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lilydalexf · 4 years

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Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with bugs

bugs has 40 stories at Gossamer. They mostly focus on Mulder and Scully, but there are also some goodies featuring Reyes and Doggett. I’ve recced some of my favorites of her fics here before, including The Link. She also co-ran WhyIncision, a fun, smart X-Files mailing list that dissected fics like a book club. Big thanks to bugs for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

Not really. While I was still in high school, I started watching the then 20 year old OG Star Trek and became a Trekkie of a sort. Starlog magazine, James Blish novels and the other novelizations, and while I was working as a library page, I found fanfiction one day among the periodicals. Who knows how fanfiction ended up as part of a library's materials, but there it was, this tattered mimeographed collection. The fic that had the most impact on me was one where Nurse Chapel wrestled a giant alien snake to save Spock's life.

So when I got into XF, one of the first things I did was look for fanfic, knowing somewhere out there, Scully was wrestling a big snake for Mulder.

That experience showed me the power of fandom, that even without the internet, how the second generation of Trekkies joined the original group to advocate for the franchise to be revived. I remember sitting in the theater for that first awful Star Trek movie, choked up with what we'd done.

Tragic backstory way to say, no I'm not surprised that a well-produced show like XF would beget future generations of fans, and that they'd be chewing their way through the fanfic archives still being maintained.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

I'm so grateful to the fandom. Literally formed the life I have today through the confidence it gave me. Many of my friends to this day are 'pocket friends' from the various fandoms I've been in, and the longest friendships were formed in XF. I learned how to write, both technically and finding my voice. I learned how to think analytically, more than any college courses.

The two most important things I took away were, write for yourself first and always, and shit ain't that damn important. In the end, it's a TV show.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

YIKES. I came in at the Fight the Future summer hiatus, so the waning days of ATXC, then we moved to mailing lists, right? Yahoo Groups was in there somewhere. Finally message boards. Live Journal rose up at the end of the run which began to fragment the fandom even before the show ended, along with the migration off our individual websites to Archive of Our Own, fanfiction.net and such. We went from group discussion platforms to 'come look at my blog for my thoughts'. It was different and I didn't particularly like it, but in the end, when I came back to fandom for a new show....I had to get a Live Journal. That's the most interesting part of fandom, that a platform doesn't mold a fandom; we use the platform and when it's no longer useful to us, we abandon it en mass.

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

I've touched on that a bit, but to elaborate, I'm glad I started in the XF fandom. It had such high standards and I hope that I maintain those standards for myself to this day. These days, I don't usually have a beta reader, but that took a couple hundred posted fics to get to that point.

Having seen the same exact flamewars and divides and squabbles over and over, seen how the taste of 'fame' can drive someone to be rather unpleasant, has given me a much more 'whatever' attitude. It's sort of comforting when joining a new fandom to know what's going to happen next in its natural progression.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

There's a meme "I have a type," and XF definitely had that type, but it just took me a while to get there. I was away at college then working on the road when the show started, and wasn't home on Friday nights most of the year. My mother has always been a big sci-fi fan, so she actually was watching before me. I don't like scary things, and would leave the room if it was on when I'd visit her. I was home for Christmas when Christmas Carol/Emily aired and I remember standing tentatively just inside the room so I could flee if necessary, and watched Scully go through the wringer, and ranting, "What the hell is this? Why are they putting that poor woman through this!?" I also saw how the show was doing the big ship tease, and I was like, uh, I don't have time for this. Even by my 20's, I'd been done wrong by so many shows that I'd become bitter. But the first film trailers suggested they were actually going from UST to RST, so I figured I could give 2 hours of my time for that. And yeah...but I was hooked, and WENT TO BLOCKBUSTER AND RENTED THE VHS TAPES TO CATCH UP....this interview is making me feel very old.

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I've always been a shipper and have no shame in that, as I think forming and maintaining a relationship is the most conflict-ridden enterprise humans can attempt, and thus is the most challenging thing to write about. Like many fanfic writers, I'd 'told stories in my head' ever since I can remember about the characters from books, shows and movies. It was just a matter of then writing it down for the first time.

After I was sucked into the show and it was still the summer hiatus, I got on my first computer, dialed up that screeching modem, and went on Netscape to search for that fanfic I knew had to be out there from my Trek experience a decade ago. Like many people, after inhaling much of the delicious fics out there, I decided I can do that. I'm someone who's very methodical on my approach to something new, so I studied what worked/what didn't, the expected formatting, got a sense of the culture I was entering, acquired a critical beta reader, so when I actually submitted the first chapter to AXTC, I was calm and confident.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

I watch from the sidelines, with a vague little smile on my lips.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

Yes, I have. Battlestar Galactica had a lot of Philes, but it was still a big step away from the very organized fandom in X-Files. Plus, with so many characters, there could be lots of little groups focused on their favorites. Same in the Downton Abbey fandom. Just a different dynamic.

On the other end of the spectrum, one of my most popular fics is in the Silence of the Lambs fandom which I've never been involved with any other fans or their fandom, if it exists. It just sits out there on fanfiction.net and chugs along with the reads. My current fandom is The Doctor Blake Mysteries which is tiny but mighty--the saying is, we're six people and a shoelace. It's shown me that it's not the size, not the 'fame' possible, but the passion that makes a fandom.

Sadly, at least at this time, I don't think there will ever be an experience like The X-Files heyday. It was such a golden moment of the rise of internet and home computer use by the general public, a large generation of educated women having the time to participate in fandom, and there wasn't the amount of 'noise' that is distracting us all now. I'm so glad that you're doing this exercise to record our thoughts. We've already lost so many of the OG folks. My first beta, Janet Caires-Lesgold; Trixie, way too young; Shari, also too young; Brandon D Ray, leaving his family too soon; and many more.

(Posted by Lilydale on March 9, 2021)

#old school x #xfiles fanfic #xf fanfic #xf fanfic author interviews #bugs

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mittensmorgul · 3 years

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Can’t everyone use tumblr how they want?

YES!

This site is exactly what people make of it for themselves. That was the exact point of that post. The fact that people reacted negatively to it at all proves my point. Seriously.

I have a number of other anons that are clearly from people who don't actually follow me, and are only here in a reactionary fashion having seen it on someone else's reblog, or else heard about it in passing and decided the best reaction to an ultimately harmless and rather bumbling post was to take personal offense and bring anonymous hate to a stranger on the internet. (and at least one not-anonymous "go kill yourself" type comment on the post itself)

THAT was the point of making that post.

For people who might be new to this fandom or new to tumblr in general (or even for people who have been here for years), your experience here is exactly what you make of it. I haven't seen that sort of vitriolic kneejerk reaction to anything I've written or posted in years. That post touched nerves. So it was a bit of an experiment, and I'm sorry to everyone who experienced any of that negativity second-hand. NOBODY should be made to feel like shit when engaging with something that is supposed to be fun. But I've learned over the years that that's exactly what some people consider fun.

There are new people to this fandom since the absolute free for all of the weeks after November 5th. We all reveled in those weeks before the show collapsed in on itself two weeks later. It was like 15 years worth of Hiatus Blogging followed by... well... some of the worst genuine hurt and disillusionment I've ever experienced or witnessed inflicted on a fandom by a piece of media.

There have to be at least a few people who floated into this fandom during that emotional roller coaster who want to make sense of it all, who were at least curious enough about how a show could've brought the characters to that emotional moment in 15.18 before effectively ignoring it all and burning the entire 15 year narrative to nothing just two episodes later.

Some folks stuck around to dig through the ashes of fandom in search of carrion, and that's fine. Some have zero desire to ever engage with the show or the fandom beyond mocking it for ever having existed at all, and that is also fine! But some folks? They might be wondering why anyone ever saw anything in this narrative to begin with, and they might be interested in knowing that there is this vast collection of information available to them (funny that none of my self-righteous anons even mentioned those, outside of one pointing out that my phrasing introducing that section of links was easily interpreted as condescending... which... yeah... again that was the point, and no I will not edit that language. none of us are free from sin).

Tumblr hasn't "changed." It was always this way. This site is not a monolith. Fandom is not a monolith. Even smaller groups within fandom aren't monoliths. Things that are considered "tumblr standard etiquette" do not exist across this entire website. And even within the supernatural fandom, and even within the tumblr-destiel-portion of the fandom there aren't "rules" dictating how you interact with anyone. Well, the one specific rule we should all be able to agree on is that you don't bring hate to real actual human beings, and yet...

There has ALWAYS been the option to engage with fandom here on whatever level an individual chooses. And that hasn't really changed since the finale aired. Anyone who thinks that Tumblr or the fandom has "evolved" or "changed" has likely just fallen in with a different fandom bubble then they'd existed within before. None of the bubbles have actually popped or disappeared. But which one you experience is entirely your own choice. You curate your experience here.

That was the point, illustrated by the vast array of comments I actually got on that post, structured with a little bit of everything including "tumblr mom from 2014." Everything pisses some people off, you know? Even the perception that some stranger on the internet might dare to lay down an arbitrary "rule" that zero people actually have to follow. See what I mean?

Because if any of the people who kneejerked at it actually followed me, or knew me at all, they wouldn't have kneejerked. They would've seen the point.

So your experience is what you make of it here. There are resources for people actually interested in engaging with the narrative or the fandom or the history of it. People mock "tumblr moms" or "fandom moms" all the time, but there wouldn't ~be~ a fandom without the people who actually build those resources. I.e. adults with the time, money, and personal investment in actually sustaining the fandom, instead of running around with torches trying to burn it down at every new whiff of perceived ~drama~ to latch on to.

For example, all of the scripts we've been acquiring and sharing with the entire fandom free of charge. I know that the fandom bubbles who seize on those scripts like hungry vultures to cough back up out of context "gotcha" posts postulating whatever theory of the differences between script and screen will dredge up the most drama or outrage in their fandom bubble... they haven't even considered how those scripts were acquired and made available to them. To them, they are "leaks." They are gifts that fell out of the sky and landed in their laps. There isn't even the barest curiosity about their origins or relevance beyond whatever social nourishment they derive by making up stuff and spouting it out with unearned authority. It's sad. But if that's how they enjoy the fandom, it's nice to remind them that none of the fandom they cannibalize would exist without the rest of us, too.

Yes, even the people you disagree with. Even the people who ship the things you find disgusting or repulsive. Even people who have an entirely different experience to your own. Even the people who are only here for those gotcha posts.

Fandom is not by nature a nihilistic shitshow, or no fandom would survive the amount of drama the 1% try to bring to it. Here have a fanlore article about this phenomenon. Right now, in Supernatural fandom, it feels like more than 1%, but I promise it really is only 1%. They're just really loud. There's actually other avenues to participatory fandom available to anyone who chooses to find them. Parts of this vast fandom that aren't focused on that 1% of reactionary leg-chewing at every turn. None of them are (as the linked article confirms) truly 100% free of unnecessary drama or bad behavior (including ME, I mean I MADE THAT POST!), but on tumblr you can curate your own experience. Fandom actually can be fun without burning down the thing you claim to be a fan of, or attacking other real human people for having the audacity to exist on the internet in a way you might believe is out of touch or pathetic. Seriously, nobody deserves to experience that from anyone over a fucking television show. Like seriously, take a step back and examine your life and your choices at that point.

Tumblr was exactly the same as a fandom community when I joined as it is now. Throughout my entire time here, I've curated my own personal experience to exactly what I derive the most personal satisfaction from. During that time I have had numerous friends and mutuals lament that their personal experience had become so toxic, but they were afraid to trim those blogs from their dash for fear of having no content left to engage with at all. For years there have been follow lists and blog recs and people desperate to find a more "peaceful and fun" fandom experience. People grow exhausted and embittered when their entire experience of fandom is an emotionally draining drama train. It's like pandemic doom scrolling, but for the thing that should be a respite from that sort of mindset, something that's supposed to be entertainment. The show did enough to us all, we don't have to turn around and re-inflict it on each other day in and day out on tumblr dot com.

So if even one person saw my post and thought well shit maybe I actually want to engage with a wider swath of fandom and see what's there, after seven months of post-finale drama, this whole other region of fandom is still here, still being the curators of the archives, the creators of stories and art and meta and gifs and videos and actually caring about it all that will keep this fandom going long after the current round of exhausting drama inevitably plays itself out.

The amount of in-group language in the negative replies I got was unsurprising. It's like folks are living in an alternate universe that doesn't mesh at all with what I experience on this exact same hellsite. Almost like we exist in entirely different bubbles of fandom, with entirely different purposes for existing at all. Everyone on this hellsite gets to pick which bubble (or bubbles) to take up residence in. Some people simply forget that their personal bubble isn't the universal defining experience of this site. Unfortunately, I doubt my little disruption to their bubbles will actually make any of them see that, but you anon... I think you did.

You are highly encouraged to engage with fandom EXACTLY THE WAY YOU CHOOSE. You have the ultimate power in controlling your entire experience here. Tumblr and Supernatural Fandom on tumblr is not Just One Thing that everyone who wants to participate in must conform to one specific code of ethics or behavior to be part of. And that NOBODY has the right to tell anyone else they're doing it wrong (including ME! I am 100% including myself in this!).

It's not MY job to dictate how anyone else experiences this fandom, as much as it was not the job of the people who reblogged my post (which I did not personally shove into their eyeballs with a demand for compliance... how did any of those people even *find* my post?) solely to tell me how *I* need to change how I experience the fandom, you see? Don'tcha love hypocrisy!

But the point was made for those who care, and a lot of people got to update their block lists (I still don't block anyone, as I said I curated my fandom space here and generally don't follow folks that don't personally make me happy and enrich my life by engaging with their content. However other people choose to engage with *my* content (any of it, going back nearly 50k posts over the last decade) is their business entirely. Sometimes I just feel the need to draw out people who are all too eager to expose their own whole asses in public. Mission accomplished.

#fandom problems #and again i'm sorry that anyone i know was exposed to ugliness because of this #but everyone i know also knows that i'm probably the least easily upset person in this corner of the fandom #if even one person achieved a modicum of self-awareness that their experience is not universal #that there IS no universal experience even #then i guess the point was made

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autumnslance · 4 years

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Heyyy! I have a question! But first I would love to share how I love your work ^^! It's mostly why I come to you with this question... See, I uh- would love to have the courage to share my writing, and my OCs to the world. But I never found the courage to. Do you have any tips? Or do you know any good tags where I can show my work at, so that one day I will just "accidentally" press the submit button? ^^'

Thank you~!

Honestly, I still feel anxious about sharing my stories and blurbs. I still feel like my OCs are pretty basic and not super interesting for others to read about.

But they're my characters and I like them anyway, so I'll keep writing about them. Even if takes me time to put some things out. I've always needed to write and share what I write, and sometimes that need overwrites the fear and anxiety--but it can still be hard.

And you know me, this rambles, so have a cut--

I have a buncha prompts and Ao3 threads with an "unnamed generic WoL" that were in some ways me testing the waters, figuring out what worked. Eventually the "unnamed WoL" in those bits leaned more and more towards being Aeryn, until I was just now writing about my own WoL (and her friends) directly without apology. But even then...Even knowing people like my characters, even knowing people like my OC/NPC ship somehow, it can be a struggle

One reason I like prompts and challenges is they make me write something and post without dwelling too hard on it, in theory. That "Rak'tika Rendezvous" piece? I've been sitting on that for at least nine months. I have other WIPs and Drafts, some even older than that! Some are unfinished--and some I'm just too nervous to post, like that one, which was edited often and heavily revised at least once.

