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silveradeptChallenge #7 tells us to go comment on a fic or in a community.
Done, easily, and repeatedly. And if you'd like to comment on some of my fic, or transform it into something, well, I'm not likely to say no. (Shameless plug over.)
Also, I'm reminded that January 13 is More Joy Day, so your interactions with others today could also contribute toward that fine celebration was well.
Also also (holy shit, it's a fun day today!),![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
threesentenceficathon is open and the first post is ready for prompting and filling.
It's for challenges like this one that the commenting culture post exists and is stickied for my space. While I don't volunteer to officially moderate the challenge space, I really do like poking around in other people's entries and making connections with them through shared interests, fandoms, and gripes (sometimes about those shared interests and fandoms.) Give me a role to play and an invitation to talk, and I can do so at length, so long as I'm not being hampered by my anxiety about whether what I'm doing is correct or a worry that I don't have anything in common with the people around me to talk about.
Many of the responses I saw to challenges about writing things, and especially many of the shouts into the void, were about missing the feeling of a vibrant community to interact with, usually with LiveJournal as the thing we all remember fondly, and that the fragmentation of community to various places, each with their own difficulties, has made it difficult to reconstruct that community system and feeling. The usual advice to people who feel this way is "if you build it, and put in large amounts of effort to keep it maintained and advertised, then people will come." Which doesn't always happen, and so we go through cycles of "I wish we could carry the energy of the Snowflake and Sunshine Challenges forward into the rest of the year," without that happening. To some degree, because maintaining that level of energy is exhausting and requires a rotating cast of volunteers and challenges and comments to keep it all going. There are communities that manage this on Dreamwidth and elsewhere, and there's an entire exchange circuit or prompt circuit for people who want to bounce from place to place and participate in keeping the engine of fanworks alive and moving. But it does require energy and people to keep going, and sometimes, to keep going on the face of no apparent activity or audience.
The other common void shout was about the encroachment of self-appointed morality police into famish spaces, with the intent of trying to close off a significant amount of possible expression as inherently problematic. Often without any recognition of nuance or an understanding of the degrees of difference between "this thing perpetuates harmful stereotypes without apparent awareness of what it is doing" and "this thing has a romantic or sexual component that I am personally uncomfortable with and would prefer not to see anywhere." I will tend to blame the increased presence of the purity brigades as a consequence of the collapsing of spaces so that there's more people all milling about in the same spaces and the reality that outrage creates engagement, and therefore the algorithms are tuned to produce things in front of you that are supposed to make you engage more by being outraged. That's spilling out into offline spaces more, as well, as our embodied and digital lives continue to suffer from the same collapse intended to push us all into a single identity that encompasses our whole selves, to be reduced to data points and then sold or sold to. There is money and power to be gained by selling outage, and many of the people who hitch their wagons to these kelpies (or sail their ships close enough to hear the sirens singing) confidently believe they will be able to get away before they are dragged into the ocean and drowned.
Unfortunately, the effects of the brigades are real, even if the premises they operate from are so unserious that in any other context, they would be correctly identified as farce. And so people keep their journals locked, because they are avoiding stalkers, or their workplace, or because they have offended a BNF with clout in the past and that BNF holds a grudge. An entry might be open for Snowflake, but as soon as that is done, it locks again. These are protective makes, and I am not judging whether someone is correct in those measures at all. I don't know their context. And it's not like they're imagining it, or that it's much less widespread than they believe. When I posted a character study for Pearl, from Steven Universe, someone commented immediately with how much they hated it and that it was the "most insulting interpretation of her one could have." Or on a work explicitly tagged F/F and concentrating on those relationships, I got a "6/10" rating from someone who complained about the lack of boys in the piece, having apparently followed a recommendation for the fic from their M/M focused Discord's other pairings channel. And then specifically said it was a work they didn't want to read again and wouldn't recommend to others for those apparently overriding reasons that have mostly to do with not having read the tags and believed them?
These are silly things, and isolated, but they're there, and while I shrug at them and use them as examples for this because I have an entire boatload of other comments about how cool the works are (have you built yourself a folder of the good comments you've received?) I can see comments like these having effects on someone's health and desire to create, especially if they came in volume and without apparent ceasing. So, going around and commenting and being positive and encouraging to people as you read their work is something that helps them keep going, and that's important to the process of getting more fanwork or into the world for others to enjoy. (As is ejecting, blocking, banning, and censuring people who are engaged in harassing behavior of others based on their ships or what subjects and scenarios they are creating on.)
