December Posting Meme: tech stuff and fandom

[thedeadparrot]

for vass
Posting Schedule

I am super cranky right now because I am damp (stupid rain) and tired (blergh, work stuff) and have been bombarded with various reminders that dudes can be pretty darn shitty (not even going to attempt to list all these out), so I am going to start out with an inflammatory statement.

Fandom is kind of terrible at building things.

Okay, so what do I mean by that? I have always liked the analogy of cultural scavengers, scouring the media landscape to find things that we can turn into narratives and stories that we find more pleasurable.

That's what we do with technology, too.

Think of the Yahoo mailing lists, filled with the announcements for the new story you just put up on your Geocities site.

Think of the webrings, a third-party service for linking together like-minded sites.

Think of the fic exchanges, built off the back of LJ's ability to screen comments to everyone except the moderators.

Think of the kink memes, a weird hybrid of anonymous LJ comments and Delicious bookmarking.

Think of Tumblr, however the fuck people manage to use it.

Sure, there are exceptions. But the AO3 is pretty much the only big ongoing technology/infrastructure project that I can think of in fandom right now. And it came out of a specific desire to control our own future. How much fannish history was straight-up lost when Geocities went down? How many people freaked out when LJ's new commenting system didn't support comment subjects anymore? How many rec lists for fandoms went nonfunctional when Delicious was sold to a new company? How does fandom manage to function on Tumblr at all? (Okay, I'll try to stop taking cheap shots at Tumblr. Mostly.) The AO3 is important, but it almost entirely stands alone. (There is still stuff like FF.net, was stuff like the Automated Archive. We are willing to do archives, apparently.)

Okay, so why? Why doesn't fandom do more things like this? Sure, writing code takes a lot of specialized skills that aren't easily developed, but so does vidding. Sure, organizing a lot of people takes a lot of work, but so does running a fic exchange.

I think it is part of the nature of fandom. We're not, by our nature, planners. We are distracted easily by the nearest, most interesting shiny thing. It's virtually impossible to see things in fandom planned one year out, much less five years out. How many WiPs have been lost to time?

Building software for fandom is tireless, thankless work. How many current AO3 coders can you name off the top of your head? Building software is also extremely time consuming. Code projects staffed by multiple experienced software developers working full time can take upwards of months, and after that, there's still bug fixing and maintenance and server costs.

And why bother in the first place? There's all this other stuff out there, given away for free. Why not just use that instead? We can repurpose it, of course, cut it up into scraps and figure out how to make it work.

But we didn't build it. It's still not ours.

Comments

[vass]

*applauds* This is a good post and you should feel good.

Okay, I'll try to stop taking cheap shots at Tumblr.

No, don't stop. I've been there for nearly a year now, and it is so bad. On so many levels. It's like some sort of experiment in how to selectively breed for fans who can survive in environments hostile to communication, creation, and community.

I feel like a rat pushing a lever for pellets of happy fannish interaction there, and then I remember that experiment that showed rats don't act like drug addicts if you don't lock them in a horrible user interface box where they have no sources for stimulation but that lever. And then I get up and read a book. But ugh, fandom, why there?

I think it is part of the nature of fandom. We're not, by our nature, planners. We are distracted easily by the nearest, most interesting shiny thing. It's virtually impossible to see things in fandom planned one year out, much less five years out. How many WiPs have been lost to time?

I think you've got something there. Although the same could be said for tech startup culture, couldn't it? (Except that that has monetary rewards. But then, fan writers could become pro writers and get monetary rewards, and some do. Way more of them now that Kindle porn is a thing.)

Sure, organizing a lot of people takes a lot of work, but so does running a fic exchange.

And the really big exchanges, like Yuletide, also have their problems with burnout and retention and with having an internet dropped on their head every year for not doing the thing the way fandom wanted it done.

Another comparison might be cons - that's a thing requiring planning that fandom does seem to reliably do reasonably competently. And (as with vidding) there's a strong mentoring/apprenticeship tradition there that helps make new conrunners. Which is not currently happening with fannish software devs or sysadmins.