I could just leave my writing in a drawer or a doc folder on my hard drive--and for many years I did. I discovered fanfiction in my teens on some of the earliest sites and webrings in the 1990s. It was a different existence; I didn't have a home computer or know how to make accounts or post. I just wrote, having realized the stories I told in my head could actually exist on paper. Literally, at the time. But they also are all gone, not archived anywhere or saved where I can find them again.

Roleplaying helped me, in learning how to make characters and write about them, and then posting about them. Tabletop, LARP, and online, I've done it all. I got pretty good at editing chat logs into something readable, and sometimes even looking like a story. The forums and Livejournals they were posted on were meant for the specific communities I was in--friends catching up on story beats. My WoW server (Shadow Council) had a community-run website, RP-Haven, for years. I posted modified RP logs and stories about my WoW OCs there; a bit more open than my immediate RP group/guild, but still people whose interests I knew were somewhat shared. So the move to posting on Tumblr and Ao3 for me feels like another step, for a wider audience of people who inexplicably like what I write about. It's been mostly positive in my experience, but I write fairly innocuous stuff and my audience is still pretty small and contained.

The internet has changed over time, so any baby steps process will be different. On Tumblr, sharing writing is a lot of knowing how the Search and Tag functions work. So far as I know you can keep something in Drafts indefinitely, until you're ready to hit that "Post" button. Tags should be simple, direct, and consistent, and only the first 5 show up in the general tag search (though can pull up on your blog easily when going to that tag). Which is why I always go "Final Fantasy XIV", "whatever challenge I'm doing", "NPC Name", "own writing tags", etc. I end up following and getting followed thanks to the FFXIVWrite challenges in the last 3 years, where we're all throwing down whatever springs to mind within a 24 hour deadline to break those anxiety-induced perfectionist habits that keep people from posting. Many folks rewrite/revise their entries later, too, because why not?

On Ao3 a draft can only exist for a certain amount of time, before it auto-deletes or you have to post it to save it from oblivion. I don't know if changing the draft extends that deadline; I don't tend to save things in drafts in Ao3, keeping those in GoogleDocs. Knowing tagging on Ao3 is also a thing (I've yet to figure out as fully). Sometimes I'll share a draft from Gdocs with a friend or two for feedback and encouragement before posting ("That Green Umbral Wind" was one, and "Please" was because hooboy).

Pillowfort is a lot like Tumblr, but has features like making a post non-rebloggable, and also any edits to the post reflect in reblogs. There's a bit more control of one's posts there. Also communities, which are like collectively following a public feed people can post or reblog directly to. Pillowfort's also still smaller/less used than Tumblr, and gives out invite keys regularly. Sometimes starting small, with more controls over how it's seen and shared, can help with the anxiety.

I'm also in a largish writing Discord where there are channels for sharing snippets of one's writing, and people can react with emojis and discuss it in the related channels. That's always nice for feedback, for brainstorming, for encouragement. There are even rules now about self-deprecating and putting down your own work--it doesn't help you or anyone else to put yourself and your writing down. We're all learning and growing the more we practice and try new things, like any other art.

You can only get better by keeping on writing, but there's only so far you can get without any feedback. Even if it's just a Like/Kudos, someone read and cared. Comments and tags like "I like this line" or "I love you wrote X part" or "I like how they interact" can really help figure out your strengths, maybe what of the other bits could be worked on more, and of course bolster the confidence to simply keep posting. Trusted friends or finding good beta readers to ping things off of can make a difference, depending on how you write.

But in the end, it's making the love of your OCs and wanting to write matter more than that fear/anxiety. Giving yourself the freedom to make changes when needed, to know it's not written in stone and can be edited, or even rewritten and reposted when you know you can do it better--I see it often. Sometimes you sit on something for awhile tweaking it until it's ready, sometimes you yeet a new piece into the void as soon as you finish typing.

Knowing that if nothing else, on a day when you need to, you can go to that page on your device and reread that thing you posted and remember you still love your characters, even years later, and maybe even think of something new to write for them.

#blogging #writing #characters #about me #roleplaying #OCs #Anonymous

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panharmonium · 5 years

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just some thinky thoughts about fandom platforms and community that i didn’t know what to do with, so i wrote them down.

[tl;dr - tumblr is weird, pan misses (certain aspects of) Ye Olde Days]

tumblr is such a weird platform.

like. i love my blog as a personal repository of stuff i enjoy, and i’m definitely thrilled to have met the people i’ve met on here - some of them have even become my friends outside the internet, and that’s been absolutely lovely. but in terms of actual functionality when it comes to trying to engage in a fandom...it’s still weird.

i know people will probably get tired of all the “BACK IN MY DAY” fandom analysis posts that float around on this website, but even having been here for years now, it is still really hard for me to adjust to a place that makes it so impossible to find any kind of actual fandom community spaces.

for me, i didn’t even start using tumblr until i was in my mid-twenties, and that was only because tumblr was where most people from LJ had migrated. i’d been Doing Fandom for over a decade prior to that, on other platforms (fandom specific sites/archives and then LJ), so i ended up here kind of out of necessity - the great fandom migration was already mostly complete, by the time i moved.

so i got here, and i got settled, but fandom on tumblr has been so different from fandom as i experienced it anywhere else, and that’s not the fault of any of its users; it’s just an inevitable function of the way this site is structured.

it is SO HARD for us to connect with people on here!

just, as an example from my own more recent life - i’ve been doing a lot of merlin stuff lately, right? that’s where my head is at and that’s what i’m having the most fun with and i would love to be more interactive with people about it, like - to have folks to geek out with about it, you know, to do the things that fandom is for - and if i were on, say, livejournal, back in the day, i would know where to go to do those things. there would be specific spaces built for just that purpose. LJ comms were places where everybody who was interested in a particular thing could go for the express purpose of posting and discussing and interacting about that thing! people still maintained their own personal blogs, but they also belonged to whichever LJ communities reflected their interests. LJ comms and fandom-specific sites were fandom hubs - it was so easy to find what you were looking for.

this functionality doesn’t exist in any meaningful way on tumblr. big, moderated groups/communities aren’t a thing tumblr truly supports. there’s no way for me to go join the “merlin” comm and just be in community with a large group of people who just wanna talk about merlin. the limited “group blog” functionality on tumblr is so non-conducive to actual usage that community spaces like those just don’t really exist, not like Back In The Day.

fandom on tumblr is so very decentralized. the way things are set up here forces all of us to just make posts on our individual blogs, which then might get picked up and put on other people’s individual blogs, maybe. you can’t like...make something (X) Fandom related and drop it in the (X) Fandom LJ Comm like “hey look, something fun to talk about!” you could put it in “The Tag,” but anyone who’s been here for any length of time knows how useful doing that actually is. and you could post it on your individual blog, but it won’t necessarily reach anybody who might want to geek out with you, not if you’re not already followed by someone in that fandom.

and the only other option is to invite yourself onto someone else’s individual blog, which is a) inefficient, when you’re looking for wider community, and b) not something a Painfully Reserved Person is wont to do.

the analogy that works best for me is this: pre-tumblr, fandom hangouts were community spaces. they were cafés with a sign hanging out front saying “star wars here!” or “kanan/hera here!” or “X here!” if you wanted to geek out about a particular thing, you would go to the café and meet a bunch of other people there.

nowadays, if you want to geek out about a particular thing, you have to barge into a stranger’s house. and not everyone is comfortable with that.

the lack of real, threaded comments is also just...i don’t know how to express how detrimental this is to communication and community. i mean, i understand that tumblr’s entire “reblog” system doesn’t really allow it to be a thing, but tumblr’s entire mechanic as a fandom platform has to be questioned, in that case.

how impossible is it to have a conversation on here, the way tumblr is set up right now? i mean - let’s say you make a post, right? one person reblogs it and adds their own text to it; another person reblogs the original version, but says something different in the tags. a third person doesn’t reblog it at all, but hits “reply” on your original post. a fourth person “replies” also, but to the second person’s reblog, in response to the additional content.

NONE OF YOU ARE HAVING THE SAME CONVERSATION. none of you are even aware that the other conversations are happening. the idea of trying to build an actual cohesive fandom community like that is just...impossible. it can’t happen.

when i reblog posts on tumblr, i feel like i’m a dragon collecting a little hoard of shiny things she likes, only i never actually see another person, because i live in a cave.

everybody here lives in a cave.

and like...this is just philosophical, i guess, but. tumblr’s focus on “follower count” and notes is also a thing i don’t really know how to handle.

having people “follow” me makes me feel weird. seeing that people are “following” this blog exerts a bizarre external pressure, as if my little house here could ever be for anybody who isn’t me. it prompts a tiny 'but should you?’ in the back of my head when i post about something that isn’t what all those people came here for, which is ridiculous, because this was never supposed to be a blog for any fandom in particular; it was just a blog for me. i was the only one here when i started, and i literally never did anything to try and get people to come here and join me. it happened accidentally, because bigger blogs than me picked up some star wars stuff i made and passed it around.

but of course, on tumblr, making connections gets conflated with follower/note count, and understandably so, because besides having a higher follower count (aka wider distribution), how are people ever going to reach the other people who are into the same thing they are?

for instance. let’s say you’re brand new to tumblr. you want to get involved in X fandom. there’s no community space here where a new blog with no followers can go and share their stuff with the right audience and meet all the other people who are also sharing their own work. unless you start messaging strangers, your tumblr time is pretty isolated.

whereas - i remember on lj comms, back when people would post as a newcomer, it would be like, ‘hey i’m so-and-so and i love xyz and here’s a picture i drew of x character!!!!’ - and people would actually respond to that. people responded to everything! like. tiny 400 word fics would have 30 comments, and all those people were talking with each other, not past each other, on the same page.

just for fun, while i was typing this up, i went through a month’s worth of posts on an old lj comm i used to frequent. not a single one of those posts was comment-less. every single post, even the tiniest, most insignificant one-line musing, had some amount of discussion attached to it.

whereas now - i don’t know if this is just confined to tumblr, or if it’s a general cultural shift, because even on AO3, i sometimes see people who have written massive sprawling epics and the comment field is just a desert. i once saw the exact same fic posted on ff.net, where it had 20 comments - and then on AO3, where it had zero.

and like, say what you will about ff.net (there’s...plenty to be said, certainly XD ) but commenting patterns were observably different there. and that’s all part and parcel of a bigger discussion, which isn’t really within the scope of these notes, except to say that it’s probably the source of my forever grudge match with AO3′s kudos button, which i realize is an absurdly silly thing to say and i’m smiling at myself even as i type this, but - i gotta be honest - i hate that thing! i can’t stand it! XD

i say that in the most good-natured way possible, obviously; this is fandom, after all, and it’s all for fun, and i love AO3 in every other way, so this is more a minor annoyance which makes me laugh at myself than anything else - but i say again - in the most fun-loving, self-deprecating way possible - that little button is my archnemesis. XD

i totally get why other people love it! it’s a completely reasonable way to feel! but for me, personally, coming out of an environment where the reward at the end of making something was getting to gush with somebody else, make a connection, talk about the thing that gave us So Many FEELS - the kudos button is so. sterile. and. empty. it doesn’t fulfill my urge to connect with people or share fannish enthusiasm in any way. i’d almost rather not even see kudos on my account, honestly, because it makes me feel more disappointed than anything else - like, “oh, man. look at all these missed fandom conversations we could have had.”

and obviously, this is in no way meant as disparaging to people who use the kudos button liberally. it is ALWAYS lovely to show appreciation for someone who wrote something you liked, however which way you are able, if and only if you are so inclined. nobody is obligated to leave feedback - lurkers are a perfectly accepted and long-celebrated fandom tradition; i belonged to that tradition myself, for most of my fandom life - so showing appreciation in any form is already going above and beyond. nobody needs to be harangued with “YOU SHOULD’VE COMMENTED” or “YOU SHOULD’VE REBLOGGED” - none of that stuff is required to participate in fandom; nobody owes comments or reblogs, and creators have to be okay with that. we can discuss and/or lament the structural factors that encourage or discourage participation, by all means, but ultimately we have to recognize that nobody is actually required to respond to things we make. it’s fandom. we’re all here by choice, and people’s participation levels are their own business.

and anyway, i know that lots of authors actually love getting kudos on their work, so my experience isn’t universal, by any means. it’s just a function of my own personal background, and the communities i used to run in - i speak for no one but myself and my own fannish life.

and besides, the entire debate about kudos/comments and like/reblog disparities doesn’t come anywhere near the underlying issues. it’s sometimes framed as “people not participating in fandom appropriately” (and that’s completely unfair; there’s no wrong way to do fandom when you’re not hurting anybody) as opposed to “what is it about our platforms that encourages or discourages participatory fan culture.” like - the only reason we even need to talk about the importance of reblogs vs. likes is because tumblr makes it so darn hard for a person’s stuff to be seen by the “right” people! reblogs are the only way for someone’s work to spread, and even then it’s kind of like throwing a handful of darts at a board and praying one of them will land in a well-connected spot. if a platform like tumblr were set up differently, we wouldn’t even need to have this conversation - there would be places to post your work where people would be specifically looking for content like what you were making. you could make those fannish connections more easily.

*** important to note, too - it’s always worthwhile to remember when reading these “back in the old days” nostalgia posts that pre-tumblr spaces had drawbacks of their own. livejournal was not some fannish utopia, by any means. there were, however, a few structural things from that era that i think were helpful influences on fan culture, and their absence here makes me miss them.

but anyways. those are just some thoughts. and now i’m going back to my regularly scheduled posting, because i DO enjoy this place, even if the platform can be somewhat lacking sometimes - we still have to find a way to have fun, right? that’s the entire point of being in fandom in the first place.

#i've always felt like tumblr was sort of a bizarre place for Fandom Central to have landed anyway #though i do think it's been amazing for graphics editors; gifset-makers especially #i do wonder where we'll end up next #whenever the next big migration hits #anyway back to regularly scheduled posting!#i've got episodes to get through #gotta keep up my momentum so i can GET TO THE END #:D #fandom

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sciencefictionismyjam · 4 years

Text

Warning for content creators.

Platforms: Their pros and cons.

I have been in a lot of places throughout my young adult life to now, tumblr. twitter, discord, DA, FA a small patreon you name it. I experienced the best and worst of all of them, and I want to make that clear for anyone who thinks about establishing themselves in an alternative environment especially if you are emotionally or mentally vulnerable.

I have deleted most of my outlets over the years for a variety of reasons, but now i’m settling down I feel obligated to share what I learned.

I have used all these places to find community, advice, explore interests, explore fandoms, cope with loneliness and depression, find friends, and mutuals... With equal success and failures, discovering also terrible things along the way...

TUMBLR.

Found friends and communities.

