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Challenge #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!),
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!),
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-13 10:18 pm (UTC)