[ SECRET POST #4513 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4513 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 19 secrets from Secret Submission Post #646.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Something I don't understand is why it seems so much more prevalent now for teenagers to whine about adults in their fandom. I honest to god don't remember it being a thing when I was a kid. I hate to play the 'back in my day card'... but when I was younger, nobody questioned the older fans; it was the younger ones that were scared shitless that they'd be chased out of the fandom if anyone found out their real age.

[(Anonymous)]

Likely a spillover from fandom purity culture. After making a big stink from saying that shipping minors is bad, it was just a short jump to saying that interacting with minors is bad and suspicious.

[(Anonymous)]

Fandom skews a little younger now, especially with the prevalence of platforms that don't normalize punctuated sentences and the fact that all you have to do to be *in fandom* is have an opinion now and then.

[(Anonymous)]

Hah +1 to all of this

[(Anonymous)]

It's the largely unmodded aspect of the current web. Back then minors had to be good, or they'd get kicked out of most communities/groups/forums and such. Now it's based on tags and largely unmodderated.

Also, I'd note that the current fandom climate means the more of an asshole you are, the more attention you get. It can be from making snappy comebacks or dressing up your bullying in social justice talk. The comments about purity wank are another thing. They use a blanket assumption of adults in fandom being creepy and go from there.

[(Anonymous)]

People got tons of attention for being assholes on the old internet. Just over different things.

Also, I think - to be precise - it's not even that the web is unmoderated as such. It's that the web is unmoderated, and also doesn't really allow people to self select into communities to nearly the same extent as it used to, because everyone got dumped into a relatively small number of massive sites instead of everyone being distributed across a few different communities. So, like, in the old days, you might have seen markedly different communities and norms on sites that predominantly had younger users, compared to sites with older users. Now it's everyone on the same site.

[(Anonymous)]

I really miss the old modded forums and communities. Too much free for all nowadays imo

[(Anonymous)]

It's not like we have any actual statistics that indicate it actually is more prevalent. We're comparing this forum's hazy recollection of The Old Days to this forum's anecdotal experience of what people on Tumblr are saying.

[(Anonymous)]

+1, I don't think it's so much more prevalent as more visible.

Also, just generally, there are more people.

[(Anonymous)]

More people period (there are over a billion and a half more people on Earth than in 1999), but more people on the internet (from almost 40 million in 1995, to 670 million in 2002, and to 2.7 billion in 2013) and more people in fandom.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the transition from sandboxed forums to big social media where we pretend that tags offer some sort of boundaries has really transformed the nature of flaming and harassment. Before, fights were limited to a few hundred, maybe a few thousand subscribers at most. Now, social media brigading and pile-ons can pull in several thousand participants with a click.

[(Anonymous)]

When I was a kid my fannish participation was all offline because I had no access to Compuserve or Usenet or whatever. In-person it's clear what people's ages are, roughly, and when you're the youngest person in the room you don't come to the conclusion that fandom is not for adults. Even when I started in online fandom, it was clear most people in those fannish spaces were older than me.

I think internet fandom skews younger now due to a greater percentage of teens having internet access than once did. However, it's not just online fandom. Conventions I've been to in the past 20 years skew a lot younger than they did in the 80s and 90s. I don't know if it's Harry Potter or anime getting more mainstream in the US or what but fandom as a whole definitely has a lot more youth participation than it did a few decades (although I think that may have been the pendulum swinging and there may have been more young people in fandom in the 60s and 70s).