Fairly friendly, fairly easy to use and mostly harmless. Since the NSFW ban things have indeed changed here but to be honest it was probably for the best for reasons that may be obvious below. Though a word of warning, this place is home to a diverse population of people with mental and neurological disabilities like myself, and its very easy to get caught up in the negative behaviours or fall victim to the creative ways users can influence or take advantage of the site to hurt eachother when things go wrong and this happens whether you like it or not. At the end of the day, people form tribes and act selfishly just like in any other social setting, its no different from high school bullying.

Regardless, its a great place to meet people and share content with ease and visibility.

DEVIANTART.

First place I shared my artwork.

A pretty bog standard place to host your artwork. Home to plenty of professionals and a huge majority of students etc, not much to say about it.

I used it in the past, posted really bad artwork and tried to chat to other artists I enjoyed for advice and social with little success (story of my life thank you Aspergers!). If you go there dont expect an audience right away because unless your material is eye catching right out of the gate no one will really care that much.

DISCORD.

Communicate with friends and found/founded communities.

Discord servers represent in the purest sense what happens when you give people overriding powers to create their own social spaces or bubbles. Digital factionalism, Neo nazis and more grow at an alarming rate here... So much so that even the most inclusive or friendly settings are no stranger to exhibiting tribalistic behaviour.

Use it carefully and responsibly.

ARTSTATION.

Used it to share most of my artwork.

Favours the privileged, luckiest and the wealthiest in the art community. This is a home for people who have been lucky enough to enter expensive art schools, been supported well enough to find early career opportunities and have carefully constructed impossible internet personalities.

Its the industry’s hall of fame. This is evident simply upon opening the website in google. Dont expect much of an audience because its a platform that values prestige more than anything else, though dont let that stop you posting regardless.

PATREON.

Run an open donation art sharing outlet.

I would say without any hesitation that this website is now officially compromised as a content delivery system. I once run a small patreon for my old artwork though I intended to delete it and my content in short order since my situation had improved and it made no sense to keep it around, my content was completely free to all and the donations were small. But I had soon come to realise that this infamous “Archive” or glorified torrent site had stolen my material and hosted it on their servers without any ability to delete it just like many others. Unfortunately this is run by infamous crypto currency accepting individuals so no hope of removing it, as they are usually highly abusive and predatory (like most libertarians)... It also does not matter if you paywalled the content, since this is bypassed by a small amount of paying users which share that material to the website which stores the illegal copies on their servers against your will. If you have a dedicated pool of backers you will do just fine, though everything you make will be stolen and hosted there whether you like it or not.

It can be understandable for people wanting to not pay for these things, i’m no stranger to torrented software for example in the past when I had nothing. But its not acceptable when that material becomes extremely personal.

FURAFFINITY.

Where I posted my NSFW art for the first time and made commissions.

Contrary to an assumed popular belief, or expectations. FA is not just a place for furries given that obvious title... Infact art students both in school/self taught, freelance types, and even well known established BioWare concept artists may indeed hang out there. Its a very easy and accessible place to post your artwork or communicate with a diverse people... Unfortunately its been the subject of controversy and upsets for which I unfortunately witnessed and got sick of.

No different than tumblr in that respect...

Its frequently hacked by unsavoury people who dump gore and other illegal imagery on the site to scare people away ,or piss off the normal users. Also due to a lack of ability to curate their content delivery systems, or who gets in and sees the NSFW stuff. A overwhelming flood of underage people who unfortunately have access to SFM flood the site with very poorly made video game NSFW. (A direct result of digital content bloating)

This is not to say SFM creators as a whole are all bad (some are nice), its just that the vast majority now are not exactly people who should have the ability to create said material.

Tips for if you go there.

Keep the SFW switch on.

Be careful what you search.

Be careful who you interact with.

Expect fully to be asked by strangers and potential commission clients to make material you are not in anyway interested in, or find disturbing and do your best to ignore them all.

This place will really test your patience for NSFW paid artwork requests, so stay away if you dont want to deal with that.

#Artists #social media #mass effect #autism #mental health #awareness #sharing

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sally-mun · 5 years

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How long have you and your partner been together? I knwo you've said it's been years but how long exactly?

It depends a little on how you look at it, because there was a big gap in there for a while. Our current stint is around a decade, but if you count when we FIRST started RPing, it’s actually closer to two decades.

Here, let me just do it like this:

1997-2005(ish): Yeah, my RPing dates back this far (probably farther back than some of you have been alive, oof). Back then the internet was still SUPER new, so there weren’t a lot of ways to hang out online beyond message boards and chatrooms – and you were NEVER supposed to go in chatrooms, because that’s where all the stalkers were! However I’d come across this Sonic webpage that I thought was super cool, and in contact info of the gal that ran it was linked a chat where she was known to hang out. It was back during the days of GeoCities (before Yahoo even owned it), and there were only a handful of chatrooms on the site in total. Among them was a room simply called “Games Chat.” I decided to take the chance and went in hoping to find the girl that ran the website. I never did, but this was my first introduction to RPing!

So for those who’ve never done this format, it’s kind of a free-for-all. Whatever screen name you log in with is your character, and everything happens in real time. Your turn is basically one line, and it can be dialogue, *actions*, or both if you could fit them. Yes, the turns are small, but the chatroom format meant that turns were taken rapidly, and it actually covered a LOT of ground in a short amount of time. You could do a single session and call that a day, or you could keep meeting up with the same people over and over to do a continuous game/story. There were basically no hard rules, just ones you established yourselves either before you started or mid-game ((via talking OOC)). Regulars came to know each other while other faces slipped in and out in a flash. Canon characters and OCs basically shared equal footing. It was exciting and fast-paced and I loved it.

Over time things changed a bit; GeoCities was bought up by Yahoo, and at that time “Games Chat” was changed to “Anime Capsule,” since I guess someone on the back end noticed that we were talking/RPing way more about anime than about video games. After a couple years of that, though, Yahoo decided to shut the chatroom down all together – but fear not, one of our users set up our own Anime Capsule on his own sever! We continued there for a few more years, and the chatroom itself gained more and more features that made it an even cooler place, but I eventually drifted away from here as other regulars gradually dropped off. At this point, I lost most contact with my current partner.

Sadly, so far as I’m aware this chatroom no longer exists.

2006-2011(ish): With the Anime Capsule behind me, I was invited by @fini-mun to a forum RP with a bunch of my friends (many of whom are even here on Tumblr now – hi guys!). This was my first time using a message board for gaming purposes, but I really liked it. The downside is it’s much, much slower than chatroom RP, but it was fun to get to use actual prose and narration. This RP is what made me realize just how much I enjoy writing, and it’s more or less when I transitioned to seeing myself as a writer instead of an artist (which is funny in a way, because looking back on my old threads there I was SO TERRIBLE, but hey that’s growth I guess).

For those who’ve never done forum RP, it’s MUCH more structured. There’s an area specifically for character profiles, another area specifically for OOC discussion, and then an area for the actual RPs themselves. Each thread is a specific area and time, and the board maintains a single, continuous continuity. If a character enters one thread, they can’t simultaneously be in another, because all threads are part of the same canon. When all characters leave a thread, that particular thread is archived, and then a new one is started whenever a character comes back to the area. This particular forum also had an “off-canon” area, which was specifically for silly OOC threads, “what if” scenarios, or ongoing jokes.

This was a SUPER tight community for me. We were a fairly small group and kept the forum private, and only got new users if one of us specifically invited someone. It operated pretty well for a few years, despite being a group of only about 15-20 people. I eventually left this group after an incident went down which changed things in a way that could never really be undone. The forum was different, the group was different, and most importantly, I was different. I did my best to linger for a while but it just wasn’t working for me anymore.

This forum has undergone a few changes, but still exists! You can find it here, or message @jammerlee if you have questions!

2008-2010(ish): In the midst of the forum RP, I’d reconnected with several of my Anime Capsule friends on AIM, and we intermittently continued some of our games via AIM itself. This was nice for me, because it was like a throwback to my chatroom RP days, but on a much smaller scale. At this time I reconnected with my current partner and invited him to the forum RP, but he declined, as forum RPing just isn’t his jam.

For the most part, this didn’t result in anything particularly noteworthy, as it was largely one-off instances and a lot of OOC talk. I liked the focused one-on-one aspect of it all, and I definitely appreciated the rapid progress you can make in IMRP, since that was one of my favorite things about chatroom RPing. So, even though I was still at the forum at the time, this also became a regular RP method for me on the side. Over the years I intermittently attempted to get a couple of friends from the forum RP to IMRP with me too ( @fini-mun and @jammerlee being my biggest targets), but in most cases these attempts fizzled. I had a really fun Knuckles & Rouge story going for a while with Deebs, but that eventually died out because of…

2010-2013(ish): …the arrival of Tumblr! I ended up here due to another invitation from @fini-mun, I’m assuming because we’d both left the forum RP and our IMRPing was inconsistent. It’s probably needless to say, but Deebs made a Finitevus character blog and I made a Sally character blog.

The thing is, I actually had a really tough time with Tumblr RP format. I just really didn’t like the serialized nature of the posts because it made it too difficult (in my opinion) to read through things in order, and nevermind the fact that there’s relevant info spread across multiple blogs! It just really wasn’t my cup of tea, but I still wanted to play here with the friends I’d made, so I decided to make my own version of Tumblr RP: I wrote my character blog as though Sally herself was blogging and getting used to using the internet for play instead of work. This turned out to be WILDLY successful, to the point that I even got a lot of fanmail from former Sally-haters telling me I’d softened or even completely changed their view of the character!

Although I don’t update it anymore, the blog itself still exists, and can be found here!

2010-present: This is the current RP with my current partner. Since I was no longer at the forum RP and Deebs had moved away from IMRP, I reached out to my ye olde partner and asked if he would have any interest in RPing a crackship that Deebs and I had been talking about (aka Knuckles x Finitevus). He was intrigued by the idea and we decided to give it a go, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s turned out to be the most stable game of our LIVES. We’ve been IMRPing consistently for the last decade or so, originally on AIM and then eventually moving to Discord when AIM bit the dust. We don’t RP every day like we used to when we were kids, and we take breaks from the main story to do AUs now and then, but for the most part we’re still chugging along and have no intentions of stopping anytime soon!

And even though these RPs are not public performance, apparently I’m writing summary TV shows of them now, so you can view those here at my blog as I intermittently work on them – and while you’re at it, you can support me on Patreon or Ko-Fi because these things take a lot of time and effort and it would really help me pay my bills!

#Sallymun RPs #sorry this ended up being so long #but hey anything worth doing is worth overdoing #Anonymous

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armaina · 6 years

Text

I've been on the internet for about 22 years, and in that time I've used an absurd amount of art galleries. In light of this, I thought it might be of interest to myself and also others, that I list all these services I've used and write up a little blurb about the service and/or my experiences with it. It won't be any kind of structured review just blurbs, a little bit history, a little bit opinion piece. The sites are listed in (mostly) chronological order, ones that are still around will be linked and all sites with a ø symbol are dead. I'll be updating this page over time as I use more sites so that I can have a quick reference to everything I've used at any time.

øElfwood: The first ever art gallery I ever had and very likely the first gallery for others, I'd go as far as to say it is what made the concept of the social online art gallery a thing at all. It was a form of Juried site though, at the time it was the first and only of it's kind. All submissions had to be reviewed by a person, and while that meant it was easier to prevent stealing, it also made keeping a gallery up to date, very frustrating and it also prevented several subjects from appearing on the site at all. I uploaded fantasy art and started my presence as an online illustrator, sharing with other artists. While the site managed to last long past its relevance, the interface hardly changed and its attempts to make a new layout came far too late in its life cycle and the much complained about art screening never really got addressed making it slowly more irrelevant as more options started to appear. I tried to stay with this site for as long as it persisted until it's final days if nothing else because it was the one that started it all.

VCL: It's amazing that this site still persists, to this day. The site is simple, offers no engagement features at all. It looks like a lot of the users that haven't used the site in some time have been purged, but you could still use it if you really wanted. Illustrative works only, no photography, though I think you can upload text files.

øMediaMiner: The first real 'general art site' I encountered in late 1999. I used this pretty extensively at the time, as it was easier to use than both Elfwood and VCL, and also didn't have restrictions on the subject matter I could have.

DeviantArt: Joined in 2002, it's continued to be a mainstay in my work. Like media-miner, it aimed to be a big catch-all art website, not only that it also permitted written works, design, skins, crafts, just about any kind of art and design that had been neglected by anything available (and is often still neglected in many as you'll see). Due to its ability to house all many different types of creative works, easy to use interface, the ability to discover and engage in ways no other place I had used at the time, it grew very quickly. It set the standard for what was expected from art gallery options from then on out and continues to do so. RSS feeds for all galleries and favorites, the ability to watch favorites, drag and drop organization, folders and nested folders for organization, comment management, dedicated critique commenting, groups, easy thumbnail use in comments, this is just a fraction of the type of features DeviantArt has pioneered and influenced other art sites after it. It is the largest gallery archive of mine apart from my personal archive and will remain to be one of my first choices in what I decide to keep up to date and I'll probably keep it going until it no longer exists. About the only type of file it doesn't out-right support is audio, it remains one of the only sites to cover the most bases. (this is due to a sister site dmusic being prevalent at the time of Deviantart's development)

øSheezyArt: DA made some change and people were upset so they made Sheezy Art. It had this reputation for being the more.. drama filled version of deviant art. It permitted mature content in the beginning but then banned it 2 years later (this lead to the creation of FurAffinity) It had all the features DeviantArt did due to it being pretty much a code fork of DA's old code base, and its only real selling point was that you could customize all the colors on your page. But it's lack of management, updates and features just made people go back to DeviantArt and it eventually folded after empty promises of a rebuild.

Newgrounds: Most people had known this place for its flash games, as did I, but I discovered it had a very nice and genuinely helpful artist community on the forums. Only recently has the site expanded to permit more than 4 tags an image, but the upload system, in general, is awkward. It also has a rating system if that's something someone might be interested in. Illustrative works only, no photography, no literary works. Porn allowed.

øStorm-Artists: Also started as a sort of DeviantArt alternative, I honestly don't even know their angle or what made them feel like they could have their own place on the internet and others I think felt the same as it languished with no real updates and eventually died.

FurAffinity: So I've effectively used this site, twice. The first time in its first iteration before it had a huge major security issue that brought it down, making the original owner give it up. And then again years later I tried it one more time only for another security problem to happen. The site is old and archaic, lacking in features and its only benefit is that it's consistently trafficked. I'll never touch the site again until certain key players in FA are replaced. Many forms of Photography are restricted, not really a good place for design work, no video support. Porn allowed.

øFurry Art Pile: Genuinely liked this site, A lot of people did. In 2006 was the first tag heavy oriented art gallery of it's kind and not only did it use tags it was the first one I remember that had tag filtering. It was easy to upload and manage, so between those features, it became incredibly popular and still gets regarded as a site people wish had stuck around, even now. It's sad to say that it took about 10 years for the concept of tag filtering at all to catch on just about anywhere. To this day only Weasyl and a paid Pixiv account have functional, multi-tag filtering.

øJaxPad/ArtSpots: Started out as 2 sites, merged into one. One site was supposed to be one anyone could use, while the other was intended to be Juried like the old Yerf gallery. They had even imported all the old Yerf art with the original creators blessing. But volunteer support faded and it died due to being unable to not having the people to keep up with adding features and changes to the site.

