Fandom Lurking Culture

[impala_chick]

I've been thinking about that tumblr post by caelum-in-the-avatarverse called fandom can do a little gatekeeping as a treat. vriddy made a post about it here at meta_warehouse. For me, this discussion resonates because I'm trying to strike a balance between protecting my fic from AI data scrapers and nefarious people while also gaining views and kudos and comments from other fandom enjoyers who might like my fic. I love getting kudos even when they're from guest/anon accounts. Before, I just assumed people weren't logged in to AO3 because maybe they were embarassed/didn't want their username associated with the fics they liked, but the 'lurker' label is much more broad and there a lot of reasons someone might not have an account or be logged in that I hadn't considered before. Maybe they're just not logged in because it's allowed/easier.

One of the links in the original tumblr post led me to this 2021 post with an ask about whether fandom was getting dumber - and the discussion there was about how 'easy' it is to access fandom spaces now.

I thought nyxelestia's response was especially on point:

The guy who founded Pinboard and talked about exactly this in his 2013 presentation describing how and why he welcomed fanfic fandoms over to his site when Del.icio.us died. Literally, one of his takeaways/suggestions to tech companies trying to grow a community on their platform:

Don't Make It Too Easy

One counterintuitive thing about active communities is that they sometimes use clunky, outdated tools. This doesn't just apply fandom, you can find it in all kinds of places. I like to scuba dive, for example, but the main scuba site is a terribly crufty PHP message board.

Our first instinct as programmers is to want to make these tools better. But these terrible interfaces serve a protective function, where they keep the community insulated from drive-by visitors and require new contributors to endure a a period of apprenticeship and lurking.

If you ever wonder why comments on sites like The Guardian or the New York Times are total trash, one reason may be that they've gone to too much effort to make it easy to post to the site.

I so agree that fandom is way too mainstream - even AO3 itself - and that has created a lot of our problems now. But then what's the fix? Make AO3 harder to navigate? I love the tag search features, so I certainly don't want those to go away.

I said I was going to lock all my fics, but I realized I've been forgetting to lock my newer ones. I kind of wish the site defaulted to locking all fic.

Comments

[colls]

I didn't know the asterisk thing came from TikTok - learn something new every day.

[impala_chick]

Yeah, funny enough I learned about this on Tumblr (b/c I don't even have Tiktok) - but apparently there are a lot of blocked words on that app.