I loved LJ fandom like my own family, but I remember a lot of the same culture of ruling fear and mass bullying that goes on on tumblr from there too–that goes back at least to the 80s and ‘zine culture, where you even had to be “sponsored” by someone at a con to be taken seriously.

We started SJ on LJ, not tumblr–I remember early iterations going back to around 2002-03, it got serious in around 2007, and became impossible to ignore in 2009. So it had been steadily building up until tumblr got started, and many initially went to tumblr to get AWAY from the constant guiltmongering and finger-pointing. If you recall, DREAMWIDTH was originally considered the “special snowflake” haven! My old flist on LJ was all, “Oh, we’ll never move to Dreamwidth, all they care about is talking about disability and alternate sexualities there.” Then they all did…or went to tumblr, or focused on their offline lives.

My point is, the culture’s always had issues, it’s always been in flux, it’s always cannibalized one community after another because it’s never been stable, fandom always aspires to goodness while the means we attempt to reach this end is mostly bullying each other like the mean girls in high school, and we always claim the moral high ground while doing this–hell, the Godawful Fanfic archive in 1998 claimed it was helping the authors it mocked behind their backs with “useful crit.” Everything people are whining about with tumblr is nothing new, but an evolution of the culture we already had, that was already poisoning itself but we were too young and naive and happy to find our tribe to see it.

Anon.

http://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/131867.html?thread=687489819#cmt68748

http://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/131867.html?thread=686760731#cmt686760731