Ship wars

[soc_puppet]

Jeez, ship wars sure have escalated since I stared in fandom. It used to be specific ship versus specific ship, but now it's like... entire categories of ships are at war with the concept of shipping itself. Or is it the other way around?

Comments

[vriddy]

It's pretty demoralising. You make a good point about the platforms/technology having an effect on this in the other comment. Back in the day if I didn't want to see Dumbledore/Harry because it squicked me I just never had to see it... but because tumblr and twitter push everyone together to play into the one big single courtyard and then try to do algorithmic recommendations, people end up seeing all sort of things they don't want to see (and might have happily continued living life not knowing it existed!) and there's no way to avoid it. Not that I don't think people also go looking for stuff specifically to hate on it, too, but it's a lot easier to become aware of it in the first place.

I was away from fandom for a decade or so and thought some of the ship wank posts I saw were jokes when I came back. Unfortunately not.

[soc_puppet]

Right? It's all well and good to say "Cultivate your online experience", but it's so much harder with content aggregation sites, because they're designed to move content everywhere. I wrote a long essay about the differences between audience on Tumblr and Dreamwidth, and one of the major points is that you are much less likely to have bad faith interactions on Dreamwidth because you are much less likely to be exposed to complete strangers. There's usually at least some greater context that your ideas can fit into, and when there isn't (say, on the Latest Things page), that's an exception rather than the norm.

Yeah, it's... bad. Things on LiveJournal back in the day were also bad, but not in the same way, and not with so much... IDK, splash damage? It was at least a bit more insular, in part because it was still possible to be insulated from it.

Anyway, I understand why Tumblr became as popular as it is, even if it frustrates me, but still: Long live Dreamwidth!

[vriddy]

Really interesting post about audience and context, thank you for sharing! Complete strangers tracking with higher likelihood of bad faith takes amplified by the lower context makes sense. Actually, that also clarifies why I start sweating whenever I see a post of mine linked on a linkspam from another platform, haha.

Long live Dreamwidth!