Actually, huh, the money part's probably quite a big thing. You need a certain level of financial security to do long range plans with other people and equipment that they'll depend on as well as you. And so much of fandom's young or in a low income or financially insecure demographic (including me.) And at the same time there's this cultural thing (partly the gift culture meme, but not only that) where we're above money and that people who do care about money are assholes and are not real fans, and in that environment only assholes like Laura Hale and Aja Romano have the nerve to monetise their fannish work, because there's not room to do it in a non-asshole way.

But that leaves a great big gap for outsiders to come in and sell our culture to us, which is permissible because they're not one of us, so they're allowed to be assholes and to make a profit or a living or to break even.

[merisunshine36]

Piggybacking on your comment....You need a certain level of financial security to do long range plans with other people and equipment that they'll depend on as well as you. And so much of fandom's young or in a low income or financially insecure demographic (including me.)

I blame this for the most part, plus the consensus culture of fandom. Not that people aren't sometimes disorganized, short-sighted, or lazy. But money is a significant motivator for people. A VC will buy twitter from you, but would they by A03?

My thoughts aren't at all organized on this, but:

-I would be interested in looking at data for socioeconomic status of A03 coders when held next to a non-fannish open source contributors of a similar products. My gut instinct is also that fandom skews younger/poorer, and while I'd bet money on the younger part, I'm not so sure about the "poor", if only because personal finance talk is not really the done thing.

-Similarly, I've read anecdata stories about dude coders who point to coding being their refuge from anxiety/mental issues/feeling outcast. I wonder if for tech inclined fannish females, fandom participation fills those mental and emotional needs. Coding takes hours of time, but so does creating fanwork, and there are only so many hours in the day.

[thedeadparrot]

A VC will buy twitter from you, but would they by A03?

More importantly, will a VC pump money into the AO3 right now? That's how a lot of the startup economy works, on the backs of the funding they can raise right now, before selling the company even comes into it.

Coding takes hours of time, but so does creating fanwork, and there are only so many hours in the day.

I used to write code for the AO3, but now that I have a full-time job in tech, I just refuse to devote my free time to doing what I already do 8 hours a day at work. So, yeah, more anecdata for your non-study.

[thedeadparrot]

It's like some sort of experiment in how to selectively breed for fans who can survive in environments hostile to communication, creation, and community.

Yeah, I feel like I understand why Tumblr is popular, but you're right. It feels like it magnifies the worst parts of LJ culture: the cliquishness, the inability to keep up with volume of mediocre content, and making viral networking effects extremely important to visibility, which makes things impossible to find or get read if it's not recced/reblogged by the 'right' people. TBH, I don't know if I could have survived the migration if it hadn't been AO3. And it might have been AO3 that made the jump even possible for fandom.

I think you've got something there. Although the same could be said for tech startup culture, couldn't it?

I think the better analogy is, as merisunshie36 points out, is open source communities. But still, the open source economy is primarily built off the backs of paid coders who can remain financially sustainable because companies are willing to fund the work they do. Sure, there's projects that are primarily community-built for free (*cough* OpenSSL *cough*), but there is a company paying Linux Torvalds' salary so he can work on Linux full time. No one is willing to do that in fandom.

Another comparison might be cons - that's a thing requiring planning that fandom does seem to reliably do reasonably competently. And (as with vidding) there's a strong mentoring/apprenticeship tradition there that helps make new conrunners. Which is not currently happening with fannish software devs or sysadmins.

I know the OTW was hoping that the AO3 would be a place for that kind of mentoriship and apprenticing, but I think one thing I tried to work into this post and never quite managed to make work is that the non-financial incentives/payoff to coders/sysadmins in fandom is also completely out of whack. When you run a con, you have a con at the end of it, and you can take a year off until the next one, and people will clap and cheer for you when it gets pulled off successfully. When you run a fic exchange, at least you get fic out of it. If you build a fannish project yourself, sure, you might be able to make a cool feature, but then you're responsible for drumming up interest, working with or against network effects, maintenance, etc. For a con or fic exchange, that work is frontloaded. You know ahead of the majority of work whether or not people actually want to participate in it. No such luck with coding projects.