The comment culture post is supposed to help with both of these situations. By laying out explicit rules and statements about what I want and welcome in my space, I'm trying to do the journal equivalent of a kerb cut (or curb cut), something that makes the space more accessible, including to audiences I may not have intended it for at the beginning. I want people who want to comment, but can only muster the spoons for a short comment, or even a single emoji or word, to know their comment is welcomed and valued, even if it's a heart on a five thousand word screed. I want people who are concerned they have to be able to respond to the entire post to not feel that pressure at all, and I want people who feel they have to respond with something weighty and erudite that I don't require that, either. I realize that I might be intimidating, with all the words and the links and such, but I don't want to be, I want people to come and comment and play with all of the things.
So I try to make my space accessible and low-effort and friendly to people who have different ways of expressing themselves, and I go out into other people's comment sections looking for ways to interact and be friendly there. Sometimes that means subscriptions and new people to read, and sometimes it's a pleasant fannish interaction and we go on our pathways. It may not be the communities of old, but I'd like to believe it helps, in its own way.
We all have different levels of comfort in putting ourselves out there. Different levels of intro/extra-vertness. And while we here at Fandom Snowflake love to challenge people to go a tiny bit out of their comfort zone, we also want you to feel safe. This challenge really has so many different interpretations. Comment on someone's fan-creation, chat up the random person who visited your journal because you have fandoms in common, go find a community that could use a jolt. Find someone to wave to in tags. Really, anything that has you making a connection with someone else, counts.
Challenge #7
In your own space, interact with a community or a fic.
Done, easily, and repeatedly. And if you'd like to comment on some of my fic, or transform it into something, well, I'm not likely to say no. (Shameless plug over.)
Also, I'm reminded that January 13 is More Joy Day, so your interactions with others today could also contribute toward that fine celebration was well.
Also also (holy shit, it's a fun day today!),
threesentenceficathon is open and the first post is ready for prompting and filling.It's for challenges like this one that the commenting culture post exists and is stickied for my space. While I don't volunteer to officially moderate the challenge space, I really do like poking around in other people's entries and making connections with them through shared interests, fandoms, and gripes (sometimes about those shared interests and fandoms.) Give me a role to play and an invitation to talk, and I can do so at length, so long as I'm not being hampered by my anxiety about whether what I'm doing is correct or a worry that I don't have anything in common with the people around me to talk about.
Many of the responses I saw to challenges about writing things, and especially many of the shouts into the void, were about missing the feeling of a vibrant community to interact with, usually with LiveJournal as the thing we all remember fondly, and that the fragmentation of community to various places, each with their own difficulties, has made it difficult to reconstruct that community system and feeling. The usual advice to people who feel this way is "if you build it, and put in large amounts of effort to keep it maintained and advertised, then people will come." Which doesn't always happen, and so we go through cycles of "I wish we could carry the energy of the Snowflake and Sunshine Challenges forward into the rest of the year," without that happening. To some degree, because maintaining that level of energy is exhausting and requires a rotating cast of volunteers and challenges and comments to keep it all going. There are communities that manage this on Dreamwidth and elsewhere, and there's an entire exchange circuit or prompt circuit for people who want to bounce from place to place and participate in keeping the engine of fanworks alive and moving. But it does require energy and people to keep going, and sometimes, to keep going on the face of no apparent activity or audience.
The other common void shout was about the encroachment of self-appointed morality police into famish spaces, with the intent of trying to close off a significant amount of possible expression as inherently problematic. Often without any recognition of nuance or an understanding of the degrees of difference between "this thing perpetuates harmful stereotypes without apparent awareness of what it is doing" and "this thing has a romantic or sexual component that I am personally uncomfortable with and would prefer not to see anywhere." I will tend to blame the increased presence of the purity brigades as a consequence of the collapsing of spaces so that there's more people all milling about in the same spaces and the reality that outrage creates engagement, and therefore the algorithms are tuned to produce things in front of you that are supposed to make you engage more by being outraged. That's spilling out into offline spaces more, as well, as our embodied and digital lives continue to suffer from the same collapse intended to push us all into a single identity that encompasses our whole selves, to be reduced to data points and then sold or sold to. There is money and power to be gained by selling outage, and many of the people who hitch their wagons to these kelpies (or sail their ships close enough to hear the sirens singing) confidently believe they will be able to get away before they are dragged into the ocean and drowned.