øArt Piles: A revival of the Furry Art Pile code, it had the features people wanted but also ultimately tanked due to just the singular coder.

øPortalGraphics Network: This was a fairly niche gallery, as it was intended for users to post their openCanvas proprietary event files. The cool thing about it was that it would convert the files into a video format that would allow users to see the full progress of the work being done. You could even download those event files yourself to see them within openCanvas for personal study.

øFurocity: Another one of those 'more social media site than art gallery' sites. I used it for a time, gave a lot of direct feedback to the owner, but the site eventually was closed and merged with FurAffinity.

Paper Demon: Most people haven't heard of this site before, and for good reason - it's pretty unremarkable. One of the interesting features is that it has a strong distinction between its adult and clean sections of the site but otherwise there isn't much more going for it. It still exists and I've hardly touched it. Illustration and Literary focused, no photography, no audio or video support. Porn allowed.

Weasyl: It's actual inception came about by a person that was just looking to get rich off of providing 'a better FurAffinity'. Later on, the person who started the site left, and the administration staff that did any of the real work, remained. It had a strong few years where it kept on top of its updates and features but it has since languished, with hardly any real updates at all and no new features and a lead developer that doesn't seem to trust the artist base, it's difficult to say how long the site will last. It's the only other site apart from Nabyn at this time with a Character Profile feature and the only other site apart from Pixiv to have tag filtering. Restrictions on photography, no video support. Porn allowed.

øNabyn: Nabyn's effect and impact felt very similar to Furry Art Pile and it exploded in popularity quite quickly despite requiring a key to make an account. It had a robust character system that seemed to be the inspiration for many others after it. It also boasted a weird separate scrapbook feature that functioned more like blog/forum posts than an individual gallery. The site barely lasted a year before the owner shut it down due to being unable to keep up with the development of the site.

Wysp: An extremely easy-to-use site, doesn't require much for a new submission and has a Kudos feature that is a separate feature from likes, similar to AO3's Kudos feature. Its aim is to try to drive people to be motivated to draw and gives daily challenges and encouragement along with a critique feature. It also has the ability to thank people for comments, a sort of 'hey I read this' recognition which is nice for those short comments you don't know what to do about. However, it's only geared toward illustrative types of art. Illustrative works only, no photography, no audio, no video no literary works.

Pixel Joint: It does one thing and does it very well - host pixel art. It also provides a lot of resources and tools on techniques for making pixel art. However the community itself is not kind, it's elitist and gate-keeping. Which is a shame because it's platform allows you to zoom in on pixel art without requiring the artist to upload pre-upscaled images. It's the best site there is for showcasing pixel art, and that's about it.

Furry Network: I made an account, saw it was owned by Bad-Dragon, then simply filled in a few info bits in my profile and haven't touched it since, don't plan to. Whatever features it has I don't know, because I have no desire to use it.

ArtStation: the answer to the loss of CGHub, except it's better managed than CG hub and has a better interface. It features image stacks - multiple images posted in a single page, and a huge amount of resources and tools for employers to find work and artists to look for work themselves. Though it reads like a site that's only for 'professionals' the truth is, it has no restrictions on the skill level of a person to participate on the site. I think more people should use it, and just get over the fear that it's a 'professional' site. They offer a lot of good resources and the image stacks feature is so dang nice. Visual art and design only, restrictions of photography, no audio, no video, no literary works.

Pixiv: A completely viable gallery, I simply have not used it for myself. It has an English interface but most of its users do not speak English and it is a Japanese run website. Its organization is largely tag focused and it boasts an incredibly robust tag explanation and directory and is a feature I hope some English site adopts one day as this helps keeps tags organized and accurate. It also has an image stack upload feature, and as I'm aware was the first site to implement such a feature, it also now has manga submission support for an e-reader like features on the site. Other fun features are Image Responses, where you can make a submission a direct response to another submission, and reaction images you can use similar to emotes. You can follow people privately and it keeps likes and bookmarks separate from each other, rather than the same thing. Illustrative works only, no photography, no audio, no video no literary works. Porn allowed.

New Sites:

Furrylife Online: This is only just barely starting out, I don't have a lot of feelings on it yet but I'm talking to some of the people involved in its creation. It's a sort of Social Network Art Gallery hybrid much like Furry Network, except run by better people and already has a nicer interface. Also added a new character feature, making it the second only existing art community to have a dedicated character feature section apart from Weasyl. While it does not have tag filtering at this time, there are plans to add it. Only types of formats not supported at this time seem to be possibly photography, unsure about design work. Porn allowed.

ArtRise: The site isn't even completed yet, not even in beta.

Honorable Mentions:

øHumbleVoice: It was kinda like a social networking art site? I used it for a time, it was kinda mellow and nice. Kinda miss the chill introspective feel.

øzeros2heroes: This started as some strange social media promotion to promote the comic and eventual reboot of Reboot. It tried to find talent for the new works on the site and ultimately flopped. It now remains as a front end site for a production team.

I do not include sites like Instagram and Tumblr in my assessment as they are not dedicated art galleries.

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dontgobreakingmyart · 6 years

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Fanfiction: Why Is It So Popular?

As someone on tumblr, you probably know what fanfiction is and know why it is popular. My AP Literature teacher, however, wasn’t so informed.

My senior year, we were required to write a research paper about a trend. Some people did the rate of divorce, others did the increase of body modification and someone even did the death of Pokemon Go.

Our teacher recommended that we chose a topic that we were familiar with, and my first 2 thoughts were fanfiction and anime. I had already had a friend that had done anime the year the before, so I thought “why not?”

And thus, my senior paper was born:

March , 2018

Fanfiction: Why Is It So Popular?

INTRODUCTION:

Generally, the word “fanfiction” conjures an image of lonely hermits, obsessive fans, or even dangerous flirtation with copyrights, but lately, fanfiction has been given a new face―a face of validity, expression, and even publication. Since January 2012, the amount of fanfiction for just one fandom (a collection of fans supporting a certain medium) has increased an astonishing 1,154% (Pellegrini). Objectively, fanfiction is a fan-made story that contains strong elements of the original work, generally using the same characters, themes, and other various components. For example, there are numerous works based off Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, continuing on the story of Mr. and Mrs. Darcy; in fact, there has been a recent increase of published novels based on Pride and Prejudice of 32% since 2015 (“List of Literary Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice”). Why? Because fans were not satisfied with the original content; they wanted to see more of Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship or they wondered what the characters would do in a zombie apocalypse or any other variation of “what if?” Fanfiction allows “amateur writers” to express their love for a book, tv show, game, etc., and whether it’s because of the lack of LGBT themes in most published works or the increasing ease of sharing their fiction, fanfiction writers are not likely to stop any time soon (Knorr).

BACKGROUND / HISTORY:

Although it might seem very unbelievable, fanfiction did not just start recently, or a couple decades ago, or in the 70s with that one Star Trek fanfiction. In fact, a good amount of older literature is fanfiction. If fanfiction is being defined as “any work of fiction that borrows major elements of another work of fiction,” then works such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet could technically count as fanfiction; Hamlet was originally an “ancient Scandinavian folk tale . . .[known as] ‘Vita Amlethi’ (‘The Life of Amleth’)” that Shakespeare not only re-wrote as a play, but inserted his own, personal experiences (Clark). The Iliad, The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex were all orally-told, Greek myths that someone decided needed to be written down. The only reason theses works are not recognized as “fanfiction” was because copyright was not as strict in that time and practically did not exist; after all, no one knows for sure who the real Shakespeare was because he did not officially claim his work.

Fanfiction didn’t really become a label until Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in the 1880s and with the birth of the internet, the famous Star Trek fanfiction. Officially, “the actual term ‘fanfiction’ was coined in 1939” and was used as an insult towards crudely written sci-fi fiction (Reich). In the late 90s and early 00s, rather than the “all-purpose” fanfiction cites today, “fans carved out their own little homes on the burgeoning internet. Star Trek fans here, X-Files fans there, Frasier fans somewhere else” (Hill). Most of those sites, however, have since died and have been replaced with the “all-purpose” ones like fanfiction.net. One of the most infamous modern fanfictions is E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey. Although it is technically a published novel, James has admitted that her novel was simply a Twilight fanfiction that she had written and aftered so that she wouldn’t break the copyright (Morrison). The largest development to the world of fanfiction, however, was the birth of Archiveofourown.org in 2007, a fanfiction website that “promised stronger resistance to legal challenges” to fanfiction writers unlike other, previous websites such as fanfiction.net (Burt). With the creation of this site, older ones have begun to die out just like the fandom-centric ones of the past.

#1 REASON:

Over the years, fanfiction has morphed from a shameful pass time to a socially acceptable medium of expression. Published authors have been, in fact, recommending fanfiction as a positive way to start writing. The author of the Princess Diaries Meg Cabot came out about her fanfiction writing, saying, “I myself used to write Star Wars fan fiction when I was tween. I think writing fanfiction is a good way for new writers to learn to tell a story” (Romano). And many other famous authors have made a contribution to the fanfiction community: Cassandra Clare, author of Mortal Instrument Series; Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game; S. E. Hinton, author of The Outsiders; Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman Series, and so many others (O’Brien, Kovach).

While visiting a Writing Workshop, the published author hosting it, Pamela Thibodeaux, encouraged me to begin writing and posting fanfiction in order to start a healthy fanbase, so that when I go to get a book published, the transition is much smoother. Writing fanfiction is just as stimulating as writing an original novel. In a CNN article about fanfiction, they explicitly stated that “even if the subject matter is a little blue [writing fanfiction] is a positive form of self-expression,” compelling parents to “encourage writing” (Knorr). In fact, the main difference between the two is that writing fanfiction “takes the pressure of world-building off” which allows the writer to explore their writing style without getting tangled up in creating something from scratch (McQuien). In a way, fanfiction is the box of cake mix in the literature world―it helps amateurs to take the first step of baking without getting too overwhelmed, but in the end, it can taste just as good.

#2 REASON:

As the overall acceptance and validity of fanfiction has increased, fanfiction has found its way into the publishing world, being branded as actual literature. Time-honored novels such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice have several published, fan-made additions and recreations of the original tale like Pride and Prejudice II: The Sequel by Victoria Park and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which was turned into a filmed phenomena in 2016 (“List of Literary Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice”). Although there have been many literary adaptations of this novel spanning as far back as 1932, there has been a 32% increase of published fanfictions just for this fandom (“List of Literary Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice”).

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has also witnessed this movement with his iconic Sherlock Holmes series, especially with the popular television series Sherlock, a “modernization” (or modern au [alternate universe] in fanfiction jargon) of the classic cases between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (“8 unconventional Sherlock Holmes adaptations”). These published fanfictions have been able to keep the trademarked names of their beloved characters, but many novels had to undergo extensive editing to cross the line of “fanfiction” into “literature.”

One of the most famous, or rather infamous, examples of this is how E. L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey was originally a Twilight fanfiction (Morrison). Another, perhaps not as well known, is L. Stoddard Hancock’s Cruel and Beautiful World, which was heavily based off of J. K. Rowling’s beloved Harry Potter; in fact, her novel indulges the ship [romantic pairing] of Hermione and Draco, fondly known as “Dramione” in the Harry Potter fandom (Sarner). While some fanfictions have to undergo a facelift in order to be published, their true identity still remains intact: they are still devoted extensions to the esteemed works of another author.

#3 REASON:

Fanfiction has evolved greatly throughout history, and how to post fanfictions and share them with the world is just getting easier and easier. As mentioned prior, the creation of Archive of Our Own revolutionized the world of fanfiction with its promise of legal support, but how? In 2002, there was a great purging of fanfictions on the original fanfiction posting website, fanfiction.net, shaking the fanfiction community and dissuading writers from posting their fanfics (Silver). It was this sort of mass-banning on works that encouraged the creation of Archive of Our Own and its legal branch the “Organization of Transformative works” where they “clarify the legality of fanfiction, champion fan-created works whenever they were legally challenged, and provide fans with legal resources in case they were targeted by copyright claims” (Silver). In short, Archive of Our Own gave fanfic writers a safe place to share their fanfictions.

Because of this difference with websites, despite the age difference and advantage Fanfiction.net may have with it, the increase of Harry Potter fanfictions on Archive of Our Own, for example, have increased 795% more than those on Fanfiction.net since 2010 (Pellegrini). Not only that, but Archive of Our Own has many other unique features that makes both writing fanfictions and reading fanfictions much more convenient such as tagging (Romano). Speaking from personal experience as a user of both Fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own, although the first is not a bad place to read fanfiction, it is not nearly as user-friendly. For example, if I wanted to read a Harry Potter fanfiction, I could easily do so on both sites, but if I wanted to read a Harry Potter fanfiction that had the ship “Dramione” or had “zombies” or where Fred didn’t die, I can only specify those tags on Archive of Our Own to find that perfect fanfiction. And fanfiction sites are still continuing to expand, to shape, to mold themselves in order to fit the preferences of the ever-evolving writers that post on them.

#4 REASON:

The world of literature is a diverse melting pot of ideas and people, but even with this diversity, there are many minorities that are pushed to the side such as the LGBT community―in the world of fanfiction, however, they are the majority. Seeing LGBT often connotes inaccurate concepts, especially in literature, where one thinks “gay” when they see LGBT and then “the label of ‘gay’ often overshadows the important elements of the story/author, often tarnish[ing] the book before it can be read” (Guy). The LGBT community is so much more than just “gay,” and those different branches are very rarely explored in published literature, but in fanfiction, they florrish.

Although majority of fanfiction does involve romance and a good amount of it involves couples of the same sex, that is not the only layer as is with most “gay” literature. In fanfiction, everyone is represented―if you want to read a fanfiction where the main character is asexual, where the main character is genderfluid, where there’s a polyromantic relationship, where someone is aromantic, bisexual; no matter what it is you want, I can almost guarantee it’s out there somewhere. The fanfiction website Archive of Our Own found that only 38% of their users were heterosexual, meaning that at least 62% belong to the LGBT community and more people identified as genderqueer than as male (Hu). Everyone wants to be represented in media, to have someone to relate to.

The little gay literature that is there, is only just now being reprinted, falling out of print since the 80’s, and a good amount of it is being banned (Healey). For example, Amazon refused to sell a gay Victorian novel, claiming it was “pornagraphic,” yet they have an entire section for “erotic” fiction such as 50 Shades of Grey (Healey). With fanfiction, writers don’t have to worry about labels, whether a couple is straight or homosexual or genderqueer or whatever. Writers care about the stories, the chemistry between the characters that make them a dynamic duo, and with fanfiction, writers can share that.

CONCLUSION:

Fanfiction has existed for centuries with Sophocles's Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek and it shows no sign of stopping now. In fact, the amount of fanfiction hasn’t just increased because of its acceptance or its publication or the ease of posting, but because of new and continuous material.

