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sorryyourenglishteachersucked · 2 years

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Recently I saw a post going around about how people are overly condescending about people not knowing valuable internet skills such as how to curate your experience, and it was a good post that I didn't want to derail, but it reminded me of a closely related issue, so I'm making my own post:

When it comes to a lot of common fanfic and shipping discourse, I suspect a good chunk of it comes from people noticing a very real problem with Web 2.0 – that is, that the trend toward centralizing content on a few Big Sites makes it way harder to curate one's online experience than it needs to be, and contrary to popular claims, in many ways harder than it used to be – and applying the wrong framework to analyze and solve that problem. Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming this brand of wank entirely on this Damned Newfangled Internet, Why Back In My Day--

But I am saying that the way the internet operates at this point is definitely a factor.

Look, I got into online fandom in the era where a SINGLE large enough fandom might have enough fanfic archives to fill an entire Monopoly board. This had its own problems (many of these sites could just cease to exist with no warning, whether because someone got tired of maintaining them or because a lot of source media creators were a lot more litigious and small archives didn't have lawyers; a lot of mod teams were unprofessional and inconsistent in which rules they enforced and how strictly and/or would just make up technicalities to remove pieces they didn't like, etc.), and this brand of drama existed then too, but it was a lot less...all-consuming. Back then you could usually just go about your life on Your Big Central Site (usually Livejournal if you were a fannish type) without being asked which “side” of an argument you were on, with no way to answer that wouldn't get you death threats.

Dark fic existed. Smut fic existed. Fics about touchy and upsetting subjects existed. Of course there were always some people who got really upset by that, and there were always regulars and even webmasters of more strictly moderated sites who were really judgy about it and assumed the worst of everyone who used the free-for-all archives, but in that period, by and large the response to people getting belligerent about it was basically “dude, stay off that site/out of that group then, stick to this one where that kind of stuff isn't allowed, leave it alone, it’s not worth it.” It was usually a lot less heated than it is now, simply because people had the option to stick to their own circles without being all but forced to interact with content that upset them if they wanted to be in the fandom at all.

The problem is, that advice doesn't work now that we're mostly centralized on big social media juggernauts and AO3, and “then block the tag/that user” is not actually the same.

The result is that curating your experience used to be done passively – you just stayed on sites and in groups oriented toward the kind of fannish content you wanted to see, and didn't visit the ones that invited what you didn't want, and on Big Sites where everyone mingled, you just didn't follow links you didn't trust – whereas now it must be done actively, in many cases involving downloading a ton of browser extensions, by creating tag and keyword blacklists that you have to configure yourself, which is not only tedious, but really sucks when something bothers you enough that you don't want to be reminded that it even exists and now you have to type it into your blacklist for every new site you visit. Never mind the fact that these measures can fail if someone forgets a tag, doesn’t tag their work properly because they don’t recognize the element as something people are likely to want to block (i.e., something that would get a work removed from a stricter archive before most users are subjected to it), does tag something but does so in a way that’s not picked up by your filters, you’re on a site that doesn’t let you opt out of seeing when and why content has been blocked (which, again, is not exactly a fun time when you blocked something because you don’t want to be reminded it even exists), or someone just decides not to tag something at all. You can block someone who does this or add their version of the tag to your blacklist, of course, but when that happens, the damage is already done. It’s even more likely for this to fail on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok, where The Algorithm is very likely to decide to show you things you never even knew you’d want to block, even more so than just this model where, even if you don't HAVE to follow individuals' whole accounts to see their content for your fandom, you're still more heavily encouraged to than you used to be now that broad site-wide tags have largely replaced groups. The onus of filtering has shifted from webmasters and moderators, to individual social media users who just dare to have boundaries, often for disability-related reasons that make that job a lot more difficult and stressful than it might be for others.

Because of the way the modern internet is structured, modern fandom absolutely has a problem with making it harder than it used to be to avoid what you don’t want to see, and this needs to be addressed and fixed.

Again, I'm not saying things used to be all sunshine and rainbows, or that there are no benefits to centralizing, because there are a lot. However, even positive changes can introduce complications; every change breaks someone’s workflow (and steadily increasing corporate control of the internet isn't even a net positive in the first place), so of course we're having Issues. People love to talk about how rah, back in my day it used to be the wild west out there, "lemon" could be anything from vanilla fluffy smut to hardcore guro porn with detailed illustrations, and the only warnings you got were "don't like don't read" – but, as true as that was, there were other filtering methods. You didn't like how FFN or the big communities on Livejournal were more of a free-for-all than you were comfortable with? You went and made your own archive with blackjack and hookers by just opening up a new Invisionfree forum or something like it to only host/link to the kind of content you liked, or you started a new Livejournal community that banned the content that caused you distress. You invited all your friends. You ignored the broader unfiltered sites and groups unless you were feeling really brave and bored that day.