Unfortunately, the effects of the brigades are real, even if the premises they operate from are so unserious that in any other context, they would be correctly identified as farce. And so people keep their journals locked, because they are avoiding stalkers, or their workplace, or because they have offended a BNF with clout in the past and that BNF holds a grudge. An entry might be open for Snowflake, but as soon as that is done, it locks again. These are protective makes, and I am not judging whether someone is correct in those measures at all. I don't know their context. And it's not like they're imagining it, or that it's much less widespread than they believe. When I posted a character study for Pearl, from Steven Universe, someone commented immediately with how much they hated it and that it was the "most insulting interpretation of her one could have." Or on a work explicitly tagged F/F and concentrating on those relationships, I got a "6/10" rating from someone who complained about the lack of boys in the piece, having apparently followed a recommendation for the fic from their M/M focused Discord's other pairings channel. And then specifically said it was a work they didn't want to read again and wouldn't recommend to others for those apparently overriding reasons that have mostly to do with not having read the tags and believed them?
These are silly things, and isolated, but they're there, and while I shrug at them and use them as examples for this because I have an entire boatload of other comments about how cool the works are (have you built yourself a folder of the good comments you've received?) I can see comments like these having effects on someone's health and desire to create, especially if they came in volume and without apparent ceasing. So, going around and commenting and being positive and encouraging to people as you read their work is something that helps them keep going, and that's important to the process of getting more fanwork or into the world for others to enjoy. (As is ejecting, blocking, banning, and censuring people who are engaged in harassing behavior of others based on their ships or what subjects and scenarios they are creating on.)
The comment culture post is supposed to help with both of these situations. By laying out explicit rules and statements about what I want and welcome in my space, I'm trying to do the journal equivalent of a kerb cut (or curb cut), something that makes the space more accessible, including to audiences I may not have intended it for at the beginning. I want people who want to comment, but can only muster the spoons for a short comment, or even a single emoji or word, to know their comment is welcomed and valued, even if it's a heart on a five thousand word screed. I want people who are concerned they have to be able to respond to the entire post to not feel that pressure at all, and I want people who feel they have to respond with something weighty and erudite that I don't require that, either. I realize that I might be intimidating, with all the words and the links and such, but I don't want to be, I want people to come and comment and play with all of the things.
So I try to make my space accessible and low-effort and friendly to people who have different ways of expressing themselves, and I go out into other people's comment sections looking for ways to interact and be friendly there. Sometimes that means subscriptions and new people to read, and sometimes it's a pleasant fannish interaction and we go on our pathways. It may not be the communities of old, but I'd like to believe it helps, in its own way.
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Date: 2023-01-13 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-13 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-13 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-13 08:32 pm (UTC)Steal What Works,
Fix What's Broke,
Discard The Rest.
There's no rule that says what you do has to be that detailed, or that you have to know everything from the jump. I go back to it every year and edit and tweak and add and make decisions about whether something is still relevant.
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Date: 2023-01-13 08:35 pm (UTC)Like you said in your other comment: This! So much this!
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Date: 2023-01-13 08:02 pm (UTC)Being friendly takes different forms to me, from sharing fandom memories to reccing a fic you know someone will like to a simple :) on a comment. Yes, also, to compiling a file of compliments, good reviews or what have you!
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Date: 2023-01-13 08:27 pm (UTC)The Good Things file is super-important and comes highly recommended.
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Date: 2023-01-13 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-13 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-13 08:29 pm (UTC)Let me know when you've put it together, so I can see how it works for you, please.
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Date: 2023-01-13 08:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-13 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-13 08:33 pm (UTC)Let me know when you've put it together, so I can see how it works for you, please.
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Date: 2023-01-13 08:35 pm (UTC)Will most certainly do!
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Date: 2023-01-13 08:50 pm (UTC)When a few more posts were shorter, commenting felt easier, somehow. I love reading long posts, and sometimes I even write them.
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Date: 2023-01-13 10:18 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2023-01-14 07:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-14 07:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-14 08:00 pm (UTC)I like how thorough your commenting culture post is. It kind of reminds me of the fort brochures that some of the different waves of beta users put together to let new people know how they felt about interacting with old posts, commenting, following/unfollowing, and all that. I might need to think on updating my fort brochure with some specifics like your sticky post, so no one wonders if they've somehow found the one type of comment that might be annoying or something.
