Where has all the fandom gone?

[sarasa_cat]

Fandom in the 1990s: Usenet news groups. Mailing lists. Geocities. PAPER ZINES exchanged at cons or by sending your address and some money through the mail.

Death of 90s fandom? The birth of Web2.0 baby!

Fandom in the 2000s: Blogs. LiveJournal, InsaneJournal, other LJ spinoffs now dead. Fanfiction.net. Various fanfiction websites that came and went. Deviant Art. Various forums. Delicious.

Death of 00s fandom? Strikethrough. Blogging platforms folding or selling off to other companies with different goals. Yahoo!'s kill-the-goose approach to ownership.

Fandom's initial response to the late 00's: Dreamwidth! Archive of our Own!

What fandom in the late 00's failed to see coming: The endless scrolling wall of decontextualized micro-posts.

Fandom in the 2010s: Tumblr. Twitter. Facebook. (Discord? Instagram??) ....meanwhile Dreamwidth and AO3 show their technological age while nonetheless doing exactly what fandom needs.

Death of 2010s fandom? No one really wants an endless scrolling wall of decontextualized posts controlled by corporatism. No one ever wanted the depressive-addictive dopamine hijacking that is purposefully engineered into these products and the side effect of these products amplifying outrage while suppressing measured discussion. No one likes the fact that they cannot consistently find *anything* that actually interests them within in this constantly updating endless scrolling wall and that there is no sense of community, moderation, or safety. No one has time or energy to be plugged in 24-7 while also **creating** fandom content and doing Adulthood(tm) and, meanwhile, the kids are terrified and screaming.

Potential harbinger of the future? AO3 receives recognition for what it has done and wins a Hugo.


So what is your vision for fandom in 2020s?


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Edited to add: while this post addresses fandom, I think it could be expanded to all indie-media writers, artists, makers, and the consumers/fans of their original work. That said, Fandom is useful to talk about because of how large and all encompassing it is, but every indie maker, every solo artist or writer, and every consumer of their work feels similar pains, at least, from where I am sitting. Creators who make media for fandom and/or make original works are equally welcome to respond to this post.

Comments

[fereldanwench]

I miss forums for fandoms so goddamn much. So much. So so so so so much.

Lately, I've been really missing not being forced into built-in private chat features, like I am with Tumblr or Facebook. Most of the boards I used did have external chatrooms, and I loved those because I could partake when it worked for me. Ditto for IMing. I absolutely loathe being pinged just because I'm actively posting on a social media site.

Learning how to make prettiful signatures and avatar sets for my play-by-post RPG forums was actually how I taught myself Photoshop all those years ago. Doing edits/gifs for Tumblr kind of hits the same way, but also not. I make indulgent edits for myself pretty regularly, but I do also think about the reblogability of them, too. Like OC-centric edits? Probably won't circulate unless the right mutual(s) reblog 'em. Pretty scenery gifs? 1000+ notes no problem.

Signatures and avatars were just for me. And for my friends, if they wanted some. Ugh, I loved gifting signatures for my friendos.

I also thought it was really cool that each forum kind of had its own style of signatures, too. Like I was on 3 Star Wars RP forums, and the players all subconsciously adopted a similar art style that was drastically different from another forum. One was about those really high-tech, glossy kind of sigs. Another was grittier and artsier. UGH. I love it.

....

Anyway, haha. OBVIOUSLY I would enjoy a return to that very much.

I don't think I'm in-tune enough with the zeitgeist to have a good sense of where fandom and the creatives are headed for the next decade so all of this is just what I've experienced. Maybe it'll align with the masses, maybe not.

I have noticed a lot of my friends, even friends who previously hated Facebook, have been getting on board with smaller Facebook groups. Groups with less than a few hundred members, at most. My brother actually set up a group for our circle of friends to get feedback on creative works so we're not texting 3 different people who will inevitably forget to respond because something else came up.

Discord, I think, will continue to grow. There are some Discord servers that are gigantic, but since I've started using it, most of the servers I'm in feel like a hybrid of old school chatrooms and forums. They're smaller, they're private, they have a clear set of rules and community values, it's easy to kick out troublemakers and make them stay out. They're not good for things like getting a lot of eyeballs on your creative works, and the image uploading doesn't support the multiple-image set aesthetic like on Tumblr, but it is relatively visuals-friendly, which I think is going to continue to be very important in the next decade.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that Twitter is apparently planning on giving users options to decide how people interact with their posts. Lots of interesting conversations there. (I'm personally for it at the moment, given how often even I with my relatively small following will get random jackasses commenting on my personal tweets that aren't things I'm opening up to "debate," although I can appreciate the concern about the wrong people using a "statement" function to avoid being fact-checked and whatnot.)

