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queer_scribbling) wrote2022-08-22 12:45 am
queer_scribbling) wrote2022-08-22 12:45 am
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Re: Coy's Hitching Post
As I was perusing Coy's hitching post last night (slash early this morning), I came across the Library of Moria and Fanfic Walmart post and vriddy's Dreamwidth post where some more commenting happened.
There are some moments where I think I can see a point, but I also think the choice of metaphor is getting in the way. (AO3 is not actually a for-profit corporation that specifically wanted to eat up and displace local mom and pops stores like Wal Mart.) There's also a bit of a disconnect because I'm not in the associated fandom nor did I ever use Library of Moria.
From what I can gather in the comments, it had a forum section or otherwise had a means of encouraging community on the site, which is sort of grouping together some of the comments/replies in more of a "loss of community" direction than "loss of small archives" direction. A bit 'po-tay-to, po-tah-to' for some, but I can't help but highlight this one comment:
My early 2000s to roughly 2010 fandom experience did not involve small archives where the mods lovingly checked in on writers or whatever. If you didn't have a good enough grasp of written English and/or were young, you read and just lurked because you had to email the owner your fic so they could post it, and they might not want to host 'poor quality' fic. For HP, I can remember there were ship specific archives, or if you were lucky, the archive might focus on a character and allow multiple ships. I don't even remember commenting abilities on some, and the actual community stuff had to happen elsewhere (for example, The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet). Most of the people I knew posted their fic on deviantART or FanFiction.net because we could post whatever quality of fic, as long as it was categorised/tagged properly. [The matter of slash, femslash, or ratings were sort of an adjacent conversation when it came to some sites.]
I have no doubt that other people had different experiences, depending on their fandom or genre. Some fandoms weren't really big enough that they could sustain ship or character specific archives like HP, and some fandoms wax and wane as canon continues or does not continue. (Whatever thoughts about continuing with any material connected to JKR someone might have, you also can't escape the fact that the books and movies that make up the "Lightning Generation" reached their end point. Some people are ambivalent or don't pay as much attention to other content that's extended the universe afterwards, which affects community spaces and new content for small archives.)
It also ties into a factor that more than one person pointed out, but I'm just linking to one example:
The gist stands, but it's sort of complicated, you know? Like, in LJ times, the fans might have been spread between a mailing list, a LJ or DW community, a site for hosting images, someone might cosplay a character at a local con, and a small, hard to find website someone from the middle of nowhere was running on bubblegum and luck. Now, someone's live-tweeting a show on Twitter, a gifmaker's on Tumblr, a fanartist can host on Imgur, there are five different Discord servers, and so on.
There are some moments where I think I can see a point, but I also think the choice of metaphor is getting in the way. (AO3 is not actually a for-profit corporation that specifically wanted to eat up and displace local mom and pops stores like Wal Mart.) There's also a bit of a disconnect because I'm not in the associated fandom nor did I ever use Library of Moria.
From what I can gather in the comments, it had a forum section or otherwise had a means of encouraging community on the site, which is sort of grouping together some of the comments/replies in more of a "loss of community" direction than "loss of small archives" direction. A bit 'po-tay-to, po-tah-to' for some, but I can't help but highlight this one comment:
AO3 is literally just an archive. It has lots of nifty tools to leverage that archive for events and the like, but it is not and was never intended to be a community. Just an archive. - dawn_felagund.With a little dash of:
I have always been of the mindset that archive =/= community. For the SWG, the need for community has always been handled by groups associated with the archive: first Yahoo! Groups and now Discord. Sites like the LoM that did achieve community didn't seem to do so on the archive (the pre-eFiction LoM didn't even allow for comments, I don't think?) but in forums elsewhere on the site. - Also, dawn_felagund.I'm not saying that anyone's having the wrong reaction to this post or other conversation in the comments, but it does feel like there's a little talking past each other in some of the details. AO3 was not intended to replace the community spaces where the conversation happened, and it's highly variable as to whether a given small archive even had those.
My early 2000s to roughly 2010 fandom experience did not involve small archives where the mods lovingly checked in on writers or whatever. If you didn't have a good enough grasp of written English and/or were young, you read and just lurked because you had to email the owner your fic so they could post it, and they might not want to host 'poor quality' fic. For HP, I can remember there were ship specific archives, or if you were lucky, the archive might focus on a character and allow multiple ships. I don't even remember commenting abilities on some, and the actual community stuff had to happen elsewhere (for example, The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet). Most of the people I knew posted their fic on deviantART or FanFiction.net because we could post whatever quality of fic, as long as it was categorised/tagged properly. [The matter of slash, femslash, or ratings were sort of an adjacent conversation when it came to some sites.]
I have no doubt that other people had different experiences, depending on their fandom or genre. Some fandoms weren't really big enough that they could sustain ship or character specific archives like HP, and some fandoms wax and wane as canon continues or does not continue. (Whatever thoughts about continuing with any material connected to JKR someone might have, you also can't escape the fact that the books and movies that make up the "Lightning Generation" reached their end point. Some people are ambivalent or don't pay as much attention to other content that's extended the universe afterwards, which affects community spaces and new content for small archives.)
It also ties into a factor that more than one person pointed out, but I'm just linking to one example:
But for those of us (now) in tiny/'fandom of one' fandoms, there are no single fandom archives and never will be and that's what I see as AO3's great strength. - corvidology.I've talked about Incorporated and Ordinary Joe on here before, and those are definitely relatively recent and personal examples of fandoms where any fannish content did not escape private spaces, or maybe some parts of Reddit. (Somewhere in the comments, there's a comparison about what Reddit did to different forums, too.)
In LJ times the 5 fans may have all found each other anyway, but now there is one on DW, one on Tumblr, another on Twitter and the rest have given up - vriddy.
The gist stands, but it's sort of complicated, you know? Like, in LJ times, the fans might have been spread between a mailing list, a LJ or DW community, a site for hosting images, someone might cosplay a character at a local con, and a small, hard to find website someone from the middle of nowhere was running on bubblegum and luck. Now, someone's live-tweeting a show on Twitter, a gifmaker's on Tumblr, a fanartist can host on Imgur, there are five different Discord servers, and so on.
no subject
The original Pillowfort post can be seen here.