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Date: 2023-01-14 08:12 pm (UTC)Feel free to adapt or adopt. It's something I'd like to see around more.
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Date: 2023-01-14 08:08 pm (UTC)Commenting is a very good thing to do.
She also blew the collective mind of her new fan community with her story when the reveals went up! QUASAR! THAT WAS YOU?!!!
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Date: 2023-01-14 08:13 pm (UTC)Also, bless those who go to works with zero comments and leave comments on them.
Thoughts
Date: 2023-01-24 08:49 am (UTC)I saw a lot of that too. I made a post on "Improving Communities in Dreamwidth." I hope that more people will support the activities, and some seem interested.
However, it's very common that when I point out things people could do to improve a situation, they turn hostile. They don't want advice; they don't want to work on the problem; they just want to complain about it. This results in problems not getting solved. What's worse, it's an aspect of the generally increasing negativity, because it discourages other people from working on problems. Who wants to take time to make a post just to get bitched at?
>> The usual advice to people who feel this way is "if you build it, and put in large amounts of effort to keep it maintained and advertised, then people will come." <<
Hence why I tried to find multiple ways people could help, from small to large. Not everyone has the time and energy to run a big event or a community, but a lot more people can manage a short-term fest or a series of posts about a topic.
>>Which doesn't always happen, and so we go through cycles of "I wish we could carry the energy of the Snowflake and Sunshine Challenges forward into the rest of the year," without that happening. <<
I could never keep up with Snowflake year-round. It's too much extra time and effort. However, I like having multiple events around the year that are big and busy. Snowflake in winter and Three Weeks for Dreamwidth in spring are the biggest. Sunshine Challenge in summer is smaller but a similar concept. I haven't really seen a fall one yet.
>>There are communities that manage this on Dreamwidth and elsewhere, <<
Yep, two of mine are
>> and there's an entire exchange circuit or prompt circuit for people who want to bounce from place to place and participate in keeping the engine of fanworks alive and moving. <<
I think
I wish that other types of promotional community got as much attention.
>>The other common void shout was about the encroachment of self-appointed morality police into famish spaces <<
I saw a lot of that too. It's to the point that fandom is no longer a welcoming place; it's just as full of bullies as the mainstream. So it's not worth making extra effort to seek out, the way it used to be when it was a genuine refuge. I've repeatedly heard from people who had a bad experience and backed away from fandom for years. Can't say as I blame them. But if the fandom withers, people with money will be less interested in making new content to be fans of.
People responded positively to my shout in the void, but when I followed up with "Firing the Fandom Police," the responses were much more negative. They're happy to support complaining, but very unhappy with the idea of anyone doing anything about the problem. And that's exactly how we get the diminished fandom culture that we have today.
I have no problem with people venting. I support having communities like
>> Often without any recognition of nuance or an understanding of the degrees of difference between "this thing perpetuates harmful stereotypes without apparent awareness of what it is doing" and "this thing has a romantic or sexual component that I am personally uncomfortable with and would prefer not to see anywhere."<<
Honestly, I'm of the stance, "Write badly with pride!" Because almost everyone starts out writing bad stuff. Poorly constructed, poorly conceived, tasteless, whatever. It takes time and loads of practice to get good, to learn what works or doesn't work. So if people attack all the bad writers, that greatly undermines the flow of writers developing their skills to become good writers later on. "Don't like, don't read."
>>I will tend to blame the increased presence of the purity brigades as a consequence of the collapsing of spaces so that there's more people all milling about in the same spaces <<
I've seen more fragmentation than conglomeration, although it's true that as one venue collapses, its users tend to move into different ones and carry their habits with them. Most of the problem I see is mainstream culture penetrating into fannish culture and blotting out the things that made fandom good and different. It's just mundania with elves now, which sucks. A lot of that came from changes in the ways people found fandom; it used to be mostly books and magazines, then shifted to mostly television and movies, now also video games. But people who love movies and video games are often very different from people who love books.
>> and the reality that outrage creates engagement <<
Yeah, that's a pervasive problem in culture. People seem to have forgotten how to turn things off, mind their own business, and choose a few causes to support while ignoring hassles that are in someone else's wheelhouse. And that will rip a culture to shreds.