Before the release of BBC’s show Sherlock, there were fanfictions based on the original book, and the addition of the show allowed Sherlock Holmes and John Watson to become more familiar, and thus, more fanfictions to be added to the overall fandom. The same occured with the Harry Potter fandom. When Jack Thorne’s play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (a published fanfiction continuing J.K. Rowling’s original series Harry Potter), fanfiction writers exploded with new material, new ideas, and new fanfictions; a total of 1,682 fanfictions concerning Harry Potter and the Cursed Child have been posted on Archive of Our Own since the play’s release date in 2016 (Search Results for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child). Due to the recent release of Voltron: Legendary Defender in 2016, there has been a staggering 5,054% increase of fanfiction for the show originally from the 80’s (Search Results for Voltron).

With every reinstatement of a show, a new generation of potential fanfiction writers are exposed to it, adding on to the classic mediums other fanfiction writers wrote about before them such as Star Trek or Sex in the City, where there are still significant increases of 8,600% since 2005 and the show ended in 2004 (Kneale). Fanfiction increases because more and more people are being exposed to that world. Just as there will always be incoming literature and TV shows and movies, new fanfictions will be trailing in afterwards like a relentless shadow.

Works Cited

“Archive of Our Own Beta.” Archive of Our Own, www.archiveofourown.org/works/search?utf8=✓&work_search[query]=Harry potter and the cursed child.

“Archive of Our Own Beta.” Archive of Our Own, www.archiveofourown.org/works/search?utf8=✓&work_search[query]=Voltron.

Burt, Stephanie. “The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 23 Aug. 2017, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-promise-and-potential-of-fan-fiction.

Clark, Cassandra. “‘Hamlet’ Origins: The Legend of Amleth.” Shake It Up, 28 June 2017, sfshakes.wordpress.com/2017/06/28/hamlet-origins-the-legend-of-amleth/.

“Eight Unconventional Sherlock Holmes Adaptations.” The Week - All You Need to Know about Everything That Matters, 29 Feb. 2012, theweek.com/articles/477729/8-unconventional-sherlock-holmes-adaptations.

Guy, Lauren. “What's the Point of LGBT Literature?” The University Times, 16 Oct. 2016, www.universitytimes.ie/2016/10/whats-the-point-of-lgbt-literature/.

Healey, Trebor. “Early Gay Literature Rediscovered.” Huffington Post, www.huffingtonpost.com/trebor-healey/early-gay-literature-redi_b_5373869.html .

Hill, Mark. “The Forgotten Early History of Fanfiction.” Motherboard, 3 July 2016, motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4xa4wq/the-forgotten-early-history-of-fanfiction.

Hu, Jane. “The Revolutionary Power Of Fanfiction For Queer Youth.” The Establishment, The Establishment, 16 May 2016, theestablishment.co/the-importance-of-fanfiction-for-queer-youth-4ec3e85d7519.

Kneale, Heidi. “Final Staff.” The Appeal of Fanfiction, July 2005, www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10165.

Knorr, Caroline. “Inside the Racy, Nerdy World of Fanfiction.” CNN, Cable News Network, 5 July 2017, www.cnn.com/2017/07/05/health/kids-teens-fanfiction-partner/index.html.

Kovach, Catherine. “7 Authors Who Wrote Fanfiction.” Bustle, Bustle, 20 Mar. 2018, www.bustle.com/articles/160939-7-authors-who-wrote-fanfiction-because-its-actually-the-best.

“List of Literary Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice.” List of Literary Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/List_of_literary_adaptations_of_Pride_and_Prejudice.html.

McQuein, Josin L. “My Bloggish Blog Thing.” Novels vs. Fanfiction, 18 Apr. 2012, 12:53 PM, josinlmcquein.blogspot.com/2012/04/novels-vs-fanfiction.html.

Morrison, Ewan. “In the Beginning, There Was Fan Fiction: from the Four Gospels to Fifty Shades.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 13 Aug. 2012, www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/13/fan-fiction-fifty-shades-grey.

OBrien, David. “Famous Authors Who Began in Fan Fiction.” AUTHORS.me, 27 Oct. 2016, www.authors.me/famous-authors-began-fan-fiction/.

Pellegrini, Nicole. “FanFiction.Net vs. Archive of Our Own.” HobbyLark, HobbyLark, 15 Feb. 2017, letterpile.com/writing/fanfictionnet-vs-archive-of-our-own.

Romano, Aja. “10 Famous Authors Who Write Fanfiction.” The Daily Dot, 9 Mar. 2017, www.dailydot.com/parsec/10-famous-authors-fanfiction/.

Romano, Aja. “Is It Possible to Quantify Fandom? Here's One Statistician Who's Crunching the Numbers |.” The Daily Dot, 24 Feb. 2017, www.dailydot.com/parsec/toastystats-ao3-fandom-statistics/.

Sarner, Lauren. “This 'Harry Potter' Fan Fiction Author Adapated Dramione Into A Novel.” Inverse, 18 July 2016, www.inverse.com/article/15572-dramione-fandom-harry-potter-fan-fiction-romance-l-stoddard-hancock-broken-wings.

Silver, Farasha. “How Archive of Our Own Revolutionized Fandom.” FAN/FIC Magazine, 26 Mar. 2017, fanslashfic.com/2015/11/01/how-archive-of-our-own-revolutionized-fandom/.

Times, J.E. Reich Tech. “Fanspeak: The Brief Origins Of Fanfiction.” Tech Times, MENU$(".Topsearchbutton").Click(Function(){ $(".Srcframe").Toggle(); }); $('Input[Type="Search"]').Keypress(Function() { $("#Srcform").Submit(); });TechScienceHealthCultureReviewsFeatures, 25 July 2015, www.techtimes.com/articles/70108/20150723/fan-fiction-star-trek-harry-potter-history-of-fan-fiction-shakespeare-roman-mythology-greek-mythology-sherlock-holmes.htm.

#senior paper #fanfiction essay #yes i wrote an essay about fanfiction #educational #informative paper #pls dont judge me

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fffinnagain · 7 years

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Lost Works and Posting Rates on fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own

Recently, I posted an analysis of these two large fanfiction archives using work numbers (nodes) to get a sense of how active they have been over the years. Investigations since I’ve discovered how different these node counts are from the works CURRENTLY available in these archives.

In Red and Green above are the number of nodes assigned per month in each archive, going back to 2001 for Fanfiction.net and to AO3’s beginning in 2009. These nodes are assigned to each new work, or (on AO3) each new saved draft on the archive. The Blue and Yellow are estimates of the works currently in each archive from these past times, hence, works surviving.

Not only is the gap between Nodes and Surviving Works very big, it is shaped totally different for these two archives. To see this directly, here is the percentage of nodes with works currently in the archives, by month.

If we are going to compare fan activity on these archives from these data, Nodes and Current works, we need to get a better sense of what is going on. Below I get into the details of where these numbers come from, their historical context, and justify my interpretations, but here are the main points fanfiction readers might want to know:

Fanfiction.net has lost a lot of posted works over the years, up to 70% of those posted before 2003.

The proportion of works removed from fanfiction.net has gone down to ~20% since 2016

While some loss of works is to be expected, this amount of works removed over time suggests active curation by the FFN community and staff.

On AO3, the proportion works removed, or drafted but never posted is probably around 20%.

AO3 has a spam problem, with non-fan agents flooding the archives with fake works.

AO3 outpaced FFN in terms of works being posted to these archives in 2015 (as suggested in previous analysis) in the middle of messy part of the plot at the top.

In 2019, AO3 could reach FFN’s past peak posting rate of ~3500 fanworks per day.

So where are all the fanworks?

Did they disapeare or did they never exist in the first place?

Find out under the read more, where I also explain these numbers, how I reached these conclusions, and some historical explanations for the changes over time.

I’ll also try to add corrections there, if new information comes to light.

Where did the fanworks go?

On FFN, my best guess is that the gap is from works being deleted from the archive.

On AO3, some part is from deleted works, another is from drafts never posted, but most of the empty nodes never held fanworks at all.

To explain my reasoning, I need to get deeper into the details of how these archives have operated since their inception.

So first what are NODES: every work on either archive (or any archive) is assigned a unique number or node. In both AO3 and FFN, they manage this by giving out numbers successively. This means works posted this year have larger numbers than works posted a year before, and so on.

The way nodes are assigned is a clue to the number of works posted to the archive from any given past time, but it certainly isn’t the same as the works CURRENTLY available on these archives. If you check on a random node on either archive (ex: FFN node 1044532 AO3 node 10906586), there is a good chance you won’t find any transformative works. The graph above says the same.

Why are works removed from any fanwork archive?

Without considering specifics, there are lots of reasons for works to be removed from these archives. A work could be deleted because:

It’s actually spam, completely unrelated to the archive’s purpose.

It’s inappropriate content, according to the current terms of the archive.

It’s deleted by the creator for their own personal reasons.

It’s deleted when the creator leaves or is removed from the archive.

It also happens that the structure of the archives may skip nodes. In early 2014, AO3 changed its server structure and now two work numbers are discarded for every one assigned (I’ve compensated for this in my past analyses and most graphs here). As far as I know, there is nothing similar in FFN. Instead the gap between nodes assigned and works surviving is steadily around 1000 a day from 2003 to 2015. This consistency in the rate of works removed suggest that the process of removing works wasn’t set by the number of works posted, but rather defined by the resources available to do the database curation.

Fanfiction.net and the Missing Works

A warning: My interpretation of fanfiction.net’s situation is mostly inductive, connecting the behaviour of these time series, direct experience with the archive interface, and historical accounts. This hasn’t been confirmed or addressed by anyone inside the organisation.

So, I bet that the vast majority of nodes on FFN were once published fanworks. FFN doesn’t assign nodes until the creator clicks publish, and the website includes a few technical tricks to make it harder this to be abused, such as a Captcha check (at present). I’ve heard complaints about how awkward it is to post on fanfiction.net but those extra steps are excellent protections from anyone who isn’t really invested in sharing fanworks. (If anyone knows of past changes in this posting process, I’d love to hear about them!) Looking at average number of nodes assigned per day (below), there doesn’t seem to have been any big changes that would mark a sudden increase or decrease in spam postings. At least not since 2003.

But this means that the number of Nodes assigned per month is pretty close to the actual numbers of fanworks posted to the site for people to read. It is the closest I can get to the legit rate of works published to FFN (rather than currently on.) (Note: L'étude fanfiction.net also used node numbers in this same way.)

Here the fanfiction.net numbers from that first plot, presented on their own, specifically the number of nodes assigned per month (proxy for works published) and the estimated number of works currently available from these times past (+/- standard error). The gap between nodes assigned and works surviving on the archive is HUGE! I was shocked looking at this and double checked my work, but, yeah, that’s it.

Again focusing just on fanfiction.net, this is a plot of the PROPORTION of nodes assigned per month with works currently attached, our fanwork suvival rate. These precise numbers are estimates of the number of works on the archive, measured through random sampling. Scroll way down to the end of this post for details.

From later analysis, I’d suppose at less than 10% of works eventually get pulled by creators for reasons unrelated to archive policy. But as far as I can tell, up to 40% of all works posted to the Fanfiction.net have been removed, with a loss of more than 50% in the years before 2008, and up to 70% before 2003. How did that happen?

FFN has been around for quite a while, in internet time. It’s been open to users to post fanfiction since 1998 but what can be posted has changed over the years. New terms of service, categories of works, and purges of “inappropriate” content has resulted in a few waves of works being removed and the consequences of those changes are striking.

In October 2002, the archive removed all works rated NC-17 and those identifiably about Real Persons (RPS/RPF). From my present standpoint, I can’t evaluate precisely the number of works lost with this particular action, but the huge proportion of works removed from the begining of 2002 to the terminal date is a spectacular 70% (30% surviving). In absolute numbers, the nodes assigned around this time seems to be very large compared to the time preceeding it (preceeding plot, before 2002). Besides works being deleted, I wonder if some extra nodes may have been generated for the reposting of works, moved by users or the archive to new categories (or ratings).

The changes in October 2002 were momentus but the proportion of published works being removed continues to be very high for a while yet. It’s still around 50% in 2008, and gradually falls as we get closer to the present. From the information available, there doesn’t look to be big changes to the ratio, like new spam filtering or big automated deletions. And rather than a steady ratio of works being removed, there is a fairly consistent number of culled nodes, around 20 000 to 25 000 per month from 2003 to 2012. This suggests a sustained (and distributed) process of reporting and removing smaller sets of inappropriate fanworks. Stories abound of fans taking it upon themselves to report works that went against the rules in various fandoms and the losses were felt by many.

Another notable purge of content happened in 2012, with a focus on explicit content around the time that fanfiction.net changed its signup conditions to welcome minors. One fan calculated a loss of 0.4% of works over two days in some fandoms, but the efforts to scrub the archive must have extended well beyond that.

Instead of a massive automated lose of fanworks like in 2002, this change in policy coincides with a turning point in fanfiction.net’s popularity. Looking back at the average daily posting rates, the years of steading increases in node assigements begin to slow in 2012, decelerating much faster than it had been accelerating before. This change was much more palpable in some fandoms than others, but overall, the story looks like many long time fans moving to build communities and collections elsewhere. If those who left were mostly fans who wanted to post works outside of the archive’s rules, that could also account for the proportional decrease in works being removed for content reasons since.

Some creators leave by never updating again. Others leave and delete their accounts, removing all of their past work in the process. [C&C 2.] The total works removed in substantial, but the loss is nearly always a gradual erosion of works recent and old from many individual decisions by users and staff.

While these graphs show the archive slowing down when compared to it’s heyday, this doesn’t mean fanfiction.net is dead, far from it. FFN is very active for many groups playing (more or less) within the terms of service. Current posting rates of 1000 new works a day is substantial and the support from their employees surely is appreciated by many fans and fandoms still. But hopefully they won’t need to challenge their users again with new rules any time soon.

Archive of Our Own and the Pains of Rapid Growth

The history of Archive of Our Own is a bit easier to tell because it’s not as long and I’ve gotten great insight and numbers from @zz9pzza, a very kind volunteer working on the backend of the archive. Between those numbers (download and play with the csv files yourself!) and a few funny techniques, we see a completely different archive story.

Looking only at the figure above, AO3’s nodes assigned and works published by month, we get a very clear trend coming through: the numbers are very close together in the early years, but then more work is getting deleted as the archive rate of new works grows. The difference is bigger than proportional growth so there is some kind of change in type of activity on the achive over time.

I should explain the two lines for AO3 works: In grey is an accurate count of works by publication date in 2017-10-04. But AO3 allows people to backdate works, so this count includes fanfiction that was actually added some time later. Without knowing how many works have been backdated, we can’t tell if this is convering up substantial work attrition. Instead of just trusting these counts, I sampled the archive to estimate surviving works as well (in magenta), and the difference is nearly always within standard error. This suggests that only a small proportion of the archive is backdated works, like less than 4%, and the impact is distributed widely.

While we are looking at this graph, I want to draw attention to just how linear AO3’s grow continues to be, nearly constant acceleration under seasonal bumps and shifts. (If anything it is growing fasted than linear.) At this rate, AO3 will be acquiring 100 000 published works a month, 100 000 real publicly accessible fanworks, by 2019.

