000. welcome & faq

[tozka]

This Week in Meta is a pan-fandom meta newsletter. It collects links from: Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter, Youtube, blogs, and anywhere else people may be writing and talking about meta. Newsletter guidelines, linking rules and etiquette, as well as posting policies and moderator accounts can be found here.

Anyone can join and anyone can comment, but only editors can post.

FAQ

What is meta?
"In fandom, meta is used to describe a discussion of fanworks of all kinds, fan work in relation to the source text, fanfiction characters and their motivation and psychology, fan behavior, and fandom itself.

Meta or a meta essay can also be a fan-authored piece of non-fiction writing that discusses any of the above topics."
-- via Fanlore

What is linked here?
Meta about: fandom as a whole/concept, fandom history, fannish activities/experiences, fandom statistics/polls, acafan writings, fandom-wide news and resources.

We will (probably) not link to: memes, headcanons about specific characters or fandoms, episode reviews, book reviews, movie reviews, homework help, troll comments/deliberate wank.

Why don't you link to meta about specific fandoms?
Sometimes we do, if it's the kind of meta that could apply to multiple fandom genres, character types, tropes, etc. Also most fandoms have a newsletter or noticeboard of their own, so if you're looking for meta about one specific show, you can usually find it easily enough.

Who runs this thing?
Right now it's tozka, who started it after realizing that all the old meta fandom newsletters had died several years back.

I want to add my link!
Leave a comment on the newest newsletter post, or email the editor.

I don't want my link here!
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I have other questions or comments!
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-- Last updated January 24, 2019.

Comments

[teigh_corvus]

This is such an excellent idea! Thank you for creating this newsletter. :D

[alasse_irena]

Oh this is so gooooood! Thank you!

[sqbr]

Oooh, hooray!

[ride_4ever]

Thank you kindly for creating this newsletter!

[kore]

We don't ask permission to link to publicly available posts, but we will give you a head's up that it's going into an issue.

Mmmm, I don't mind if individual people link to public posts on my DW without asking. I feel a little differently about a big fandom newsletter doing it with no warning.

[muccamukk]

The following is from the_rck, who was one of the metafandom mods and wanted to share her experience, but is currently swamped and can't commit to conversation about it at this time. I offered to post as proxy for her.

During the time when I was doing link finding for metanews, the main reason we didn't link much in the way of LJ or DW posts was staffing limitations*. Asking people for linking permission really wasn't a limiting factor or impediment. Nine out of ten people (possibly nineteen out of twenty) responded to a query in the comments, and almost all of them said yes. We'd wait two to three weeks for a response to the request and then, if we hadn't gotten an answer, assume that that meant 'no.'

Some people on DW and LJ have profile statements that include permission to link. We didn't ask for permission for specific posts from those people. We also decided that accounts that were clearly meant as real name accounts for professional authors could be linked without permission because they were intended as a public interface. That only applied if the name on the account was the name the person published under professionally. If the user name was bippitybobbityboo and the name on their books was John Smith, we'd ask permission.

Linking is a lot like demanding that someone throw a last minute party for their kid's soccer team-- 15 six year olds and all of their siblings and parents. Asking before linking gives people a warning to do the household equivalent of making sure the kids' bedroom doors are closed and that there aren't stray LEGOS in the carpet or smelly, dirty dishes in the sink. Some people will say yes. Some people will say no. Some people will pretend that message went to junk mail/got eaten by voicemail because saying no outright is rude and might lead to a panic attack and saying yes would lead to a worse panic attack anyway.

The people wandering into a post and wanting conversation are potentially crossing other social boundaries. Once I have guests in my house, I have an obligation as host. Somebody's going to ask why the refrigerator doesn't match the stove. Someone's going to rummage in the bathroom cupboard and get judgy about what's in there and what isn't. Strangers will argue with each other about politics or fashion or proper parenting practices.

Asking permission to link gives people time to say no privately. It's much harder/more humiliating and terrifying to say no after people are already letting themselves in the door and setting up chairs in the yard. At that point, if one says 'no,' it's in public. People might mock you on FFA or sneer at you in other places.

Going back to the last minute party-- There are knock-on repercussions for saying no and for not behaving perfectly while hosting. If you refuse or botch it and everybody knows, will you ever be able to attend a game or practice again? Will you be able to carpool? And those families will be there at school and for the other sports your kids might want to play.


*metanews was supposed to have link finders who focused on specific potential sources of meta. At the very end, I was doing most of the link finding. My assigned scope was entirely separate from LJ and DW. I might link things there if they were things from within my circle, or I might have a spare hour and figure that looking at one or two journals wouldn't make me more exhausted. We didn't link much on DW and LJ during those last months because we lacked staff even to track people we knew posted a lot of meta.

It wasn't that we were asking and being ignored or rejected. Almost everyone said yes.

Another reason that permissions weren't generally an impediment was that finding obscure meta posted by people who don't write it frequently is very difficult. Link finders can't possibly follow every account that might potentially post meta, can't check every newly created journal to see if there's meta. Going through half a dozen irrelevant posts to get one linkable post is feasible if one's absolutely certain that something will be there. Going through forty or fifty or a hundred posts to find something? That devours time.

Most people who post frequent meta either lock all of it or know that they may be hosting a party each time. A meta aggregating newsletter is more useful when it turns up things that readers wouldn't see otherwise. Someone new to DW or new to reading meta (or to reading it for a specific fandom) may well benefit from seeing links to that new post by person Q; people who've been around longer and/or have broader reading lists will have seen that post linked at least six times and probably follow person Q anyway.

Generally speaking, people who post meta infrequently won't ask to have it linked even if they know they could. There's a fear of rejection. There's also a fear of being seen as demanding/encroaching or-- worse-- pathetically needy. Bringing one's own work to the attention of the link finders leaves open the possibility that the resulting link is a pity link.

[recessional]

From your answers and general participation/etc (and like, here I want to say: go you for stepping up to do a big thing! I have much sympathy with the Stress involved!), this may go without saying, but it might also be good to note whether or not you'll respect people putting a "please don't aggregate" note on their posts.

An example: a while back I was doing a thing where I summarized the events of the Silmarillion chapter-by-chapter in Approachable Me-Style Talk. It was something I was happy to do publicly, and I was absolutely fine with people spreading individually, but at the time I was super burned on the kind of attention that could come from any kind of aggregator (whether this kind of metafandom one or even the kind of Fandom Newsletters that were still stumbling along to silent death at the time).

So I put a "please do not aggregate" note on the index post, because I knew that those operating at the time knew what that meant and would follow it.

Honestly just from what I've seen in responses it seems intuitively likely you would too! So it might seem like A Given? But I think explicitly noting it if so would also help anyone who is wary feel better.