>> Unfortunately, the effects of the brigades are real, even if the premises they operate from are so unserious that in any other context, they would be correctly identified as farce. <<
A big problem is that some lies, when popular enough, can behave as if true even though they are wrong. Frex, "black people are stupid." If you believe they're stupid, then you do things like undermining their schools or banning them from libraries, and that impairs their ability to learn things, which encourages more people to believe the lie.
>>And so people keep their journals locked, because they are avoiding stalkers, or their workplace, or because they have offended a BNF with clout in the past and that BNF holds a grudge.<<
I don't blame them. People use blogs for different purposes. Among those are a diary and a way of communicating with a small closed circle of friends. That's fine. They just aren't things I find useful, because I'm doing something different with mine -- it connects me as a writer with my fans -- so I don't frequent those blogs.
>> An entry might be open for Snowflake, but as soon as that is done, it locks again. <<
In fact, if you look at blogs in January, you'll see a lot of people who are only active during Snowflake.
>>And it's not like they're imagining it, or that it's much less widespread than they believe.<<
I once posted a piece that had "WARN ALL THE THINGS" in bold red letters ahead of more detailed warnings; someone blew past that and then threw a fit about the content. Well, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Just this Snowflake, someone ignored all the arguments in a post I made and just said it was mean, which is an ad hominem fallacy. I made one post about a holiday, and several people threw tantrums about how I chose to celebrate a holiday that was personally relevant to me. In that case, I deleted the post, decided to quit supporting the holiday, and largely withdrew my support for the subculture. Fuck 'em. That fits with my observation of other people withdrawing from fandom, when getting dogpiled over something like love is their "fuck 'em" moment.
>>I can see comments like these having effects on someone's health and desire to create, especially if they came in volume and without apparent ceasing.<<
That's a big problem, because the world is already stressful and rapidly getting worse. People don't have a lot of the supports that they used to, which means fewer spoons to deal with other people's bullshit and also less willpower to resist the temptation to spout off in ways that may be harmful.
>>So, going around and commenting and being positive and encouraging to people as you read their work is something that helps them keep going, and that's important to the process of getting more fanwork or into the world for others to enjoy. <<
I agree, those are important.
>> As is ejecting, blocking, banning, and censuring people who are engaged in harassing behavior of others based on their ships or what subjects and scenarios they are creating on.<<
It's vital to have moderation tools, and important to use them. I won't hesitate to ban strangers who think a drive-by bitching is okay. My audience is generally congenial. An unfortunate result of Snowflake -- and this is getting worse over time, it didn't use to be a problem -- is a notable increase in obnoxious behavior by people who aren't regulars. It's gotten to where I've started just deleting nasty comments. I detest censorship, but if someone shits on the floor, it needs to be cleaned up so other people don't step in it. >_<
>> The comment culture post is supposed to help with both of these situations. By laying out explicit rules and statements about what I want and welcome in my space, <<
I put a lot of my parameters in my bio. Many people find it helpful to have a list of what's okay in a space. When I launched
I also do this because I've had way too many experiences where I posted in a community, following the visible guidelines, and one or more people bitched about it. Now, if I'm checking out a community and the first several posts or their comments contain mean things, I won't bother joining or posting, I leave. So do a lot of other people. This is especially egregious in a low-traffic community, because those nasty remarks stay visible for a long time, which further erodes traffic. It's different in a very busy community or one that only accepts one type of post (some recipe and review communities are like that), where managing signal:noise is important. But few communities are that busy, and the narrow ones usually have not only a statement of focus but also a posting template.
>>I realize that I might be intimidating, with all the words and the links and such, but I don't want to be, I want people to come and comment and play with all of the things.<<
Yeah, me too. When I do friending memes, I mention that my journal is highly active. There are lots of folks who bemoan low activity; they will probably love my blog if we have any common interests. But other folks want blogging to be leisurely and relaxing, and anyone easily overwhelmed is NOT likely to enjoy drinking from my firehose. I do have several fans who consistently make emoji or other very short comments. Like you, I welcome a wide range of interactions. I have other people who'll post pages-long replies to things that excite them. It balances out. Heck, I've had fans get into lengthy crosstalk threads in my Poetry Fishbowl posts that call for prompts. I don't mind, sometimes I can pull bits out of the dialog to use. It's a living room/office blog metaphor for a reason.
>>It may not be the communities of old, but I'd like to believe it helps, in its own way.<<
Posts like this definitely help.
If nothing else, it makes me happy to see somebody other than me doing the work.