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necessarian) wrote2018-01-01 07:36 pm
necessarian) wrote2018-01-01 07:36 pm
Entry tags:
[Archiving] On Lurking
Originally posted: 14.3.'17
just wanted to say some stuff on the note of the last post i reblogged and inspired by another post i saw which i’d rather not link because i respectfully disagree with it and don’t want to get into any fights. while it’s true that authors love comments, it’s a little worrying to see the kind of rhetoric being bandied about that pressures people to participate in a way they mightn’t necessarily want to/be able to. no-one is obliged to comment if they don’t want to and fandom culture has always existed in this paradigm! having said that, fandom has had this exact debate before the last time the technology shifted in a big way. so before we let the past repeat itself i’m going to lay down some fandom history: i remember back in the early-mid 2000s it was de rigeur for people to complain about those authors who wrote things in their notes like “if i don’t get at least 25 reviews, i won’t update!” that sort of guilt-tripping, pressuring behaviour was rightly looked down upon. “you need to comment otherwise authors will stop writing” is a less overt but no less insidious version of that, and frankly i’d rather not be lumped in with the proverbial authors who are using such language to get people to engage with their fic.
anyway. back to fandom history. we never used to have the same proliferation and feedback culture as we do now, which made it much harder to discover fic and much harder for fic to get big in the same way it does now, so in many ways reviews and comments were all we had. you had to go looking, you couldn’t just find something in a tag you track. ffnet filtering and search is nowhere near as sophisticated as the tag-based system, and even something like LJ that has always used tags still relies on a searching system. fandom was inherently smaller, and it baffles me to see people say that fandom is diminishing because of the lack of commenting, because the way i see it, fandom is just getting bigger and bigger. (not better, not worse. it’s just a different environment.)
back in the 2000s and early 2010s, non-lurkers left comments because it was just about all they could do. when i used to post fic on ffnet, i would get emails when people favourited my stories (always more than had commented, as is the nature of the affair), but that feature was only available to logged-in users. there was no real way to tell how many people had read and enjoyed your fic. now, on ao3, i get an email whenever anyone leaves me kudos. you have no idea how much of a step up the ao3 kudos is from the ffnet favourite. kudos is a really viable way to tell an author “i liked this,” if, for whatever reason, you can’t or don’t want to comment. and, it’s permanent, so unlike favourites, the number can never go down. i would challenge any author to say that they don’t feel gratified when they see a kudos email come in. and here’s the real clincher: because guests can leave kudos, it’s given lurkers a voice without forcing them to compromise their lurking.
i’d say it’s counter-intuitive to worry that fandom culture is changing because people aren’t commenting anymore. fandom culture is changing because the websites we use are changing and the technology is getting more efficient, and if people are leaving less comments (which is impossible to quantify, given you’re trying to compare things which happened at different times with way too many uncontrollable variables, i.e. humans) then the only reason i could think of is because they now have other ways to let you know they liked it. they can leave kudos, save a public bookmark. like and reblog it on tumblr. put it on a reclist and tag it so that everyone who tracks the tag will see it. the one thing that hasn’t changed in fanfiction circles is that we’re all here doing this out of love, and whether we lurk or comment, read or write, we definitely shouldn’t be trying to solve any perceived problems by pitting different types of fans against each other and trying to force everyone to be the same kind of fan.
anyway. back to fandom history. we never used to have the same proliferation and feedback culture as we do now, which made it much harder to discover fic and much harder for fic to get big in the same way it does now, so in many ways reviews and comments were all we had. you had to go looking, you couldn’t just find something in a tag you track. ffnet filtering and search is nowhere near as sophisticated as the tag-based system, and even something like LJ that has always used tags still relies on a searching system. fandom was inherently smaller, and it baffles me to see people say that fandom is diminishing because of the lack of commenting, because the way i see it, fandom is just getting bigger and bigger. (not better, not worse. it’s just a different environment.)
back in the 2000s and early 2010s, non-lurkers left comments because it was just about all they could do. when i used to post fic on ffnet, i would get emails when people favourited my stories (always more than had commented, as is the nature of the affair), but that feature was only available to logged-in users. there was no real way to tell how many people had read and enjoyed your fic. now, on ao3, i get an email whenever anyone leaves me kudos. you have no idea how much of a step up the ao3 kudos is from the ffnet favourite. kudos is a really viable way to tell an author “i liked this,” if, for whatever reason, you can’t or don’t want to comment. and, it’s permanent, so unlike favourites, the number can never go down. i would challenge any author to say that they don’t feel gratified when they see a kudos email come in. and here’s the real clincher: because guests can leave kudos, it’s given lurkers a voice without forcing them to compromise their lurking.
i’d say it’s counter-intuitive to worry that fandom culture is changing because people aren’t commenting anymore. fandom culture is changing because the websites we use are changing and the technology is getting more efficient, and if people are leaving less comments (which is impossible to quantify, given you’re trying to compare things which happened at different times with way too many uncontrollable variables, i.e. humans) then the only reason i could think of is because they now have other ways to let you know they liked it. they can leave kudos, save a public bookmark. like and reblog it on tumblr. put it on a reclist and tag it so that everyone who tracks the tag will see it. the one thing that hasn’t changed in fanfiction circles is that we’re all here doing this out of love, and whether we lurk or comment, read or write, we definitely shouldn’t be trying to solve any perceived problems by pitting different types of fans against each other and trying to force everyone to be the same kind of fan.