#if anyone got related fanfic for me to read also that would be stupendous | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

valoisfulcanelli · 5 years

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randomsquirrel replied to your post: What’s going to happen to my content on Tumblr

Doesn’t it just figure that JUST as things are getting together and you CAN start posting again they pull this bullshit. I’m in a similar boat, as this is one of the few places I can think of to say “hey, read my fics!”, and without it, well, I almost wonder why bother updating, yeah? >_>

Yep. The new computer is actually arriving this afternoon.

The thing is... *sigh* I’ve seen all of this before. Many years ago, before Tumblr was even much of a thing, LiveJournal was THE home for fandom. Everyone was there. After the first ‘strikethrough’ several clones popped up--most notably JournalFen--but LJ was fandom’s home in its entirety. You could find anything on there when Brad and his staff ran it.

(I got wordy again. The rest is behind a cut.)

Then Brad sold it to 6Apart, who took it apart. They created VOX: an abortive attempt to ‘simplify’ LiveJournal for people who thought it too complicated. I got an account there to try it out, and it was horrendous; like LJ for kiddies. You couldn’t leave comments on other peoples’ posts; the only way you could respond was by clicking an “I like this” button.

Clicky buttons are the one thing I truly detest about Facebook. Their ‘like’ button was the start of what I think of as ‘lazy reactions’. People rarely comment these days (and yes, I include myself among that number) because we have other, much faster ways to react. And thus, slowly, community and support is eroded. Slowly, more and more young people--who grew up with simplified reactions as their only feedback--are at risk of tying their self-esteem and self-worth into how many likes/hearts they get, and how many followers they have, regardless of whether those followers actually interact with them. Is it any wonder that--despite our all being so much more ‘connected’ these days--many of us feel so much more lonely?

So 6Apart began the taking apart of LiveJournal. I finally quit my expensive permanent account when one of the staff members made a post mocking people who were upset about the changes that were being made. He actively wrote derogatory things about them (I still have the screenshot of it somewhere in my old backed up archive files). And when I made a final post telling my almost 300 followers that I was done with the site, guess what happened?

Several of them told me I was selfish for taking all of my self-created content away from them. People messaged me, screaming about how I was letting them down. Other people messaged a co-writer I’d been working on a long series with and urged her to forget about me and take on a new co-writer who would (get this) take over my characters and write them for me, just so they didn’t lose a series they were so invested in on that platform.

I’d created something they loved, and they didn’t want to lose it. Looking back on it now, with the benefit of time and hindsight, those people were just as scared as I was of change. But while they stayed on the sinking ship, I had to jump over the railing and swim away.

I quit in 2008 and pretty much left fandom for a long, long fucking time, after having been incredibly active on LJ for 7 years. 6Apart sold LJ to SUP, a Russian company. I took a tentative step back to LJ about a year ago. I tried it for about a month and then the ToS changed. Everyone was logged out, and they couldn’t log back in without accepting the new ToS... which stated that they agreed not to post any LGBT ‘propaganda’.

So I closed the tab and never went back. So did many others, but--Dreamwidth aside--there was no single place that fandom went to. The diaspora had already begun years back, with the people who posted the pictures moving to Tumblr, the fic-writers moving to AO3, and the general bloggers moving to DW. Fandom was split into three, and--not incidentally--that was when fandom started turning in on itself, too. The worst of fandom that you see today was beginning to make itself known back then, on those disparate sites. Sure--even prior to that--you’d see some stupendous Harry Potter absurdity being related on the fandom_wank community on JournalFen but the kind of shit you see with fen turning on other fen wasn’t around back then. (Anyone familiar with ‘hed pastede on yay’? That was a fandom_wank thing.)

I didn’t get back into fandom until I started writing The Madness of Mr Goth. And my god, had fandom changed by that point. I barely recognised it. Whereas before--when I posted chapters on LiveJournal--I’d get up to 50 comments per chapter, now I was lucky to get maybe five or six from the same faithful band of devoted readers. Sure, a lot of that could be down to the fandom I found myself in--but hell, my old ones weren’t exactly hugely popular! I was often the fandom-of-one who managed to pull other people in.

People don’t interact anywhere near as much as they used to. And part of me can’t help but think that... that is what’s wanted. In isolation and loneliness, people have no support, no backup, it’s harder to organise things. Look what happens when people do protest. Shit gets done! But with everyone posting away and getting only hearts and thumbs-ups, it’s harder to feel like you’re getting anywhere. Whereas, back when I was more active and other were too, there was support everywhere.

You know something about me and LiveJournal? I started something there, something that a lot of other people picked up and ran with. Anyone who might have been active back then may realise that I’m about to out my old fannish identity to anyone with a good memory, but I started a movement on LJ: the _daily community, posting a daily image of [insert fandom here]. I created the very first one--the idea was mine--and thousands of others followed. You won’t find a _daily that’s older than the one I created (and yes, eventually deleted when I deleted all of my other journals; another thing I got told I was selfish for doing) because I started that whole thing. And I was the only one who never missed a goddamn day. I even arranged for others to cover when I was away on vacation (there were no queued posts back then) so that not a single day was missed.

I had something like 30 or so journals and communities, combined. They ranged from my own personal account, personal fanfic posting, non-fannish fic posting, several fandom communities, a writers’ support community, a community dedicated to philology, multiple roleplay journals and journals dedicated to individual long story arcs, a journal that I was writing from the historical standpoint of a fictional Elizabethan doctor and his apprentice (in as close to original syntax as I could), and many many others. I was ridiculously active back then, posting fiction almost every day, and huge summaries at the end of each month, so people could click links to catch up on what they were currently reading.

LiveJournal was my home, but I upped sticks and left because I couldn’t stay there any longer with the way it was heading. Not only did I leave behind those journals, I also left behind the online persona I had been using for more than ten years (actually, when I look back, I’d been using that persona online for about TWENTY years). I figuratively shed my skin, and felt lost for a very long time because my entire online identity was left behind on LJ.

I don’t even know where I’m going with this ramble. Clearly I have a LOT of fucking thoughts on this, and many of them have been simmering just under the boil for about ten years. I would love to go back to how I was then, but I’m not sure that I can.

#randomsquirrel #reply post

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