But back to the question of missing fanworks. This figure reports the estimated ratio of nodes with works surviving from 2010. Conversely, the proportion of nodes without works increases with time, opposite to the story at FFN. A small proportion (20%) of possible works are missing from the early years, growing slowly to around 30% in 2015. The standard error estimates for these values gets very large with the server change in 2014, but even allowing for that uncertaintly, the proportion of nodes with works becomes very erratic in the last few years.

Also on this plot is the ratio of works listed to nodes assigned in grey. That this line is so close to the number of nodes remaining suggests that backdated works aren’t covering up all that much.

On AO3, some proportion of the nodes NEVER had works published on them. A unique node is assigned to save drafts as well as to published posts, so pieces that languished in users’ draft files on AO3 add to these counts. I have no idea how many drafts are never posted, but I’m willing to bet that it is a) more than total number of works users delete for their own reasons and b) the proportion of nodes stuck on unpublished drafts will be constant to the number of works published. From the above, that means that less than 20% of nodes are assigned to drafts that never get published. Maybe it’s 5%, maybe it’s 15%, I don’t know.

Now, AO3 is famously permissive about what can get posted there because it was constructed to welcome a lot of the fanfiction that was too controversial for the commercial archives. The terms of the website sets some practical limits on what is considered a transformative work and what creators can say around the pieces posted, but it is consistently (and controversially) resistent to the purges that cut so much material from fanfiction.net. Add the right tags and your fanwork is not going to be cut because of the type of mature content or the commercial property it was derived from.

So what is being deleted from the archive? A small number are removed because of content restrictions, some are taken off by the creator for personal reasons, but most of the stuff removed is spam. Posts like this:

AO3 users and volunteers are reporting this non-fandom stuff so it can be removed whenever possible, but as we can see from the plot above, this problem is getting worse. On top of the contributions by dewdrop495 and their compatriots, the messiness of the works to nodes ratio in the last few years is also due to the occasional bot infestations. That’s why there are spikes in the nodes counts at odd times. It’s activity that has nothing to do with fans sharing fanworks. Compared to FFN, it’s really easy to spam AO3 once you are logged in. And as the archive gets more popular, more efforts are made to post irrelevant material. Regular users of AO3 will have seen some recent alerts as the volunteers try to handle this kind of abuse of the archive. [C&C 1.]

Works removed from an archive do not get cut the moment they are put online. Whether spam, content, or creator discontent, it takes time and opportunity for works to be removed. By subtracting the accurate current works published last April from last September, we can see the proportional attrition of works from times past from AO3.

The number of published works removed from AO3 is not trivial: we see up to 5% loss in only half a year for recently published works. If spam levels stay constant (ha) we would expect around 15% of published works to be removed over the long haul. Without spam this would be less, but there will always be some loss. Looking further back, to times when spam wasn’t so much of a problem, we see a total loss of 3-4% of works no longer in the spot light.

Looking back at the early days of AO3, when only 20% of nodes were without published works (see figure: AO3, % Nodes…), we can guess that between 10 and 15% of works started do not get published, and 5 to 10% of non-spam works published are removed for archive and creator reasons.

AO3 vs fanfiction.net

All this work started when I wanted to know how many works were being posted at any given time on either archive. Like, without the noise of spam and before anyone might delete their works. The nodes assigned might satisfy for FFN, but for AO3, we can’t get much closer than knowing the rate of fanworks being posted to AO3 is somewhere between the light blue and magenta lines in the figure below.

This figure shows the average rates per day of nodes assigned and works existing. The real fannish activity is somewhere between these lines, but the analysis above suggests that for FFN, its the same or very close to the nodes assigned (Brown Trend line)), while on AO3, it is closer to the works currently available. A conservative estimate would be 5% to 15% higher, depending on if you count lost drafts (purple Trend line). Note: These trendlines are just eyeballed with all this ambiguity in mind and not calculated with precise error estimates.

This puts the crossing point on posting rates in late 2015. A few other points can be made from this plot of archive activity over time:

AO3 is growing faster than FFN did: annual increases of ~350 published works per day vs ~290 per day

The deceleration of FFN posting rates is stablising, both in Nodes accumulated and works surviving.

AO3 will reach peak FFN daily posting rates in early 2019

Before you go, I want to encourage everyone to take a moment to recognised all the work put in by volunteers and staff to maintain these archives. The specifics of their efforts depends on where they are, but it’s a real struggle to keep up with the flow of new fan produced content and the other stuff that gets posted. These sites are so important to our fandom communities and I wish them all the best.

Where do these numbers come from

Nodes Per Month: The nodes are sampled from a database of Harry Potter fanfiction metadata from each archive. I scraped the data, took the earliest work from each month (or thereabouts) and took the difference to track how nodes had accumulated over each interval of time. For all the node work I’m exploiting a key fact that these numbers are assigned consequetively.

Getting the number of nodes assigned per month or day is easy with FFN data as they are handed out, one by one, and only as works are first published online. AO3’s structure is more of a challenge. For one, the backdating of works interferes makes it likely for works in the early years to actually have much later node values, for any other, the changes in counting process and occassional bot infestation obfuscate the regular process growth process. To compensate, I took the median node value for single chapter works listed as published from ides-to-ides (:P) of adjacent months, which produced something close to the begining of the relevant month, and divided the differences when appropriate to estimate work numbers assigned rather than absolute node numbers.

The surviving works estimate come from random sampling of the archives to check if works existed. I randomly sampled 100 work node pages from each month to see if they returned errors pages or fanworks. This gives an estimate of the ratio of nodes with surviving works, along with standard error range for these binomial stats.

Both sets of counts of currently listed works by date of publication are directly from AO3, courtesy of @zz9pzza. The numbers are all to be posted on fandomstats.org so that you can play with them too.

@zz9pzza was also generous with insights and pointed out the example of spam which has since been removed.

A number of folks shared their experiences of having works removed from these sites. I couldn’t report on all that at the same time as get the numbers down, but I hope a few more stories will be called forth by this analysis. I also learned a lot of the chronology and related analyses by digging through fanlore, so thanks, @otw-fanlore!

And a final cheers to @destinationtoast for feedback on this post. Yes it could have been worse :P

CAVEATS and CORRECTIONS

AO3 has a highly reliable automatic SPAM detector (99.3% accuracy), and they have (just) implemented new methods to suppress Sports stream related SPAM posts. (Thanks for the announcement, @ao3org)

Apparently fanfiction.net doesn’t let you delete your account. By the ToS (7) they can remove accounts, but we can’t do it ourselves. Anyone can still manually remove their own works, but that is as close as one can get to leaving without being kicked off the site. (thanks @kagenoneko!)

Somehow, I just found this post by the FFN stats blog about the number of works and posting rates from 2010! I haven’t gone through to reconcile our results, but it does report that at that time only 53% of postings (nodes) were still accessible works at that time.

#fanfiction.net #AO3 #fandom stats #fandom stats discussion #fandom history

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michaelandy101-blog · 3 years

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34 Inbound Hyperlink Constructing Methods to Assist Your Website Rank Greater

New Post has been published on https://tiptopreview.com/34-inbound-link-building-strategies-to-help-your-site-rank-higher/

34 Inbound Hyperlink Constructing Methods to Assist Your Website Rank Greater

There’s no query that constructing nice inbound hyperlinks to your web site is difficult work. Whereas many web site homeowners resort to spamming weblog remark sections to get their backlinks, that’s neither essential nor efficient in your website positioning efforts.

Though there’s a lot discuss producing inbound hyperlinks, the nitty-gritty methods to truly do which can be not often mentioned.

Fortunately, hyperlink constructing methods aren’t as powerful to implement as many individuals say they’re. Consider it like social media — when you’re a supply of nice content material, and also you get it in entrance of the precise folks, they’re going to share it.

With that in thoughts, we’ll get you began with examined and efficient tips that will help you construct professional inbound hyperlinks. Learn on to see the way to use these hyperlink constructing concepts in your website positioning technique.

What’s hyperlink constructing?

Hyperlink constructing is the method of accelerating the amount and high quality of inbound hyperlinks to your web site to realize referral visitors, enhance area authority, and enhance search engine rankings.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks, additionally referred to as inbound hyperlinks and incoming hyperlinks, are a type of off-page website positioning the place you earn hyperlinks from different web sites that direct readers to your individual web site.

The individual receiving the hyperlink is the one who refers to a hyperlink as a backlink.

Backlinks are completely different from outbound hyperlinks (hyperlinks out of your web site to a different web site) and inside hyperlinks (hyperlinks from one web page in your web site to a different).

The precise backlinks can do two nice issues in your web site:

They will drive visitors to your web site. If somebody posts a backlink to your web site on their web site or weblog, their readers would possibly click on on it — and you will profit from that referral visitors.

They may help you rank larger in search. Backlinks inform search engines that your web site is an authority on a sure topic — so the extra backlinks you earn from high-quality, high-authority websites, the higher your web site will rank in search engine outcomes pages (SERPs).

A great inbound hyperlink comes from an authoritative web site, and makes use of pure anchor textual content. Anchor textual content is solely the textual content copy that is hyperlinked. For instance, if I hyperlink to our weblog submit about backlink strategies, the anchor text is “backlink strategies.”

Natural anchor text means you’re not just hyperlinking keywords left and right. Google understands the context of a link, so more generic “learn more” and “click here” anchor text can be just as valuable as keyword-optimized anchor text.

Link Building Strategies

Maintain a steady blog with great content.

Link to other blogs on your blog.

Write guest blog posts.

Curate and publish helpful resource lists.

Do expert roundups to build relationships.

Write newsjack posts.

Create case studies about your most impressive clients.

Volunteer to be the subject of a case study.

Administer surveys.

Write book reviews.

Conduct free webinars and post archived copies online.

Create free tools.

Create shareable templates.

Create compelling infographics.

Create other forms of visual content.

Create SlideShare presentations.

Do something funny.

Write press releases about interesting company news.

Send out a joint press release when your news involves another company.

Do some outreach when you have big news or a great piece of content.

Set up press request alerts and look for opportunities to send quotes.

Write and pitch op-ed articles.

Partner with companies in complementary industries.

Do some co-marketing.

Ask for reviews.

Make friends with other webmasters in real life.

Search for and monitor mentions of your brand.

Identify broken links through site-crawling tools.

Search for and monitor your competitors’ backlinks.

Incorporate ‘Tweet This’ links into your content.

Install social sharing widgets.

Sponsor or speak at an event.

Help another webmaster fix an error on their site.

Give away free trials and sneak-peeks of your product.

1. Maintain a steady blog with great content.

Consistently creating great blog content that people naturally want to link to is one of the most tried and true ways to organically generate inbound links.

You should publish content that’s directly related to your industry and that helps your reader. That way, they feel compelled to share it. They might even link to it from their own website, if they own one.

Learn how to start a successful blog with our free guide and checklist.

2. Hyperlink to different blogs in your weblog.

A weblog is supposed to be a social instrument. The extra you hyperlink to others — particularly while you do it in a constant, opportunity-driven method — the better chance a kind of bloggers will return the favor.

Plus, you’ll be able to’t cowl every thing about every thing in your weblog. It is sensible to leverage the wealth of sources on the internet to make your weblog’s expertise higher and extra rewarding in your readers.

three. Write visitor weblog posts.

Write an awesome weblog submit, and store it round to blogs it might be a superb match for. If one accepts, they need to be prepared to offer you an inbound hyperlink within the submit. Visitor running a blog is an effective way to each promote your experience and earn high quality white-hat hyperlinks.

Do not know whom to write down for? Most media retailers permit folks to submit authentic articles on subjects related to their readership. You must begin, nevertheless, with publications straight in your area of interest. In the event you’re a branding company, you would possibly inquire with branding publications.

four. Curate and publish useful useful resource lists.

Useful resource lists are each nice hyperlink bait and useful content material in your readers. In the event you create a complete useful resource checklist, it will be straightforward for different bloggers to hyperlink to it in their very own posts as a substitute of rehashing and curating all that content material themselves. To provide you an concept of what one would possibly appear like, here is an instance of an inventory of sources we curated for newbie website positioning’s.

5. Do skilled roundups to construct relationships.

Skilled roundups is usually a useful gizmo for constructing relationships with influencers. Whereas these roundups could not get you numerous inbound hyperlinks or leads immediately, constructing relationships with influencers will enable you get strong backlinks from authoritative sources down the road.

After they contribute to your roundup, you’ll be able to attain out to them later to ask a couple of visitor submit alternative or one thing else — whereas thanking them once more for contributing to the earlier skilled roundup.

In one in all our skilled roundups, we reached out to profitable entrepreneurs and requested them to share their prime content material marketing suggestions.

6. Write newsjack posts.

Newsjacking is while you capitalize on the recognition of a information story to amplify your individual gross sales and marketing success. In the event you’re the primary blogger to touch upon a information occasion, you will rise to the highest of the SERPs as a result of “freshness” element of Google’s algorithm, and others will hyperlink to your content material in their very own accounts of the story.

In the event you’re undecided what newsjacking can appear like, check out just a few newsjacking examples we discovered throughout the net.

7. Create case research about your most spectacular shoppers.

In the event you make your shoppers look good in case research about their enterprise, you’ll be able to wager they’re going to be linking to your web site. However you have to make them good. This implies selecting corporations which have seen the most effective outcomes, are enthusiastic, and know your services or products effectively.

It additionally means asking the precise questions and laying out the case examine in a lovely, complete method.

Download three free case study templates to get you started.

eight. Volunteer to be the topic of a case examine.

Why not get on the opposite aspect of the case examine hyperlink love? Firms are all the time in search of prospects who’re prepared to be the topic of a case examine. Volunteer your time for one in all your main distributors, and get a backlink from the case examine as soon as it is revealed.

9. Administer surveys.

In the event you conduct analysis, promise to share the information with others. In the event you do the information assortment and crunching and provides some excessive authority websites entry to the findings afterwards, you’ll be able to wager they’re going to do some promotion and inbound linking so that you can ensure you have an awesome pattern measurement.

10. Write e-book evaluations.

In the event you present a complete overview about one other writer’s content material, there is a good likelihood they (and others) will hyperlink to it. This is an instance of a e-book overview from our weblog, which sums up The Challenger Sale in a five-minute learn or much less.

11. Conduct free webinars, and submit archived copies online.

If it’s informative, your attendees will completely share it. One straightforward method to do that is to show your PowerPoint presentation slides right into a SlideShare presentation, after which embed that presentation right into a weblog submit. You may as well embed it into the webinar’s touchdown web page in order that anybody wanting to enroll in a webinar that is already over can try the presentation.

For a fair higher shot at backlinks to those archived webinar pages, companion up with one other firm, model, or influencer for the webinar. Not solely do two well-aligned manufacturers make for a strong presentation, nevertheless it’ll widen the viewers — even after the webinar is over. (Study tips about making a webinar on this weblog submit.)

12. Create free instruments.

Keep in mind once I talked about curating and publishing useful resource lists in your weblog? What do you suppose folks embrace and hyperlink to on these useful resource lists? Free instruments are a giant one. You may get on the opposite aspect of these useful resource lists by creating free instruments which can be actually useful in your goal prospects.

Right here at HubSpot, for instance, we created Website Grader, a instrument that has received hyperlinks from many companies, companions, and others in our trade.