For all we talk about how things used to be so much worse and more unfiltered, that's really only half true. You were more inclined to accidentally actively click through to a surprise moderate squick, yes, but you would usually stick to sites and groups where any actual major triggers you had weren't allowed and certainly wouldn’t pop up in their full glory in your (now often algorithmically-generated) personalized feed like some kind of horrible jack-in-the-box (unless you were unlucky enough to log in during a 4chan raid, but that wasn’t exactly a daily occurrence like filter failures on Twitter now).

We don't really do that anymore. We don't really have the option to do that anymore, at least not the way we used to. Free and cheap forum hosts still exist, but hardly anyone uses them, because it's hard to populate a new site when the culture has shifted to wanting to maximize exposure more than build community and ALL the members of your my-otp-only-no-lemons-allowed forum and thensome already follow you on Twitter or tumblr.

However, somewhere along the line, fandom largely missed the point and applied a media critique model to this problem. Instead of calling for more websites to adopt (or more accurately bring back) interest-based user-run groups a la Livejournal, or placing more value on people who curate rec lists and building more tools to do so, it’s become a battle over what kind of content is allowed to exist at all. In this environment, depending on which side of the great debate you’re on, either every fanfic is treated as if it has the reach and influence of a major mainstream Hollywood production or more, or you recognize that that model doesn’t really apply so every problem it gets misapplied to gets shouted down as nonexistent.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are absolutely things in fandom that do need to be critiqued using that framework. Fandom has a long history of...not always being kind to marginalized people or characters. The beauty and ugliness alike of fandom is in the fact that fan works, especially fanfics, are mostly created for fun and nothing more. “Crack taken seriously” is so ubiquitous that a lot of it doesn’t even recognize itself for what it is; it’s just part of The Nature of Fanfic. Fan works are often unpolished; the quality is all over the place (and that is a good thing), because the barrier to entry doesn’t exist – people can just post whatever the hell they want, and in some cases this is actually more true than ever as the internet becomes more and more centralized, as people usually don’t need to go as far out of their way to search for the specific websites that allow their type of content. The downside is, this often means that because no one is reviewing someone’s work before publishing, no one is there to say “dude, what the fuck is wrong with you, that’s racist as hell, we are NOT gonna publish that”. This is definitely something worth addressing using the media critique framework.

But that’s not the same problem as the fact that content that explores uncomfortable and potentially triggering topics exists, and we are having trouble keeping it contained because the modern internet is built around trying to smash everything vaguely related together for Maximum Engagement.

Some people have liked to explore darker subjects in fiction for as long as fiction has existed, and this is especially common with marginalized people who may have a complicated relationship with darker subjects in fantasy because of their real life experiences. However, for just as long, some people have preferred to stick to fantasies that feel safe, often for the exact same reasons. This is because humanity is extremely varied. It’s really that simple. Darker fiction will never cease to exist, even if it turns out to be true that it “should” (which I highly doubt is the case). What we need to be doing is working on more ways to make that fact safer to navigate-

Which is the exact opposite of what the modern internet is doing.

The modern internet is mostly about getting more eyes on every page to sell more ads, to the extent that even when it’s not about selling ad space, it’s created a cultural expectation of centralized content delivery where more engagement is always better and there's no such thing as a non-target audience. The modern internet is about cramming as much Content on Big Sites as possible, both commercially and culturally – mentally, we’re often averse to taking the few minutes it takes to sign up for a new site when we have bigger hubs we consider Good Enough. Oftentimes, the modern internet is about obsessing over your engagement numbers to the point of feeling dejected and personally slighted if someone doesn’t want to see content you know is a trigger for them because Your Friend Is Not Contributing To Number-Based Support. All the art is on Twitter, all the fic is on AO3, and if you want to browse those sites to look for it (especially Twitter with its very limited tag room) you will almost certainly run into content that will feel tailor-made to personally upset you, and if you want to engage with your fandom at large you have very few other options.

It’s just plain not good for fandom. At least AO3 is made for fandom, but it has its flaws anyway, because yes, the fact that it’s not made to sell ad space and user data may mean the features that get made are made with improving the actual human user experience in mind, but it also means...not nearly as many resources to make better features in the first place. (Block function? Easier filtering system? Saving filters account-side? I know they're working on some of these, but...well, the fact that they don't have the corporate backing of Twitter and Facebook is painfully obvious.)

We need to go back to embracing smaller and more specialized archives; we don't have to give up the security that AO3 provides to do that if we just mirror or link works hosted there. We need to create more rec lists. We need to push for more sites to adopt/bring back groups (it's sad when Facebook is doing something more right than any other major site). It would be great if someone could create an engine to let people easily create their own archives where users can embed AO3 fics, to let authors and readers alike take advantage of AO3’s protections while allowing readers the full benefit of passive curation again.

We need to recognize that Web 2.0 is just plain hostile to meaningful human interaction and community-building, perhaps especially in fandom.

#fandom #fandom culture #fandom problems #internet problems #web 2.0 #sorry your english teacher sucked #long post

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