Fandom Snowflake Challenge - Day 14

[elrhiarhodan]

Day 14

In your own space, talk about what you think the future holds for fandom. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I hope, with the migration away from Tumblr, we'll start to see a more community-based fandom experience, again. I don't think it will ever rise to the heights it had been in the days before the disasters on LJ (strikethrough/boldthrough) and the rise of insta-blogging/micro-blogging on Tumblr and Twitter, but I think that if there are a few dedicated souls in each fandom who are willing to put in the time and effort to build the necessary structures on Dreamwidth, and others who will help with the heavy lifting (promotion, signal boosting, etc.), Dreamwidth can be a centralized home for fannish activity.

tozka has been posting their thoughts about fandom and it's future on their journal, and I don't want to reiterate their ideas here (read: steal), and I urge anyone who is the least be interested in the future of fandom on a journal based platform to go read their posts (this one and this one).

Between Doctorsidrat's meta and the last three Fandom Snowflake challenges have really gotten me to think about why it was so easy for fandom to migrate to Tumblr and why it's going to be difficult to rebuild it here on Dreamwidth.

Time. (Queue up Simon and Garfunkel's Hazy Shade of Winter)

It's easy and quick to set up a blog on Tumblr. Tags don't belong to you, they are Tumblr-wide. You don't have to do much to keep people in the loop other than keep hitting the reblog button.

Creating a community on DW is a much more deliberate action. It requires a lot of thought and you need to make some pretty serious choices. Tagging is community specific and for it to be effective, the comm owner needs to set up a tagging system (my experience is that the comm owners should pre-create the tags and not allow members to create their own tags). Signal boosting means you have to reach out to other community owners and ask for permission to post the boost, you have to corral friends of the comm to boost on their journals, and if you're lucky, you'll get someone with a lot of friends who'll see those posts.

All of this effort takes time. It's not easy. Good, well-run communities have clearly spelled out rules that are easily found (it's surprising how many comms don't use their profile page at all and don't sticky-post the rules or put a link to the rules in the sidebar). Things that you think are obvious still need to be spelled out and sometimes, in great and tedious detail, especially for challenges and fanworks exchanges.

Fandom on Dreamwidth will grow again through good, well-maintained and regularly moderated communities, all of which take time and dedication and a handful of people who are able to give that.

Comments

[wendelah1]

I like your sense of optimism.

[meridian_rose]

You're right about the effort involved. I actually co-modded one time only an attempt to have a community event at Tumblr for writers and it was a nightmare in terms of people not reading the instructions, not understanding the instructions, still not getting it after clarification, outright ignoring the instructions, complaining about the event, etc. Running a successful community, event, fest does require effort and patience, but can absolutely be worth it if you get enough positive involvement :)

The tags thing drives me crazy because Tumblr tags aren't actually that good. They only go back about a month for 'most recent', they only allow one tagged post per user for that tag, they seem to disappear (google search for "fandom tag" often leads to tumblr dashboard with zero hits for that thing that did exist, and might still exist but somehow elsewhere). We had the issue with the community tag for the writing event, it didn't work 100% of the time.
So I'd go into the search bar, type "fandom name" and get maybe 10 posts, 2 of which were duplicates in a small fandom because there weren't enough results. And with no AO3 canonical tagging you get things like Fandom, Fandom (TV), Fandom Network, Fandom reboot, Fandom Year, Fandomedit, Fandomedit...which makes it hard to find things.
I always said it sucked not having communities because unless you were a BNF or could get a BNF to reblog your posts, fandom tagging alone would never get you any attention. So I'm please to see more DW activity and people talking about using communities more!

I do think we could do with some optional public, canonical/wrangled tags for DW, though I don't know how feasible it would be. So you could post your 'fandom' tag exactly as you want it but also use the wrangled tag PUBLIC: Fandom (TV, 2016) to allow more people to find it. Because finding posts and communities is something that maybe does need improving in some way to get more people using DW :)

[spikedluv]

Do Not get me started on Tumblr's stupid tagging system! When I started on Tumblr I tagged my pairing posts with the usual '/' (ie, Derek/Stiles) and had no issue searching for tags that also used the '/'. Then one day it stopped working. Tumblr told me that I couldn't use the '/' in tags, and had supposedly Never Been Able to use it. Except how I had. So I checked their info on tags, and they never mention that there are certain characters that you can't use. That bugs me to this day.

[meridian_rose]

Oh yes then you get DerekxStiles or DerekStiles and again multiple tags which may or may not be searchable. There was that whole thing with hyphens too, so derek-hale to avoid spaces in your tag was fine until Tumblr co-opted it to use instead of tags with spaces (I think) so your tag derek-hale no longer worked and...nightmare basically!

[spikedluv]

This is so true! Communities do take a lot of time and effort. I've seen so many people during Snowflake ask about communities, but they're new (mostly) so they're looking for communities that already exist, not something they have to set up. I've encouraged a few people to go ahead and create that community. But you're also correct in that they need to have clear rules and a good tagging system, something many comms lack because people just create a comm and let it go without paying it much attention post-creation.

Luckily we do have several DW comms where you can advertise your new comm, so people should make use of those if they create a community or challenge.

[tjs_whatnot]

It is a lot of work, but I think, worth it.

It's just so much easier--and more return on your investment tbh--to drop the one liners and instant reactions to Twitter and FB then to construct a worthwhile post here.

More importantly, for me is, I have to remember, I have to invest in other people's lives if I want anyone to give a shit about mine, ya know? And that's a lot of work too. UGH. ♥

[lessonsinescapology]

Unless I'm mistaken, Tumblr only shows the most recent posts and tags. It doens't go back like LJ or DW.

I'm hoping for more fandoms to migrate to DW. For example, Kingsman seems to be entirely on Tumblr and it's hard to have a real conversation there.

[silveradept]

Communities are a strength of DW, or would be if there was enough participation in them and they were set up. In mulling over thoughts about how to make them more discoverable and perhaps there's somewhere where a person has put together a guide for creating a findable, active community somewhere?