13. Create shareable templates.

Like free instruments, templates are one other factor folks will discover helpful sufficient to hyperlink to. Earlier than you create a template, take into consideration what sort of templates would make folks’s jobs simpler. A designer, for instance, would possibly create a library of downloadable enterprise card templates to which others may hyperlink to again and again. Bookmarkable content material is usually the sort of content material that will get tons of inbound hyperlinks.

14. Create compelling infographics.

Individuals completely like to share infographics. In the event you create an authentic infographic your self, folks will hyperlink again to you as the unique supply. To extend the chance of an inbound hyperlink, you may additionally share your design with the sources you cited, and make the embed code in your infographic simply accessible.

Not a designer? Anybody can create professional-looking, high-quality infographics — and shortly with templates like these free infographic templates. Earlier than creating an infographic, you’ll need to give you a subject that may really be visualized and that pertains to your trade.

15. Create different types of visible content material.

Cartoons, content material visualizations, charts and graphs, and the like are an vital a part of a visible content material marketing technique and an effective way to win inbound hyperlinks. Since they take time and money to make, others will most likely skip the fuss of making their very own visible content material and hyperlink to yours as a substitute.

You should utilize free online design instruments to create your individual graphics, no matter how tech-savvy you’re.

16. Create SlideShare shows.

Slice one in all your infographics into items or repurpose one out of your final talking gig. You possibly can put these up in your weblog, in your web site’s useful resource heart, and even on a SlideShare account for extra hyperlinks.

Understand that essentially the most shareable shows are those which can be essentially the most compelling. Which means nice content material and nice design. Learn this weblog submit for a start-to-finish information on nailing your subsequent PowerPoint presentation.

17. Do one thing humorous.

Humorous issues unfold like wildfire. Take into consideration the humorous inside jokes in your trade, and capitalize on it with some humorous content material that is linkable. You possibly can create a meme, a brief video, or a tweet that captures the joke. Simply watch out that you just perceive your viewers and the way they’re more likely to reply in order that nothing is taken offensively.

18. Write press releases about attention-grabbing firm information.

By turning your PR technique into an inbound one, you create alternatives that weren’t there earlier than and carve out a spot in your firm, constructing significant mindshare within the course of together with your goal audiences.

When you write an awesome press launch, submit it up in your web site after which push out your releases to one of many large newswires to get extra protection.

Download our inbound press release templates for free.

19. Ship out a joint press launch when your information includes one other firm.

This may help attain hundreds of different associated websites that, in a press launch about simply your organization, could not have linked to your web site. This offers you an opportunity to achieve a bigger variety of folks — and get extra backlinks because of this.

20. Do some outreach when you may have large information or an awesome piece of content material.

Gaining consideration from the press and getting revealed in trade publications may help you construct your model, enhance your seen experience, enhance your credibility, and, after all, get backlinks from authoritative sources.

First, create a devoted web page concerning the story in your web site for them to hyperlink to. Then, attain out to a handful of journalists and/or publications that you could see actually valuing your story. Remember to give context to your request, observe their guidelines, write a compelling topic line in your pitch electronic mail, and be useful, not boastful.

21. Arrange press request alerts and search for alternatives to ship quotes.

Press request alerts are requests for sources of knowledge from journalists. These journalists are continually in search of quotes from particular folks to characteristic of their article, and there are a number of mediums they use to ship requests and discover these quotes.

This is an inventory from HubSpot’s VP of Marketing Matthew Barby of the companies you’ll be able to join to obtain alerts from journalists in your inbox:

Due to the excessive quantity of requests you will obtain, Barby additionally recommends creating electronic mail filters or folders to maintain your self organized.

22. Write and pitch op-ed articles.

You probably have an attention-grabbing opinion to share and might specific it clearly and persuasively in an op-ed article, you can have the chance to achieve lots of people, earn recognition for your self and your group, and get authoritative backlinks to your web site. I discover the simplest op-ed articles make a single level, embrace the writer’s private voice, after which supply particular suggestions.

When you write the article, goal online variations of trade newspaper and journal publications for a particularly beneficial inbound hyperlink.

23. Companion with corporations in complementary industries.

It’s frequent follow for company channel companions to hyperlink to one another’s nice content material, as a result of they’ve a vested curiosity in each other’s success.

You would possibly take into account assessing how a lot visitors a companion can drive to your web site by looking at their total net presence on Alexa and SimilarWeb. These websites may help get a tough concept of visitors, bounce charges, key phrases, and sources persons are utilizing to search out that web site, in addition to the following motion they take after visiting.

24. Do some co-marketing.

You may as well go a step additional and construct co-marketing partnerships. This implies partnering up with one other firm to advertise a bit of content material or product after which sharing the outcomes of that promotion. Once you leverage the connection and attain of a companion, you will get extra hyperlinks and extra buzz with much less work.

Efficient co-marketing does not should be difficult or costly, both. You possibly can attain out to a similarly-sized model in one other area and pitch the venture to them. You can begin with one thing so simple as just a few tweets, then construct your method as much as creating marketing collateral.

25. Ask for evaluations.

You possibly can ask customers of your product and trade specialists or analysts to overview new options you are rolling out, for instance. Not solely will you obtain an inbound hyperlink, however you will additionally get nice suggestions and strengthen your relationship with these you requested to write down evaluations.

Do not know the place to ask for evaluations? Take a look at our checklist of the most effective product overview web sites for B2B and B2C corporations.

26. Make mates with different site owners in actual life.

Strengthening your relationship with different site owners will open the door for related inbound hyperlink requests when future alternatives come up, and make it extra doubtless these requests don’t go ignored.

Networking is an unparalleled talent to have. The broader and extra open your community, the extra alternatives may very well be unlocked that you just did not even know existed. Listed below are useful tips about networking like a professional to get you began.

27. Seek for and monitor mentions of your model.

Contact site owners about turning these mentions into inbound hyperlinks, however solely when it is warranted — like once they’re citing knowledge of yours, for instance. It is a tactic referred to as “hyperlink reclamation.”

Monitor model mentions by establishing alerts utilizing instruments like Mention or BuzzSumo, and including key phrases associated to your model or merchandise. Simply ensure you exclude any mentions from your individual web site throughout the alert, which you are able to do in these instruments’ settings.

This is an electronic mail template for reaching out to ask for a hyperlink from our VP of Advertising and marketing:

Image Source

28. Determine damaged hyperlinks via site-crawling instruments.

Much like the step above, some site owners could hyperlink to your web site however use previous or damaged hyperlinks. That is pure as you modify and replace your web site over time. Nevertheless, these inbound hyperlinks are nonetheless beneficial — and you may replace them.

Use instruments like Dead Link Checker, Link Juice Recovery Tool, and Screaming Frog to scan for damaged hyperlinks on different web sites. Then, utilizing the above template as inspiration, attain out to site owners with an accurate hyperlink as substitute.

29. Seek for and monitor your opponents’ backlinks.

Discover alternatives the place you may get related hyperlinks. It is a nice approach to discover high-value hyperlink alternatives pretty simply. Run competitor analysis weekly or month-to-month to search out new alternatives you’ll be able to benefit from whereas they’re nonetheless contemporary.

Use a hyperlink evaluation instrument like Arel=”noopener” target=”_blank” hrefs, Majestic, or Moz’s Link Explorer to get an inventory of the backlinks for one in all your opponents. Then, try what varieties of posts are incomes backlinks and benefiting from that off-page website positioning.

For instance, if one in all your opponents is writing visitor posts for sure publications, there is a excessive chance these publications can be desirous about visitor posts from you on related subjects.

30. Incorporate “Tweet This” hyperlinks into your content material.

A part of getting inbound hyperlinks is getting your content material out to the plenty. Together with “Tweet This” or “Click to Tweet!” hyperlinks for tweetable nuggets in your content material will get folks sharing your content material socially extra usually.

The end result? Better visibility in search engines, information feeds, and Twitter streams — and thus extra alternative in your knowledge to be referenced in different folks’s content material.

This is what one in all these hyperlinks can appear like:

Researchers discovered that coloured visuals enhance folks’s willingness to learn a bit of content material by 80%. [Tweet this stat!]

You possibly can simply create tweetable hyperlinks utilizing the ClickToTweet service — with out having to be taught any customized code.

31. Set up social sharing widgets.

Similar to “Tweet This” hyperlinks get your content material on the market, so do social sharing buttons and widgets. Put them in your marketing content material like case research, whitepapers, ebooks, and weblog posts. The extra usually your web site seems on different social media websites, the extra doubtless somebody will see it, share it, and hyperlink to it from their web site.

32. Sponsor or converse at an occasion.

Occasions often give their audio system and sponsors nice web site publicity. They’ll both checklist you on their sponsors web page or introduce you as a speaker on a weblog submit. You may as well negotiate inbound hyperlinks into your phrases to make certain your time and sources yield a useful inbound hyperlink.

In the event you’re talking at an occasion, make a extremely superior, shareable presentation that folks will need to discover, share, and even hyperlink to later.

33. Assist one other webmaster repair an error on their web site.

Keep in mind once I mentioned you must get to know different site owners? That is one other time these connections will come in useful. Once you discover damaged hyperlinks on others’ websites, allow them to know (politely, after all), and supply them with a bit of your individual content material that might be an acceptable substitute for that damaged hyperlink. Be private, pleasant, and useful, and this may very well be a chance to begin constructing a relationship with that webmaster, too.

34. Give away free trials and sneak-peeks of your product.

When folks get to see your product beforehand, they’ll need the world to know they’re a part of the VIP crowd, and would possibly write a overview with a hyperlink again to your web site about it.

There are just a few methods to offer away free trials. You would create some call-to-action buttons in your web site or weblog. (Download these free, customizable CTA templates to help you out.)

You would additionally ship a brand new product announcement electronic mail to people who you suppose is perhaps , like present prospects. In the event you’re undecided the way to announce your product, try our information on the way to create an awesome product launch electronic mail.

Construct Inbound Hyperlinks the White-Hat Manner and Improve Rankings

The times of spamming remark sections and paying for link-building companies are over. With the information and strategies I’ve shared, you’re effectively in your approach to constructing high-quality backlinks the white-hat method. As extra hyperlinks level to your web site, you’ll rank a lot larger within the SERPs, boosting natural visitors and attracting extra potential leads and prospects.

Editor’s Word: This submit was initially revealed in April 2012 and has been up to date for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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How Can We Convince Big Companies to Leave Iconic Websites Online?

A version of this article originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Look, I’m not going to tell you that Yahoo Answers was the height of cultural artifacts.

But the thing is, it had value. And the reason it did was because of the amount of time that it was online, the sheer number of its answers, and its public-facing nature. But sites do not stay stationary, encased in amber, and there is significant financial motivation for large companies to only play the hits. After all, it’s why Top 40 radio isn’t all Dishwalla, all the time.

But after seeing yet another situation where a longstanding Yahoo-owned website is shutting down, I’m left to wonder if the problem is that the motivations for maintaining sites built around user-generated content simply do not favor preservation, and never will without outside influence.

How can we change that motivation? In a follow-up to an argument I made about historic preservation as Yahoo Groups was getting shut down, here’s my attempt to see the issue of preservation from the corporate perspective.

“I understand your usage of groups is different from the majority of our users, and we understand your frustration. However, the resources needed to maintain historical content from Yahoo Groups pages is cost-prohibitive, as they’re largely unused.”

— A statement sent to an archivist in 2019 as Verizon took steps to shut down the vast majority of the existing Yahoo Groups, the last major element of Yahoo’s user-generated content apparatus that was dismantled, with Groups meeting its maker a little over a year ago. It’s worth keeping in mind that at the scale Verizon works—making billions of dollars per year, on average—the costs of continuing to host such content would have been relatively minimal—especially given the fact that, uh, it owns a big chunk of the network through which that content is distributed.

The problem with corporate motivations is that they aren’t the same as the user’s, even when the user made the content.

Whether Google, Verizon, Disney, Nintendo, or Sony, the corporate motivations for keeping content available online for long periods differ greatly from the motivations that drive external visitors.

Users very much have an expectation of permanence just as they did with physical media, but in the context of online distribution, these companies have competing interests driving their decision-making that discourage them from not taking steps to protect historic or vintage content.

And in the case of user-generated content, there might be outside considerations at play. Perhaps they are concerned that something within an old user agreement might come to bite them if they leave a website online past its sell-by date, opening up to liabilities. Perhaps the concern is old, outdated code that may look novel on the outside but is effectively a potential attack surface in the wrong hands. After all, if they’re not keeping an eye on it, who’s to say someone can’t take advantage of that?

And then there are reasons that are a little more consumer-hostile. Nintendo recently ended sales for a bunch of old Mario content in both digital and physical form. It evokes the old gating of home video releases that Disney used to do in an effort to keep its old content fresh and make more money from that old content.

When it comes to websites, though, much of that content is user-generated, even if a technology company technically maintains it. I have to imagine that there’s an expectation that a company only has limited capability for maintenance costs, and the motivation for doing so is limited.

But on the other hand, as digital preservationist David Rosenthal has pointed out, in the grand scheme, preservation is not really all that expensive. The Internet Archive has a budget—soup to nuts—of around $20 million or less per year, around half of which goes to pay for the salaries of the staff. And while they don’t get all of it (in part because they can’t!), they cover a significant portion of the entire internet, literally millions of websites. They have a fairly complex infrastructure, with some of its 750 servers online for as long as nine years and petabyte capacity in the hundreds, but given that they are trying to store decades worth of digitized content—including entire websites that were long-ago forgotten—it’s pretty impressive!

So the case that it costs too much to continue to simply publicly host a site that contains years of historically relevant user-generated content is bunk to me. It feels like a way of saying “we don’t want to shoulder the maintenance costs of this old machine,” as if content generated by users can be upgraded in the same way as a decade-old computer.

One thought I have is that this issue repeatedly comes up because the motivations for corporations naturally lean in favor of closure when the financial motivation has dried up. Legislation could be one way to manage this to sort of right the axis in favor of preservation—but legislation could be difficult to pass. (This was the crux of my case for trying to make the existing legislation for the National Register of Historic Places apply to websites.)

In my frustration about this issue recently on Twitter, I found myself arguing for legislation that balances liability in favor of preservation of public-facing content. But I’m a realist—a law like that would have many moving parts and may be a tough sell. So, if we can’t encourage a law, maybe we need to build strategies to make maintaining a historic website easier to lift.

2012

was the year that the genealogy platform Ancestry.com launched a new site, Newspapers.com, to offer paid archives of newspapers to interested parties. The company, which charges about $150 per year for access to the archive, has helped maintain access to the historic record for researchers who need it. (I’m a subscriber and it is worth it.) With the exception of paid services for Usenet like Giganews, this model has not really been tried for vintage digital-only content, which seems like a major missed opportunity for companies raising concerns about financial costs for maintaining old platforms, like Yahoo/Verizon. Certainly I would prefer it to be free, but if I had to have a choice between free and non-existent, I’d pay money to access old content. Just throwing that out there.

Image: Ethan Hoover/Unsplash

A middle ground: An “analog nightlight” mode for websites

In some ways, I think that part of the motivation for taking down old or outdated websites is the expectation that the internal systems must also stay online.

