoping everyone got contacted to alert them to this ... and purposely critical comments? That is just going to lead to badness. There are some REALLY good fics on that list and I would hate for them to take their fics down because of stupid people.

[blue_meridian]

It's a mess, but it at least seems like the class in question is now VERY aware of the issue and at least some of them have responded well, so that's something.

[quiet__tiger]

It's amazing that somehow someone could be dedicated enough to something to want to teach it to others, yet have no idea how it works. At least ask permission from the authors to feature their works. Or at the even leaster, inform them their stories will be read by a class and be evaluated. Granted then people might take down or block the stories somehow.

Being critical solely for the sake of being critical isn't what sharing fic is about.

[blue_meridian]

They are fans themselves! Albeit only lately out of ff.net, but, theoretically, they understood how it works. Either they have very different standards (I did mention ff.net...) or they completely failed to apply critical thinking skills of their own and realize what was likely to happen when people entirely unaware of or no care for the community standards of conduct were dropped into it with no guidance. Permission would be polite, but the critical commentary requirement was where it all seems to have spun so wildly out of control.

[blue_meridian]

Recent (first hand) reports are that they are mostly all fans of some kind, albeit wildly assorted communities and practice, but the class set-up was in such a way that things just went very wrong. (Well, and some of the people involved were perhaps not the, uh, most thoughtful.) It's not a horrible idea in concept and one that I believe has been executed well quite a bit, but this particular execution was terrible and the class leads obviously needed a lot more guidance than what they had. Siiiigh.

I think part of the problem here wasn't so much there was an unusual commenting structure for what the community* generally employs - an ongoing debate, as always, but community standards do currently dictate positive feedback - but that there were a whole slew of them all at the same time. So everything magnified and doubled down in effect very quickly.

*(By which I mean the community these author's are operating in. I recognize there are a multitude of fannish communities with different standards and norms.)