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silveradeptTalk about why you participated in Snowflake and/or what you got out of it.
Well, I could say that I can't resist the opportunity to pontificate at length about topics and show off my cleverness while I'm at it, but that's not actually true, mostly because if I tried to say I was clever, the brainweasel horde would rise up and start laying siege.
It's not actually that, anyway. Yes, I try to compose things that other people will find interesting, insightful, comforting, or unique in perspective, because that's how I write, with the idea of engaging people in a discussion about a topic that we're all interested in some aspect of. But I also try to go out and see what other people have written and leave comments about their works equally as well. After all, I write one entry, and there are hundreds other perspectives out there to look at.
So the first reason I do Snowflake is because it's a thing that draws the community together to talk to each other, if only for half a month or so. It's kind of like a convention, except we're all panelists and audience at the same time, which makes for some of the best conversations that you can get around. I like the upswing in activity that comes with Snowflake, and the comments waiting for me over time as the challenge progresses through its days.
For people who worry that Dreamwidth is a bunch of individual fiefdoms who don't always talk to each other or know how to find each other to talk, Snowflake brings people together in a community and puts them in front of each other. There's been a lot of talk about how difficult that seems to be on Dreamwidth as compared to other platforms currently on fire, falling over, and sinking into the swamp. It's got the gears in my head turning about discoverability, taxonomy, indexing, and how much of this idea could be achieved by machines doing the lifting and how much of this has to happen by humans instead. While also respecting that some people do not want to be found by the wider community and others don't want to participate, and the likelihood of any approach having to be opt-in, which might limit its efficacy. Tricky problems, and things that might need to involve the very helpful and thoughtful people at![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_suggestions picking apart the ideas and telling me what I'm not thinking of that's important.
The second reason I do Snowflake is because it's a gathering of fans to talk about the things in their lives, good, bad, or indifferent, and to receive support from their community in doing so. Have done a lot of leaving cheerleading comments. Also, more than a few questions or attempts to begin some discussions about what was posted for any particular challenge. Questions about the future of fandom and what are the most useful parts of any given platform came to light this year more than many years because everyone was still lit by the fire of Tumblr imploding and a large amount of fans were decamping for the next great adventure, whether on Dreamwidth or some other platform of their choosing. The question of finding a place that's fan-friendly and also loaded with enough capital to pay for the hosting and the bandwidth of serving images, audio, and video is a big question without a useful answer at this particular point. The existence of AO3 gives someone a template to work from, I suspect, if they want to build a platform similar to that, but there's the sheer money question. If OTW had an endowment arm somewhere whose job was essentially to get donations and accumulate enough capital such that the interest on it could run AO3 and whatever the multimedia AO3 would be, that might solve those problems, but endowments require fiscal management as well. There aren't any answers yet, but Snowflake helps spark the discussions, and perhaps somewhere in these conversations, someone is coming up with an idea that might solve some of these problems, if not all of them, and they will unveil it to all of us at some point in the future.
There's also all the less weighty conversations, too, about things that were excellent in this year's fic haul, in finding a way to create that works with your schedule and your brain, in the serendipity of discovering that there's someone who shares the same interest as you in tokusatsu shows. In discovering that the stargate Atlantis fandom is pretty massive, even though that show's been done for a while, and that older fandoms are still trucking along pretty solidly, even though they'd like more people around to talk to and make fanworks for them. In remembering that people participate in fandom in more ways than fic/art/podfic/vids, and that a lot of fandom relies on the people who write meta and recs to get the stuff that they really will enjoy, because humans are still better at recommending for humans than algorithms are. (So support your local public library.)
The last reason I do Snowflake is because it's a license to talk about things fannish. It's probably just a thing about my brain, but I have a style and a brand, as it were, for what entries look like in my space, and what someone can expect to see when they get here, and what sort of topics are likely to be covered. Because it's what I do, there's a certain amount of subconsious worry about putting something out that might stray from the idea I've created for myself about what goes in this space. Yes, even though it's my space, and therefore I can do whatever I'd like with it, at any point I would like, and the audience can adjust or go elsewhere. This gets a little exacerbated by the part where I'm often not as interested in discussing the romantic possibilities going on in a canon as a primary motivator as I am interested in examining the story and the characterization and the underpinnings of the material. I'm not interested in the will-they-won't-they of Marinette, Adrien, Chat Noir, and Ladybug by itself. In how the characters and their superpowered alternate selves are mirrors and the way in which the anonymity of the mask allows them to behave in different ways, and how that creates these one-sided dynamics, that's interesting. The lament of the meta folk everywhere is that they can't seem to find each other, and Snowflake offers an opportunity for that, assuming you hit it big by finding a friend who is also into the same meta and the same fandoms that you are. (Another problem to be solved, somehow, through the use of human-mediated algorithms, perhaps.)
