[ SECRET POST #5966 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5966 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 35 secrets from Secret Submission Post #853.
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

[fscom]

07. https://i.imgur.com/nZDawUi.png

[(Anonymous)]

Having a hard time buying the first part of this secret ("loathe thinking about things like algorithms and visibility") when the second part is the same "comments are payment, think of the poor exploited authors!!" fandom-as-a-service narrative that's filling every last social-media-obsessed corner of fandom these days.

[(Anonymous)]

+1

If you want to share stuff, then just do it. I follow a couple of JP fanartists who have follower counts in the low double-digits but who post stuff regularly. Obviously they don't care about how many people are following them or looking at their stuff, they're enjoying just making it and then putting it out there for the other people who like it. To which I say, more power to them! They're living their best lives and a lot of Western creators should take inspiration from that.

[(Anonymous)]

+2

[(Anonymous)]

+3. Create stuff for yourself, share it as a bonus.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, I sometimes create stuff for me, but I also create stuff as part of a conversation with other fans. I don't care about likes/kudos but I care very much about comments, and about leaving comments on other people's work! I love fandom as a gift economy and every comment is a gift. You're not obligated to leave one but it's lovely when you do.

[(Anonymous)]

No. Fuck you. I am so tired of cReAtE fOr yOuRSelF people. If it works for you, I am glad. But not everyone is like that.

I stopped creating at all, because I don't need to create for myself. I can leave it at fantasizing in my brain level, or make couple of rough sketches and go on with my day. I create to share small pieces of myself and how I see the world with people. I don't need a lot of engagement, but I need it because I leave parts of my soul in the vastness of the internet. Yes, stupid picture of two characters fucking is also part of my soul. Comments/kudos/whatever is not a cool bonus, it's why I create. Especially if I do fan things, I do them to share. And having zero engagement is incredibly lonely. Well, apparently no one cares, but still it's -1 fandom creator.

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT but I honestly think this is why most of us are so tired of "fandom creating" or get into slumps.
When a technically perfect AI-generated content gets a lot of engagement, acknowledgement (both moral/finantial) and such unlike our hard work, we as humans tend to feel kinda "well... what if the next one just stays in my head? It's fun all the same, maybe less disappointing?" unless we have a deeper purpose for creating/sharing (which we often don't, busy adult lifes and all).
On my side I can affirm that I haven't drawn in ages, and have 6 ship manifestos that are just. a bunch of random quotes thrown around and I never got around to organizing them. It feels like it doesn't make much of a difference anyway

[(Anonymous)]

Yup. I can make a sketch. Or research some historical clothing. Or make references folder. Etc. Fun stuff. But killing my body for a hobby that apparently ai does better? Nope. Fuck this.
I used to make avatar sets. Because I like doing them, but also because I like watching people using them. I used to make playlists. Because I liked to make them but also I liked sharing them and reading people having emotional response. I used to draw, because I like seeing my hands creating things my brain can imagine. But also I liked seeing people connecting with my work. Without human connection it isn't fun anymore

[(Anonymous)]

DA

Fuck them yourself, you coward. If the actual creation isn't the fun part, you are in the WRONG hobby.

[(Anonymous)]

Lol. Well, I am not in this hobby anymore, aren't I?

[(Anonymous)]

DA
Wow, someone feels ENTITLED to art!

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, that's about how it seemed to me, too.

[(Anonymous)]

There are a few sides to this, though.
There are people who want engagement for the fame that can be monetized. And then there are people who want engagement as in, a comment that says "in this overwhelmingly fast world I took the time to check your creation and, wow, appreciate it!" .

In fandom 15ish+ years ago the first option wasn't really a thing. I think OP is talking about the second.

The first option also goes a little deeper than that (the old discussion "is it okay to monetize fanworks?", "how will the disabled make a living and afford the works they create content for?" etc.) but I get when you say it's contradictory if they mean the first, because the first also treats social media as a means for "consummerism" not "sharing" .

[(Anonymous)]

DA

That second thing doesn't work when people push for it, though. Or complain about feeling unappreciated or exploited without it. We're all trying to sort out the maelstrom where fandom got huge and full of people who were clueless about what the social rules in this space even were. And the most divisive of them treat everything they experience in fandom like a product to be consumed. Like, just because they're here in their free time, everyone else is supposed to be catering to them. This goes for the people who complain about reading fanfics they found upsetting, just as much as the fan-creators who expect readers to give them just the feedback they want. These might be almost-reasonable expectations for offline relationships with a small number of people that you know well enough to take their personal preferences into account. But when you try to map them onto the internet? It's complete bedlam. It's fanartists expressing dismay and rage because their art means something shippy to you and not to them. Of course fewer people are addressing strangers, when the possibility of giving offense and the social cost of it are both perceived to be high.

[(Anonymous)]

THIS

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT - Erm. But isn't this exactly why OP turned this feeling into a SECRET instead of yelling "HEY YOU COMMENT ON MY WORKS"?

