Interesting Meta On The Places Where Fandom Dwells....

mxcatmoon posted: The State of Fandom Meta

Gone are the days when a TV show would have at least one community all its own, where fans would not just write fic but also have discussions. I'm guessing these days everyone is into one-line-at-a-time Twitter posts? Tumbler seems pretty active, but I find the format chaotic and my computer doesn't like it. I still can't figure out how to actually find anything of substance. Are there real discussions there? Fanfic posted?

Reply From One Of The Comments There: "The platforms people most commonly use are very geared toward constant engagement. Nowadays, social media platforms are literally built to give people the same kind of addiction that gambling does for some people. I heard someone who used to work for twitter (I think, maybe google) talking about how notifications are set up so that they don't actually necessarily give them to you in real time, especially on mobile. They are meant to be something like a slot machine to keep you coming back and trying again.

I think that the infrastructure for Dreamwidth comes from a time when the internet hadn't been quite so utterly taken over by corporate interest. There was ad revenue, but it wasn't so invested in stalking and manipulating people and itself in data gathering. Given how much Russia has been implicated in data-gathering manipulation of the world populace, the fact that LJ was eventually bought by a Russian company might be something that would cause one to raise eyebrows if interested in the probably-somewhat-true conspiracy theories of the world. But back when LJ was open source and a LOT of things were open-source, the notion was that the user-generated content was more valuable than the user as a consumer to be pushed around like a chess piece."