Snowflake gives the opportunity to say "Yeah, I'm a fan!" and not necessarily have to pen out a manifesto of the whys. (It's not lost on me that this is exactly what I'm doing with this entry. Familiar forms are familiar, after all.)
So, as we draw the curtain on another year of the challenge, there are some new ideas that need thinking about, there are people who are looking for a new home for their fandom, and I've really enjoyed getting to talk with all of you about things that I've written or that you've written as well. I'd like to continue these conversations throughout the year. And, now that I'm not desperately trying to write these entries in the spare time that I have, I might be able to go back through my notifications and examine the new subscribers and access. Mea culpa that I haven't done that yet. I'm looking forward to getting to know you more and to see what you're up to.
See you again next year. Or possibly earlier, depending on whether we want to run Snowflake twice a year, so that people in the other hemisphere have the opportunity to do this in their peak winter season, too.
Well, I could say that I can't resist the opportunity to pontificate at length about topics and show off my cleverness while I'm at it, but that's not actually true, mostly because if I tried to say I was clever, the brainweasel horde would rise up and start laying siege.
It's not actually that, anyway. Yes, I try to compose things that other people will find interesting, insightful, comforting, or unique in perspective, because that's how I write, with the idea of engaging people in a discussion about a topic that we're all interested in some aspect of. But I also try to go out and see what other people have written and leave comments about their works equally as well. After all, I write one entry, and there are hundreds other perspectives out there to look at.
So the first reason I do Snowflake is because it's a thing that draws the community together to talk to each other, if only for half a month or so. It's kind of like a convention, except we're all panelists and audience at the same time, which makes for some of the best conversations that you can get around. I like the upswing in activity that comes with Snowflake, and the comments waiting for me over time as the challenge progresses through its days.
For people who worry that Dreamwidth is a bunch of individual fiefdoms who don't always talk to each other or know how to find each other to talk, Snowflake brings people together in a community and puts them in front of each other. There's been a lot of talk about how difficult that seems to be on Dreamwidth as compared to other platforms currently on fire, falling over, and sinking into the swamp. It's got the gears in my head turning about discoverability, taxonomy, indexing, and how much of this idea could be achieved by machines doing the lifting and how much of this has to happen by humans instead. While also respecting that some people do not want to be found by the wider community and others don't want to participate, and the likelihood of any approach having to be opt-in, which might limit its efficacy. Tricky problems, and things that might need to involve the very helpful and thoughtful people at
dw_suggestions picking apart the ideas and telling me what I'm not thinking of that's important. The second reason I do Snowflake is because it's a gathering of fans to talk about the things in their lives, good, bad, or indifferent, and to receive support from their community in doing so. Have done a lot of leaving cheerleading comments. Also, more than a few questions or attempts to begin some discussions about what was posted for any particular challenge. Questions about the future of fandom and what are the most useful parts of any given platform came to light this year more than many years because everyone was still lit by the fire of Tumblr imploding and a large amount of fans were decamping for the next great adventure, whether on Dreamwidth or some other platform of their choosing. The question of finding a place that's fan-friendly and also loaded with enough capital to pay for the hosting and the bandwidth of serving images, audio, and video is a big question without a useful answer at this particular point. The existence of AO3 gives someone a template to work from, I suspect, if they want to build a platform similar to that, but there's the sheer money question. If OTW had an endowment arm somewhere whose job was essentially to get donations and accumulate enough capital such that the interest on it could run AO3 and whatever the multimedia AO3 would be, that might solve those problems, but endowments require fiscal management as well. There aren't any answers yet, but Snowflake helps spark the discussions, and perhaps somewhere in these conversations, someone is coming up with an idea that might solve some of these problems, if not all of them, and they will unveil it to all of us at some point in the future.
There's also all the less weighty conversations, too, about things that were excellent in this year's fic haul, in finding a way to create that works with your schedule and your brain, in the serendipity of discovering that there's someone who shares the same interest as you in tokusatsu shows. In discovering that the stargate Atlantis fandom is pretty massive, even though that show's been done for a while, and that older fandoms are still trucking along pretty solidly, even though they'd like more people around to talk to and make fanworks for them. In remembering that people participate in fandom in more ways than fic/art/podfic/vids, and that a lot of fandom relies on the people who write meta and recs to get the stuff that they really will enjoy, because humans are still better at recommending for humans than algorithms are. (So support your local public library.)
