How the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom.

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Title:	How the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom (first line of the essay, not the title)
Creator:	ardwynna (2017) and nyxelestia (2020)
Date(s):	May 20, 2017 and January 19, 2020
Medium:	Tumblr
Fandom:
Topic:
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"How the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom" is nyxelestia response to a Tumblr thread started by ardwynna. The source post was posted on May 20, 2017 and nyxelestia's expanded on the Tumblr thread on January 19, 2020. By February 20, 2021 the Tumblr post had 106,600 notes.

The Original 2017 Post

I wonder where the break happened that such wide swaths of younger fans don’t grasp fandom things that used to be unspoken understandings. That fic readers are expected to know fiction from reality, that views expressed in fic are not necessarily those of the author, that the labels, tags and warnings on various kinkfics are also the indication that they were created for titillation and not much more, please use responsibly as per all pornography. The ‘problem’ isn’t that so-called ‘problematic’ fic exists but that some of the audience is being stupid, irresponsible, at worst criminal, at best not old enough to be in the audience to begin with. And that’s on the consumer, not the author who told you via labels, tags, ratings, warnings and venues what their fic was about and what it was for.

[Tumblr notes]: #fandom #labels and ratings are there for you to use #and not as a way to find people to harass #the pedophile argument is bs #child molesters were grooming kids long before there was fanfic on the internet #the fault's on the molester #not the fic writer who told you up front what the fic was about and what it was for #and expected the reader not to be a criminal ass

Nyxelestia's 2020 Response

Topics

• lack of comments/nested comments turning a community into one way communication
• how social media companies profit from this
• how social media are disincentivized from allowing two way communication and strip fandom communities of agency
• tying this back into emerging political movements

Excerpt:

I really cannot emphasize how the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom. It turned fandom into a series of one-way relationships. Social media is extremely uninteractive compared to mediums like journals and forums.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two different people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this.....

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans resort to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you. And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements"

There have always been passive consumers, but there is a world of difference between talking “at” someone and talking “with” them. Reblogs with comments are less about talking to the person before you, but about adding something on for whenever it goes “onward”, forwarding discussion rather than reciprocating it.

This reciprocation meant that even if you were very passive or lurking, you were still exposed to lots of other viewpoints in context. I specify “in context” for a reason. Part of why reblogs are so fast and efficient at spreading things around is that the individual post’s content is the only thing that has to be and can be spread around.

In pre-social media fandoms, content didn’t come to you, you went to the content. That content means things like fic and art, but also what peopel [sic] said about those things and more. You had to follow the conversations from the beginning, and even if you didn’t follow all of the other threads of the conversation, you could not escape the fact that they were there.

This, I think, is the single biggest change to fandom in its transition from journal/forum centric platforms, to social media platforms. Interaction is now passive (stuff comes to you) and unidirectional (you pass it on, not communicate back).

I suspect the built-in passivity is also why fans get so puritanical. Fandom loves to go on about using blacklists and “not going into tags”, etc. - but here’s the thing, all of this is predicated on the assumption that everyone involved is correctly tagging their works. No forgetting to tag, no misspelling tags, and no maliciously using or refusing to use tags. And ultimately, you’re still stuck seeing or engaging with something once it appears on your dash/in your feed, however briefly, if someone you follow or someone misusing a tag makes it so. If “letting content come to you” is the only way to get new content at all, and you have no real control over how that content comes to you…then the only solution is to control who is making that content and what is being made in the first place.

Topics Covered In The Notes

The wide range of comments, with most commentators talking past one another and reading assumptions into others illustrate how social media platforms turn every conversation into one way miscommunication

Age

• Generational divides between younger and older fans
• Younger fans entering adult spaces, children attempting to police the adult world
• Ageism in fandom, especially when directed against older women

Infrastructure

• The impact of Tumblr's lack of conversational tools on fandom communities
• The need for forums that allow you to see the whole of a conversation in context
• the loss of platforms with access controls (like Livejournal)
• on social media platforms discussion always leaves the community once you comment
• Pillowfort
• Fan Nexus
• Fanlore
• AO3
• Dreamwidth
• Discord

Fandom Culture

• Comments and feedback
• Tagging and warnings (and how life and literature outside of fandom spaces is rarely tagged)
• Shipwars cloaking themselves as social justice
• Portrayal of rape and incest is not approval/romanticization
• Fiction is not the same as crimes
• being responsible for your own Internet consumption
• the need for parents to monitor their children's online activity
• LJ to Tumblr exodus. Different cultures, different expectations, and different generations
• All fic must be written responsibly
• Dead Dove: Do Not Eat
• is fictional pedophilia more horrible than fictional torture, or fictional genocide?
• stanning
• whether the Warriors for Innocence was an attempt to shut down fanfic as an open, unashamed practice
• "authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers"
• the impact of fanfiction being republished as original fic for profit
• gift economy

Wider/social issues

• worries about pedophilia
• the post 9/11 society of fear and 'other'ing
• comparisons of fanfiction to Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'
• bullying
• blaming victims of abuse
• contagion superstition/purity rules of Leviticus
• death threats against those who disagree
• neo-puritanical fear of sexuality, particularly women’s sexuality
• deterioration in reading education
• cancel culture