Between those three things, it seems to me like there probably will be a shift to people seeking out constructive boundaries and smaller communities. I think Reddit's success might speak to some of that, too? Some of those subreddits are massive, but they're still organized around a central theme or value rather than it just being one gigantic free-for-all rage fest a la Twitter.

Instagram has gotten too sucked up in influencer culture, and there's a lot of spam and advertisements. It's still something I use heavily, especially when I travel and do conventions because it's the easiest way for me to make quick edits and share the pretties, but I wouldn't be surprised if it starts losing ground. Assuming it hasn't already. And I don't think it's ever really been good for fandom--There's a lot of unintentional art theft from accounts that are trying to curate fandom artwork and whatnot, but it just doesn't work there. Ditto for Pinterest, although I do love some aesthetic Pinteresting when the anxiety gets to be Too Much.

I do think that video, in general, is going to continue to be important. Tiktok has really taken off, YouTube has its issues but is still going strong. Back in December, I participated in a big Dragon Age marathon to celebrate DA Day around the world on Twitch--I think stuff like that will continue to grow. Especially as more platforms push for video content and make it easier to watch natively on their site/app.

And I think the big elephant in the room is MONETIZATION. I don't even think we've hit the peak yet of folks trying to find a way to make a buck off their fandoming. And I think with things like Patreon and Kofi and the push for side hustles and monetizing hobbies, it's gonna continue to play a big role in the next decade.

[kradeelav]

Creator, been in fandom/online circles long enough to remember elfwood if that effectively dates me. Now essentially a voluntary hermit, and quite happy with it. I'm, in a nutshell, seeing two clusters happening:

One, (like the other comment) discord being one strong cluster for quick interaction and private water cooler hourly-update chatting. Gotten a few comments saying my art's been passed around a few discord channels so folks are evidently actively using it for art-finding purposes as well.

Two - I'm also seeing more creators (particularly NSFW ones) building their own sites as a main hub to escape censorship and/or the cancelling. This may be flavored with the particular struggles of creating with more taboo themes. I'd be remiss in not mentioning there's also a division here as the more profit-focused artists tend to favor social media for breadth, and the feeling/taboo/sex-focused creators tend to scatter elsewhere (also thanks with the *help* of FOSTA).

Now ... this doesn't feel particularly sustainable as-is considering twitter is the largest but awkward bridge between these camps in terms of visibility but also long-term happiness for creators. (... consumers, capitalists, pioneers?)

To me? it hinges on how far this purity tsunami falls. Fandom and the internet in its current incarnation hasn't been around for too terribly long, at least not long enough to go through a few swings of the pendulum as far as moral panics go. My tentative bet is going with the return of zines and the rise of physical media as the heartbeat of transformative fandom - they're pretty well suited to this flavor.

[scrawnytreedemon]

As a fandom baby, god, I don't know. I only got involved in the late 2010s, and it feels like things will only get worse with corporations trying to increase their stranglehold on the internet.

I think, in the very least among older users, there'll be a sort return-to-form of more community-based, discussion oriented communities. As fereldanwench pointed out, Discord's on the rise - And as someone who used to be more active on there, I can definitely see this being a branch, if not the bulk of the direction.

Again, though, monetisation is a tricky issue, and it's largely why fandom's become the disjointed, unconnected, actor-audience mess that it has. Companies structure sites in a way to maxamise engagement and therefore profit, and that engagement needn't be meaningful, or even healthy. I think when alot of hobbiests bemoan the lack of likes or reblogs, what they really want is to be engaged with on a meaningful level, and that with the way socmed is set up, the only way you really get that is through casting a wide net-- Something that, on a platform like Tumblr, the audience is almost obligated to do... which, as an artist and writer myself, I dunno, man. Yes, your work should have eyes on it, but I wonder how much of this could be alleviated if we had proper community spaces?

Ahhh, sorry for the ramble. It's all very disjointed, and as I've only been here a few years, chances are there are things I've failed to address. Fandom history is fascinating, though, and I try to learn about it when I can. Here's hoping things get better, or at least interesting.