But I think archivists and historians would be more than happy if public-facing content—that is, content that appeared on search engines, or was a part of the main experience when logged in at a basic level—was prioritized and protected in some way, which would at least keep the information alive even if its value was limited.

There’s something of a comparison here that I’d make: When the U.S. dropped the vast majority of its analog signals in favor of digital tuning, it led to something called the “analog nightlight,” in which very minimal, basic information was presented on analog stations was presented during the period before it was turned off. A TV host parlayed basic information to viewers about the transition, and told them what to do next. It didn’t entirely work—TV stations in smaller markets didn’t actually air the analog nightlight—but it helped give a sense of continuity as a new medium found its footing.

This approach, to me, feels like a path forward that could minimize the crushing pain of a loss of historic content while taking away much of the risks that come with continuing to host a site that may no longer be popular in the modern day but still continues to have value in a long-tail sense.

In the case of an “analog nightlight” equivalent for websites, the goal would be to essentially shut down any sort of attack surface through good design and planning. Before the site is taken offline in its original form, users are given the chance to download their old content or remove it from the website over a period of, say, 60 days. This is not too dissimilar to the warnings that site operators offer when they shut down currently—and looks like what Yahoo Answers is doing.

But once the deadline is hit, the site operators launch a minimal version of the original platform, with no way to log in or comment. The information is static, and there’s no directly accessible backend. That’s actually the important part of this—the site needs to be untethered from its original content-management system so no new content can be added. Instead, the content would be served up as a barebones static site (perhaps with advertising, if they roll that way), so as to minimize the “attack surface” left by a site that is not actively being maintained.

This reflects relatively recent best practice in the content-management space. Platforms like Netlify have gained popularity in recent years because they actively separate the form of distribution from the means of production, meaning that security risks are minimized. This is a great approach for live-production sites, but for sites that are intentionally meant to stay static, it removes one of the biggest risk factors that might discourage a content owner from continuing to maintain the work.

As far as liability concerns go, language could be included on the page to allow for users to remove old content if they so choose, along the lines of the “right to be forgotten” measure of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), though that measure includes a carve-out for purposes of historical research, which an archived version of a website would presumably cover. But the thing is, sites that are driven by user-generated content are generally protected by Section 230 in the United States anyway, so the onus for liability for the content itself falls onto the end user.

And if, even after these steps, a company still feels uncomfortable about hosting a dead website, they should reach out to librarians and archivists to donate the collection for maintenance purposes—perhaps with a corresponding donation to said nonprofit so they can cover the hosting costs. The Internet Archive actually offers a service like this!

The one site that makes me think that a model like this could work is Gawker. The news and gossip site, which was taken offline by the combination of a lawsuit and a corporate asset sale that specifically excluded it, remains online nearly five years after its closure in a mode very similar to this. Comments are closed and not visible to end users, which is a true shame as those comments often fed into the writing. But the content—the part that was truly valuable and important—is still out there, accessible and readable, even if you can’t do anything with it other than read it.

There are no ads. It’s a shrine to a platform that a lot of people cared about, even if others found it controversial. And there’s no reason what Gawker did couldn’t work in an equivalent way for Yahoo Answers.

Look, I’m going to be the first to fully admit that the motivations for protecting publicly accessible user-generated content simply remain only if the owner of that content feels “nice” about it.

And even then it feels like a bit of a surprise.

It’s still online, but it moved.

Recently, Warner Bros. got a little bit of flak for replacing its long-online Space Jam website, which dated back a quarter-century in its original form, with a site for the sequel. But I think what the company did was actually shockingly noble. They not only left the old site online, but they made it accessible from the new one. The work done to maintain this was not perfect—I think they should do archivists a solid by putting in 301 redirects on the old URLs of the vintage site, so they go to the new place—but the fact that they showed the initiative at all is incredibly impressive given what we’ve seen of corporate motivations when it comes to preservation.

Honestly, part of this was a result of people who were associated with the website’s creation still being at the company years later and being willing to speak up for preserving it—a 2015 Rolling Stone article explains that the site actually briefly was taken down after it went viral in 2010, only for employees involved in the creation of the site (now with leadership roles in the company) to swoop in and save it after some executive made the call to shut it down.

“If we had left the company, the site probably would not exist today,” said Andrew Stachler, one of the employees involved with saving the effort. “It would’ve gone down for good at that time.”

But imagine if they weren’t there. We’d be telling a different story right now.

And perhaps that’s what many companies need—someone who is willing to go to bat for the purposes of archival and protection of historic content.

In the digital age, preservation is the act of doing nothing but minimal upkeep and being comfortable with that fact. As proven time and time again, companies are more than comfortable with killing services entirely rather than leaving well enough alone.

Perhaps the way to save user-generated content is by making it as painless as possible to keep the status quo.

How Can We Convince Big Companies to Leave Iconic Websites Online? syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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Afterparty + Soundtrack Download For Mac

Jul 19,2019 • Filed to: Download Music • Proven solutions

In Afterparty, you play Milo and Lola, recently deceased best buds who suddenly find themselves staring down an eternity in Hell. But there’s a loophole: outdrink Satan and he’ll grant you re-entry to Earth.Milo and Lola are now dead, thirsty, and roaming the streets of Nowhere, the outermost. In AFTERPARTY, you are Milo and Lola, recently deceased best buds who suddenly find themselves staring down an eternity in Hell. But there’s a loophole: outdrink Satan and he’ll grant you re-entry to Earth. What adventures will you stumble through in the underworld? Every step is up to you. IMusic could be the best music downloader working on Windows PC and Mac. This free music downloader is designed for users to download music from the most widely used 3000 music sites (supported music sites are kept increasing).

I'm looking for best free iTunes music download sites, who can help?

If you are looking for best free iTunes music download sites, then keep reading this article since you will know of top sites that you can use. Across the Internet, you will notice that various websites have thousands of music that you can download, but you do not have an idea on which site to exactly use. We are going to review ten sites, which will make it easier to pick and use to download music.

Part 1. Best Free Music Downloader Websites to Download Music to iTunes

SoundCloud is the home of online music streaming sites as well as podcasts. SoundCloud allows you to follow people and explore the content they upload. On this website, you will find latest free music that you can download to your iTunes.

Pros:

It has tones of music libraries.

You can share music with your friends.

Cons:

Its search is not that good.

You can also find free music downloading for itunes on Free Music Archive. The music content is categorized to different genres like Blues, country, jazz, rock, pop and much more. You can also get top charts of all time or weekly and monthly charts.

Pros:

It curates music from other sites like 12Rec, and radio station thus providing huge library of music.

Cons:

It has few music library compared to other music sites.

NoiseTrade is another music site that you can visit and download music to your iTunes. The music files are well listed with song covers and titles.

Pros:

Songs are categorized to different genres.

It displays songs that are trending songs.

Cons:

You may fail to get songs of popular artistes.

Last.fm is another free music downloader for itunes that allows you to get free music downloads. When you click on “Free Music Download” button at the page, you will get a list of free music.

Pros:

You can stream live music.

It has a multilingual interface.

It displays newly released songs.

Cons:

Free music for downloads are limited.

If you want a site that you can explore different music genres as well as radio stations, then visit Jamendo. Its user interface is also very simple. You will also find a number of playlists. Download free palylist to iTunes is also available.

Pros:

Downloads are fast.

It has huge music libraries.

It supports sharing of music files.

Cons:

Not all music are free.

On BeeMP3 website you will be able to downloads tons of free music in MP3 format. Its search button is very responsive and it allows you to enter up to 5 keywords.

Pros:

It has popular music by popular artists.

You can stream music.

It is free to use.

Cons:

You can only download music in MP3 format.

MusOpen is also a free website that you can find free music without copyrights. This site also has free recordings and textbooks. The content is organized alphabetically for easy acess.You could get free iTunes music recorded from this websites.

Pros:

It has royalty free music.

You can browse music according to composer, year, performer and instrument.

Cons:

It just focuses on classical music.

This streaming music site allows you to download music in MP3 format. You can search for songs using keywords or paste URL link from other streaming sites like YouTube, very easy to download free music to iTunes.

Pros:

It displays bitrate of the song you want to download.

It allows one to play music.

It displays the source of the song such YouTube or Vimeo.

Cons:

It has annoying ads.

SoundClick allows you to browse and download music according to genres and top charts. This website has nearly all music genres such as pop, jazz, acoustic, metal, rock urban and much more. This website is not fancy, but trust me you will get nearly all the music that you want.

Pros:

It has a music store.

You can manage your stations.

You can stream music online.

Cons:

It user interface is not appealing.

You can also check on Audio Archive to get free audios and music recording of radios shows, podcasts and programs. On this free music download site, you can also get movies, images, data and concerts.

Pros:

It has thousands of free music.

You can also download podcasts.

It is easy to use.

Cons:

It focuses on old music thus you may fail to get latest music.

Part 2. Best Free Music Downloader for iTunes - iMusic

Having learnt about best websites that you can download music freely, it is essential to learn about a software that allows you to download free music from all these best download websites. An ideal software that not only supports ten websites but more than 3000 sharing sites is iMusic software. From these sites, you will be able to download music directly to your iTunes library. Once you have downloaded them, you will have the liberty to transfer the music files to your iOS device or your Android phone. Furthermore, iMusic allows you to download music as well as playlist from its inbuilt music library.

iMusic - Best Music Downloader to Download Music to iTunes

iMusic supports download of music from more than 3000 music sites including YouTube, Vimeo, Vevo, Hulu, etc.

It records music with ID3 tags being labelled automatically from online sites.

iMusic allows you to manage your iTunes library by deleting duplicates, erasing broken files, adding covers to your music.

It is built with a music toolkit, which enables you to rip CD music, convert music and form car playlist.

iMusic can also import music from your mobile device to iTunes Library.

Backup and recover the iTunes Library automatically.

Fix ID3 tags, like artist name, song title, year and genre automatically.

How to Download Music from Any Site to iTunes using iMusic:

Step 1. Launch iMusic software

On your computer, double-click on iMusic to open it and click on “GET MUSIC” icon.

Step 2. Select Music site

After clicking on “GET MUSIC”, you can then click on “DOWNLOAD” button. You will then see a list of sites below the copy and paste URL button. Scroll through and select any site that you want such Vevo. Next, search for the music file that you want and move to the next step.

Step 3. Select output format and Download Music

After that select the output format of your music and click on “Download” button. Once the file has been downloaded, you can locate them under “Library” icon.

There you go use iMusic software to get any music genre from the ten listed sites above. It is easy to use, and it has fast download speed. From these sites, you can also record music.

Bonus: How to Transfer Music from iPhone/iPod/iPad to iTunes Easily

Video Tutorial: iMusic- Transfer Music from iPhone/iPod/iPad to iTunes

Apple Music allows you to download tracks or entire albums for offline listening on the iPhone, Mac, and PC. But if you're crunched for storage on your device, it's best to stream Apple Music and only download select songs you listen to the most. That said, the Music app or iTunes can put a spanner into the works and automatically download songs and albums whenever you add them to your library. Annoying, right?

Below, we shall look at what you must do to stop Apple Music from downloading music automatically on the iPhone, Mac, and PC. The auto-download setting does not sync between devices over iCloud. So, you'll have to disable the feature on every device you want to stop downloads from happening automatically.

Disable Apple Music Automatic Downloads - iPhone

Apple Music has come a long way since its introduction on the iPhone in 2015. It's vastly improved in terms of navigation, pushes out better recommendations, comes with dark mode support, features a nifty auto-play feature, and more. You can stop automatic downloads in Apple Music on your iPhone by diving into the Settings app.

Step 1: Open the Settings app on your iPhone.

Step 2: Scroll down and tap Music.

Step 3: Turn off the switch next to Automatic Downloads.

Tip: You can also use the Optimize Storage option to impose a limit (4GB, 8GB, 16GB, etc.) on the amount of storage that Apple Music can use. You can use it with or without the Automatic Downloads option enabled.

Additionally, you can tap the Downloaded Music option to bring up a list of all downloaded music arranged by artist and album—you can then delete any listed item by swiping to the right and selecting Delete.

Now that you've disabled automatic downloads in Apple Music, you can tap the Download icon next to the album or track to initiate a download manually. Or, you can long-press an item and select Download on the context menu.

Also on Guiding Tech

What Does Apple Music's Web Player Do Differently And When Should You Use It

Disable Apple Music Automatic Downloads - Mac

macOS Catalina users need to use the dedicated Music app to stream Apple Music. Yes—Apple pulled the plug on iTunes after macOS Mojave. The new Music app is polished and much smoother to use. You can stop automatic downloads in Apple Music on your Mac by diving into the app's Preferences pane.

Note: If you use macOS Mojave or older on your Mac, skip to the next section to figure out how to disable auto-downloads in Apple Music on iTunes.

Step 1: Open the Music app. Then, tap Music on the menu bar and select Preferences.

After Party + Soundtrack Download For Mac Free

Step 2: Switch to the Downloads tab.

Step 3: Turn off the switch next to Downloads. Click OK to save your changes.

Tip: To remove a previously downloaded track or album, right-click the item and select Remove Download.

You can always download tracks and albums manually by clicking the Download icon next to each item or by right-clicking and selecting Download.

Also on Guiding Tech

#Apple Music='bp-purple>

Click here to see our Apple Music articles page

Disable Apple Music Automatic Downloads in iTunes - PC and Mac

Unlike on the Mac, you are still confined to listening to Apple Music on the PC via iTunes. If you want to disable automatic music downloads, you must head into the iTunes Preferences pane. The following steps apply to both the traditional desktop and the Microsoft Store version of iTunes. You can also use them to turn off auto-downloads in iTunes on macOS Mojave and earlier.

Step 1: Open iTunes.

Step 2: Open the Edit menu and select Preferences. If you use iTunes on the Mac, select iTunes on the menu bar and select Preferences instead.

Step 3: Switch to the Downloads tab. Then, uncheck the box next to Music. Click OK to save your changes.

Tip: If you want to remove a previously downloaded track or album, right-click the item and select Remove Download.

Despite turning off auto-downloads, you can still download tracks manually. To do that, click the 3-dots next to a track or album and click Download. Or, right-click an item and select Download.

Disable Apple Music Automatic Downloads - Android

If you use Apple Music (or plan to install it) on an Android smartphone, you do not have to worry about turning off automatic downloads. The app does not feature the ability to download tracks automatically—you can only do that manually.

Also on Guiding Tech

YouTube Music vs Apple Music vs Spotify: Which Is the Best Music Streaming Service

Go Manual

Even if storage isn't a concern, turning off auto-downloads in Apple Music gives you the freedom to decide what songs you want to keep on your iPhone, Mac, or PC. Auto-downloads also do not make much sense if you have access to a faster and/or cheaper internet connection.

Next up:Do you have issues while downloading tracks manually on your iPhone? Click on the next link to know how to fix that.

The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.Read Next

After Party + Soundtrack Download For Mac Os

13 Best Ways to Fix the Apple Music Not Downloading Songs Issue on iPhone and AndroidAlso See#iphone #macos

Did You Know

MEMS gyroscopes became popular after the launch of the iPhone 4 in 2010.