002. january 22, 2019

[tozka]

So...this may end up being more than twice a week. There's WAY MORE STUFF out there than I expected to find (I haven't even really dug into Reddit/LJ/personal blogs yet!), and general consensus on my informal poll is that people prefer shorter posts more frequently? :P

---

We collect links from all over the web, and welcome submissions from readers. If you know of an excellent fandom meta discussion post that we've missed, whether new or "old," please feel free to leave a comment here or email the editor. Our FAQ can be found here.

Also, if you know of a good DW journal/Twitter/Tumblr/etc. user who posts regular meta, please drop a comment below.

Okay, onto the good stuff!

---

New stuff

alis (Mastodon) posted a discussion about social media spaces: "So a lot of Things recently make me interested in knowing how the impact of a social media platform having (or not having) tools like privacy controls and public timelines influences the way users conceptualize "their" profiles."

cesperanza posted Money and Networks: "Vulnerable people NEED THEIR NETWORKS for support, for pleasure, for all sorts of things, but if you're selling to your network (using guilt or whatever, or the fact that people like you, or care about you) then you're literally undercutting something really valuable that you have going for you IMO."

dontperishyet posted fanfic writer greatest hits: "I’m a fanfic writer. You know me from my greatest hits: -“I thought this was only going to be 5K”"

enchantedsleeper (Mastodon) posted some thoughts regarding the Great Reblog Debacle: "A discussion arose in one of my fandom chats where someone (who was primarily a Tumblr user) said that they wouldn't think twice about DMing a random stranger, and didn't consider it personal. Most others in the chat were like, "Wha...? That seems so intrusive!" I think it's an Ask culture thing - many regular Tumblr users don't think twice about sending random Asks (anon or no)."

greywash posted but what does whisperspace mean to YOU?: "In other words: I think a lot of what I miss about tag whisperspace was that it was a clear and intuitive way of signalling a break between the part of a social media post that is media and the part of a social media post that is social."

probablyintraffic posted Coffee shop AUs: "Coffee shop AUs are misunderstood because more than any other AUs they inhere fantasies’ internal contradiction. Fantasies, indeed the very best fantasies, are simultaneously completely believable and fundamentally unrealistic."

---

Oldies but goodies

lysanatt posted The Fandom Divide: Nation & Cultural Citizenship: "So I dug out parts of a chapter on fandom (also a paper @ Midwest Popular Culture Association/Midwest American Culture Association Annual Conference, Chicago 2016) that might be of interest to those who want to dig deeper into what the gift cycle means to fandom, and why it works to further fandom cohesion."

namjinary posted 3 Rules of Fandom: "In light of content creators in fandom being attacked,blamed & labelled as fetishists & sexualisers I feel the need to remind the people about the "3 Rules of Fandom" which many of us from multi fandoms already know but new ones-such as #ARMY who are new to fandom culture don't."

ritalara posted Let people like things with whatever intensity their own will demands.: "Let fans enjoy their faves without a legitimacy test."

Comments

[elrhiarhodan]

Thank you. I am particularly fond of fanfic's greatest hits.

[sharpiefan]

The 3 Rules of Fandom... It's such a shame that those have to be stated outright rather than simply being understood as courteous behaviour. OK, there have been wank and shipwars since I don't know when, but even the people engaging in those had some vague understanding of what was expected behaviour. (Probably, anyway.)

I wonder if this is a generational thing (younger fans as opposed to older fans) or a platform thing (a Tumblr fandom problem rather than LJ/DW issues). Or did the rules always need stating and nobody did so before now?

[muccamukk]

I find the mastodon convos hard to follow. Guess it'll take some getting used to.

[22degreehalo]

As a rec of possible interest to you: the people of TheFandomentals.com over do general fandom articles and do do a lot of reviews of fannish interest - I saw their GOT critical posts from their old tumblr linked in one of the old metafandoms. And right now on their front page they have an article about a book which seems to be something of a queer Harry Potter affectionate parody?

[terresdebrume]

Oh my, the Mastodon conversation is super interesting, and I do think the features present or not in a website have a huge influence on what people expect and how thy conceptualize it--actually, I'd be interested on reading/learning more about that (might try and set up some kind of form someday just to see what kind of data we can collect on that (this is a VERY vague project though))

But also, let's be honest, the though od DW posts becoming rebloggable the way tumblr offers it makes my skin CRAWL xD I like having some kind of control over my content and knowing I can kick people out if they become impossible to talk with. In fact, the reblogging feature is probably THE main reason I haven't managed to get into pillowfort at all so far. I like the culture here, and how things are much chill-er than on sites that allow instant sharing of content (ie tumblr and twitter). I guess it's a ymmv kind of situation, and also unlikely to happen on dw in the near future though, so yeah xD