@wizards-7 said: this is actually interesting because I grew up on platforms where fic writers were actually the driving force of fandom with artists just kind of There, with Big Name Fans all being fanfic writers. i guess internalized this idea and never -Really- noticed that its not like that on tumblr? i wonder why’s that
In a startling twist of irony, it turns out that platforms that excessively privilege fic writers over fan artists also do not survive.
To give a high-profile example, I’m given to understand that LiveJournal was the exact opposite of Tumblr. Because LiveJournal was set up as a blogging site, text posts were the norm, and users had to pay a yearly fee to be able to host images. Moreover, people who posted images were often bullied to hide them under a cut, which meant that artists were often relegated to the filthy swamp of DeviantArt. DeviantArt, being the cesspit that it was (and still somehow continues to be), fostered an ecosystem of unfiltered nudes and pornography that understandably made a lot of artists uncomfortable, and it didn’t help that their fanwork was often appropriated by writers on LiveJournal and edited into icons, memes, and smutty photomanips on anonymous kinkmemes.
Meanwhile, a number of professional writers who had not yet gotten real-world famous (George RR Martin is a good example) managed to become BNFs on LiveJournal. These writers hated ship art (especially gay ship art with hundreds of thousands of views) so much that they had their publishers issue official statements about enforcing copyright law. This is part of the reason why so many fic writers are still reluctant to connect their fic with their real names and professional pen names, and it’s also part of the reason why so many artists were desperate to go anywhere to escape the writers who controlled large swaths of fandom at the time. It turns out that most people who get involved in fandom love fan comics and fan art, so the gradual trickle of people moving away from LiveJournal ended up becoming a mass exodus to Tumblr.
Basically I think that, if there isn’t a good balance between writers and artists, things can get weird.
Eh. I don’t know if I’d look at it quite this way. There were a lot of people who liked the text-centric aspects of LJ, and they would have stayed there forever if LJ hadn’t done a whole series of dumb things to drive them away: deleting content, removing vital site features, having annoying outages.
Now that we’re over on Tumblr, some of those people have simply drifted away from fandom because there’s too much visual stuff here for their taste and not enough text. AO3 isn’t much good for art or vids, but it’s still massively popular. The platform shapes who “we” are.
Fandom’s tenure on LJ was something like 2002-2011. That’s eons in internet time. It’s rare for a site to remain popular that long regardless of how good it is. Tumblr is coming up on a decade or so of fandom popularity. (It was founded in 2007, but when did it first get big for fandom? It was within a couple of years, wasn’t it?) And here we are with people debating what’s next. It may be that a decade is about all we can expect.