But that leaves a great big gap for outsiders to come in and sell our culture to us, which is permissible because they're not one of us, so they're allowed to be assholes and to make a profit or a living or to break even.

QFT

[vass]

the inability to keep up with volume of mediocre content

I feel like that's the point of Tumblr - nothing you say there is assumed to be very important. It's designed around the assumption that what you say isn't. That you won't want to go back and think about it again.

It's ephemeral, like Twitter, but even more about reblogging and less about saying things. It's a great place to reblog animated gifs of ducklings when your brain's fried, or to look at a gifset of last night's episode and scream and then show it to your friend and see her scream and scream back at her. But not a good place for long histories and memories, or finding things any other way than waiting to stumble across the reblogged post you were thinking of when it comes around again.

One day maybe the fans who actually survive in this environment will grow in sufficient numbers to give the infrastructure providing the conditions under which they evolved an ulcer.

Sure, there's projects that are primarily community-built for free (*cough* OpenSSL *cough*), but there is a company paying Linux Torvalds' salary so he can work on Linux full time. No one is willing to do that in fandom.

I read this terrifying thing yesterday, and (apart from "he did WHAT?" and "oh shit, I've done so many of those things myself and am still not a dev") what struck me the most was this:

"Choose one type of software development that interests you enough to define your career: web, mobile, gaming or embedded." Those four being the only types of software development that exist. Everything is user-facing. Everything.

I'm glad there are companies who will fund the people working on the Linux kernel and BIND and so on, as open source projects, so those things aren't reliant on Kickstarters or a Wikipedia banner or something worse like whatever Canonical thinks it's doing with its user data.

Sometimes it's amazing humans get anything done.

When you run a con, you have a con at the end of it, and you can take a year off until the next one, and people will clap and cheer for you when it gets pulled off successfully.

HAHAHAHAHA no.

Or not the ones I've heard about. They work all year on it, but their work is only visible during the con itself. At which point the important parts are just as invisible as sysadmin work is - nobody notices that there weren't hour-long lines for the toilets, or that the lifts didn't break down, or that the GOH's book signing didn't get scheduled at the same time as the masquerade ball.

[thedeadparrot]

I didn't mean to imply that running a con is easy or that there isn't miles and miles of unnoticed shit that they have to do to keep things functioning. More that, when a con is done, the con is done. You have completed the thing and can get catharsis out of it to keep you going for when you need to start up the next one. Yeah, there's a huge aspect of 'only gets noticed when things go pear-shaped' to both buckets of work, but I think with the way fandom is structured to celebrate the making of specific things, the success of a con is far more noticeable compared to the success of a server staying up when you accidentally release a performance regression onto production or even a major infrastructure upgrade.

[vass]

Sorry, I'm short on sleep and was snippier than I needed to be.

I think whether the con is done done or not depends on how the convention's run. But your point does stand. At least there is a high point in the cycle, a point where the work becomes visible. Not just day in, day out.

[thedeadparrot]

It's cool! I can see how my post was minimizing the work that con organizers do, so it's be good to be called out on it.

[cephy]

Ahh, tumblr. *eyeroll* Tumblr is... very good at what it actually does, which is provide endless pages of funny kitten pics and other pretty pictures for passive enjoyment. At least, that's what I use it for. ;) What it doesn't do is provide any reasonable method of conversation between users, which is something I really miss from ye olde journal days.

I recently unearthed an old backup folder in which I'd saved my fannish bookmarks from I-don't-know-how-many years ago. So many geocities pages, and others that similarly don't exist anymore.

[thedeadparrot]

Yeah, going through the rec lists of old fandoms is the most depressing thing. :( And the problem with Tumblr (unlike LJ) is that it doesn't set up redirects when people change Tumblr names. So shit disappears even faster than it used to unless it makes it onto AO3.

Sigh.

[cephy]

Sigh!