Aside from that your reply confuses me but now I can tell you're one of the anti-antis people who go on this crusade against young people in fandom, which doesn't concern me on either side. I am tired of both sides of this war. So I wasn't talking about this at all.

[(Anonymous)]

I’m, you don’t have to think about things that way though? That’s the sort of thing that content creators need to worry about (their marketing teams, to be more specific). Algorithms and AI have no bearing on if fans can participate in fandomS

And like anon above said, the second half of your secret negates the first.

[(Anonymous)]

Seriously. If you're running a business, promoting your brand is obnoxious but people will understand why you're doing it. If you're not running a business, doing all of that dishonest, self-aggrandizing bullshit anyway will just make people wary of you. You're not doing fandom a terribly generous, idealistic favor by forgoing the stink of commercialism, in a space where *we're all doing that* and where people will engage or not entirely because of whether they want to.

There are those who come into fandom and apparently find our underlying premises very baffling. It's like they've forgotten how to play, for the sheer joy of it, when they could be "productively" attempting to exploit others and trying to manipulate their equals into becoming their followers or customers. And then they wonder why people here avoid them!

[(Anonymous)]

I think I get what you mean OP, I feel similar. I try to avoid obsessing over the likes/shares part of my work, but I'm guilty of not engaging beyond that when it comes to others' works.

[(Anonymous)]

Wholeheartedly agree.

I miss the days when fan content was just... creations by fans, and they were authored by people not chatGPT, and you could talk to that person and ask "hey, what was your inspiration for this, do you like this song too?" and make friends... with a person, not chatGPT.

I honestly don't care for the final product when it comes to art more than I care for the process, but I know I am with the minority here - in that I am the kind of person who goes deep into one ow two fandoms at once instead of mass-consuming, don't mass-consume fan/works (or at least go more than surface deep into each of them when I do), have actually studied Art academically etc. I think there were more people like me in fandom back then. Nowadays... feels different. People are REALLY into the whole "consumption" shit.

[(Anonymous)]

I think there are still plenty of people who feel like you do. "High-engagement, few canons, relevant academic training" would have described nearly the entire student body and a sizeable proportion of the faculty, at most of the liberal arts schools I considered in the US. I doubt that's changed. And, of those three, I think the having-formally-studied-it part was the most uncommon: I remember there being a lot of solidly working-class older women in fandom and homemakers. I think we just have a harder time finding this style of engagement online now because, one, free web hosting disappeared as companies decided web addresses were valuable, and two, the people who would have been spending money for new entertainment every time they got bored with the last Big Thing "discovered fandom" and flooded in. Closely followed by the people who hoped they could be enticed into e-spending.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT - Maybe that's just me but I have a hard time seeing this "us vs them" that some of you see.

I never felt like "one of them" back in the Livejournal (and before) days. I can't say I feel less of a part now than I did before. I just never felt "a part". But I always managed to find a few (very few) people who like the same things that I do and share my wavelength. Having fun with those few is what the good fandom experience is to me ...

But then again, I am not US-based (or UK for that matter), I am not one of the wealthy (I happened to have PCs at home when I was very young only because I am the kid of a nerdy programmer) and I seem to have vastly different life experiences than most. I didn't know many (if any) "fandom people" IRL. When my friends who were movie enthusiasts and such became "fandom people" I thought that was a positive thing, since we could speak the same language, in a way, and it make me feel like less of a freak.

Of course I quickly learned the bad side of it all the hard way, such as losing privacy and so on. But my point is that any discussion based on "us (fandom oldies) vs them" absolutely doesn't concern me, because I don't feel like this at all.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT again - forgot to mention I didn't mean I study Art academically in a "I am Trained" way, just in a "I am really passionate about Art, not just media" way. But I think most people who are like that are leaving fandom, either because they're aging out of it or because its current ethos doesn't interest them. And I get it. But agreed that the "end" of free web hosting (well it hasn't technically, but) played a big part in the shift, and just the way capitalism "learned" to deal with the Internet in the 00s-onwards.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

*shrugs* It's not that I wish to be needlessly divisive. But people who are into consumerism have always felt sharply foreign to me. I can't tell how much that's something other fans actually want and how much people are bringing that into the space artificially in the hopes to create customers out of non-customers. But when I say "them," it's not a matter of when someone joined so much as what kind of relationship they build (or don't build) with the stories.

My impression is that, the less the basic infrastructure for fan engagement online is free, and the worse the economic situation gets, the fewer people can afford to socialize and be visible here. And that's hardly the only possible disruption: I went without an online presence for years, when I married and emigrated to another country, simply because the amount of things I had to remaster in my day-to-day life - starting with the language - were prohibitive. However, fandom has gotten huge over the past two decades, to the point that it's also gotten much easier for me to find people offline and signal to them. I'll fight tooth and nail for the AO3, and similar, but fandom was not born on the internet. And my observation has been that most of the people who have to leave merely accumulate some ash over their embers. The right sort of material and environment bring the fannishness right back, full blaze.