I found my favourite del.icio.us explanation:
I learned a lot about fandom couple of years ago in conversations with my friend Britta, who was working at the time as community manager for Delicious. She taught me that fans were among the heaviest users of the bookmarking site, and had constructed an edifice of incredibly elaborate tagging conventions, plugins, and scripts to organize their output along a bewildering number of dimensions. If you wanted to read a 3000 word fic where Picard forces Gandalf into sexual bondage, and it seems unconsensual but secretly both want it, and it’s R-explicit but not NC-17 explicit, all you had to do was search along the appropriate combination of tags (and if you couldn’t find it, someone would probably write it for you). By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation retrieval, collaborative editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock.
from the guy who runs Pinboard, which took in some number of the fleeing users.
He also gave a talk about what happened when he *succeeded* at getting fandom’s attention during the exodus, which I didn’t see before just now, but its kinda funny to look at normal fandom culture stuff from the POV of an outside observer who didn’t mean to get caught in the middle.
this whole thing is super interesting
oh my god that talk is gold
There is no God, life has no meaning, it’s all over when you can’t search on the slash character.
Having worked at large tech companies, where getting a spec written requires shedding tears of blood in a room full of people whose only goal seems to be to thwart you, and waiting weeks for them to finish, I could not believe what I was seeing.
The transcription of his talk is amazing, everyone who has an interest in fandom and platforms and the way we interact with the sites we use should read it.
(As someone who ran a fandom newsletter at the time of the Great Delicious Disaster, this guy saved my fucking life - so much of that process was automated in Greasemonkey and independent user scripts, and after Delicious shit the pot we were able to move it over to Pinboard with relatively little issue. And then newsletters and LJ
fandom in general went away relatively quickly, but that’s a different story. The point is, this dude was amazing when fandom needed someone to be amazing for us.)But man, I feel like his talk should be required reading for anyone who runs an online platform that attracts fandom, or wants to attract fandom, or really just wants to foster community.
In my foolishness I asked, “Could you make me a list of those features? I’ll take a look, maybe some of it is easy to implement.”
Oh yes, they could make make a list.
I had summoned a very friendly Balrog.
This is a really good read.