Beyond Selidor

See, back when I was hanging out on fan forums rather than LJ, my main forum also had an IRC channel where the cluster of about thirty of us for whom the forum was our main social life hung out, so I do have some experience of fannish spaces being chatrooms. But I just don't have time for that now — the period in which that group of people most heavily used IRC was when most of us ranged in age from about 15 to our early 20s — i.e. we were in high school, university, or just starting out in our first jobs, and had a lot of time on our hands. This was also pre-smartphones, so to be in the IRC chatroom a person had to make an explicit, deliberate choice to be there, have switched on their computer, and have an internet connection. Whereas now a person could dip in and out of Discord, Tumblr, Twitter etc all day on their phone, with constant notifications. It would really stress me out!

I think the move to Tumblr was driven by a lot of things: the ease with which image hosting and uploading was possible (vs the clunky workarounds we had to make use of to post images to LJ or forums or whatever), the fact that it could be used as an app rather than solely as a web-based space, and, to be quite honest, the fact that a person could use it, gain a following and group of friends without having to post a single bit of original content of any kind — merely click the reblog button.

This last one is really crucial, and I think it's done a lot to ramp up the toxicity in fandom. Before, a person had to actually contribute something, expend some effort in putting some form of content in fannish spaces — even if that content was simply short comments on other people's fanworks/posts, aggregating links and posting roundups of other people's meta or fic or whatever. If a person lurked, it would be unlikely that they made friends or gained any recognition. Sure, there were notorious blowups and arguments, but they required participants to put text to screen to make them happen.

Whereas with the move to Tumblr, all that could be done with the click of a single button — no need to expend any more effort than that. And if a person had a large following, all they'd need to do is click reblog and encourage their followers to descend on whoever they took issue with.

Like you, I kind of gave up on those spaces. In my eight years on Tumblr I think I made two friends — everyone else I engaged with on that space was someone I knew already through forums, LJ/Dreamwidth, or real life. I'm happier just hanging out here in the kind of community that works for me, rather than trying to follow the fannish herd.