The last reason I do Snowflake is because it's a license to talk about things fannish. It's probably just a thing about my brain, but I have a style and a brand, as it were, for what entries look like in my space, and what someone can expect to see when they get here, and what sort of topics are likely to be covered. Because it's what I do, there's a certain amount of subconsious worry about putting something out that might stray from the idea I've created for myself about what goes in this space. Yes, even though it's my space, and therefore I can do whatever I'd like with it, at any point I would like, and the audience can adjust or go elsewhere. This gets a little exacerbated by the part where I'm often not as interested in discussing the romantic possibilities going on in a canon as a primary motivator as I am interested in examining the story and the characterization and the underpinnings of the material. I'm not interested in the will-they-won't-they of Marinette, Adrien, Chat Noir, and Ladybug by itself. In how the characters and their superpowered alternate selves are mirrors and the way in which the anonymity of the mask allows them to behave in different ways, and how that creates these one-sided dynamics, that's interesting. The lament of the meta folk everywhere is that they can't seem to find each other, and Snowflake offers an opportunity for that, assuming you hit it big by finding a friend who is also into the same meta and the same fandoms that you are. (Another problem to be solved, somehow, through the use of human-mediated algorithms, perhaps.)
Snowflake gives the opportunity to say "Yeah, I'm a fan!" and not necessarily have to pen out a manifesto of the whys. (It's not lost on me that this is exactly what I'm doing with this entry. Familiar forms are familiar, after all.)
So, as we draw the curtain on another year of the challenge, there are some new ideas that need thinking about, there are people who are looking for a new home for their fandom, and I've really enjoyed getting to talk with all of you about things that I've written or that you've written as well. I'd like to continue these conversations throughout the year. And, now that I'm not desperately trying to write these entries in the spare time that I have, I might be able to go back through my notifications and examine the new subscribers and access. Mea culpa that I haven't done that yet. I'm looking forward to getting to know you more and to see what you're up to.
See you again next year. Or possibly earlier, depending on whether we want to run Snowflake twice a year, so that people in the other hemisphere have the opportunity to do this in their peak winter season, too.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-16 06:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-16 08:36 pm (UTC)Also I've wondered about the possibility of public tags, akin to the wrangled tags at AO3. So you have your own tags, fandomname or fandom name, or fandom name 2016, or knitting, knitting again! etc. But with the option to add wrangled public tags like PUBLIC: Fandom (TV, 2016) and PUBLIC: Crafts:knitting to enable a wider audience to search for those using the tag and find people and communities. I don't know if it's at all feasible but I'm in agreement that " discoverability, taxonomy, indexing" are important conversations and considerations we need to keep poking at to maintain and improve communication and community :)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-16 10:36 pm (UTC)Community finding was the thing I kept seeing over and over again through the challenge. It seems like starting with a machine-generated index of communities is a good idea, except there are some communities that don't want to be found, so there would have to be some sort of opt-in, and it definitely sounds doable but not comprehensive.
The other way would be to try and keep a community with an index of communities and hope that everyone will drop by and leave communities to be indexed. That might go the way of other things, though, if nobody comes by or eventually there isn't enough support to keep it maintained.
Those both sound like good ways to start, though.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-17 07:03 pm (UTC)A community with an index of communities is something I was thinking about as still needing quite a lot of work to keep up to date, but possibly the best way to have a single "Go Here" space to find communities :) It would need volunteers to check up on the links every so often I guess, and people could add their communities in tags to specific posts and have a volunteer/moderator add each verified community to the post proper and delete comments when it was done...certainly something to think about.
A machine generated index would be a good idea but you point out the privacy issue and a machine couldn't know something like I just joined,
It's definitely something we need, a way to connect, but the how is still a big question mark.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-17 09:18 pm (UTC)I think the index of communities is a good idea, and they could monitor community advertisement communities, fandom calendars, and the like to find communities to send messages to asking if they would like to be indexed. That would be a good way of maintaining and updating the list (along with the occasional checks to make sure that communities that delete or close are taken off the list), but generating an initial list that's big enough to stake a claim as definitive is the biggest hurdle that I can think of for getting it off the ground.