Fandom Migration Over Time

[goth_is_not_emo]

Another Tumblr post that's likely to get deleted in the Crackdown, because a FUCKTON of posts about why censorship is bad or why the Crackdown is wrong keep getting flagged very quickly.

Original thread link here.

cfiesler

I have talked to four journalists today and have agreed to write a press piece that I need to start on, but obviously it’s important that I finally sit down and post on Tumblr, too.

This is a weird feeling: I literally think that I am the world’s foremost effort on the potential impact of Tumblr banning adult content.

Here’s why: I’ve done a bunch of research about the genesis of AO3/OTW, and most recently, a large-scale study of fandom’s migration across platforms over time. I can tell you for a fact that both fanfiction.net’s and LiveJournal’s bans on adult content resulted in fans leaving those sites–and in LiveJournal’s case, essentially the death of that platform for fandom. 

The image above, if you haven’t seen it before, shows fandom platform use over time, and the red line that dips drastically is LiveJournal, after “Strikethrough 2007.”

Here’s another finding from that study: That policy was the #1 reason that fans left LiveJournal. For every other platform, fans mostly left because something better came along, but nope, for LiveJournal, it was specifically because of their crackdown on “obscene” content, and what that signaled to fandom about how they were unwelcome there.

I’m going to be posting more about this in the coming days, so watch this space, but here’s my tweetstorm from today, here’s a CNN article I’m quoted in, and here’s another Tumblr post with an optimistic view. As I wrote recently in a TWC piece about how I see the future of fandom, “fandom is not helpless to external forces—to platforms, industries, or even policies.” I believe that.

If history repeats itself, then Tumblr might fall as LiveJournal did - but something better might come to take its place. 

The Tumblr post mentioned:

cfiesler	I wrote this essay for the “future of fandom” issue of Transformative Works and Cultures.  It is written as a design fiction, which is a cousin to fanfiction in the same way that speculative fiction is - it imagines a possible future. It traces fandom’s past, through its present, and finally what the future might hold for a fandom community that continues to “own the servers.”  “As Henry Jenkins said many years ago, ‘Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk’ (Harmon 1997). We may not own the myths, but owning the servers is also a form of damage repair, where we’ve reasserted the values of our community. The future of fandom is particularly bright because of how far we’ve come, the path we’ve taken to get here, and the amazing things we’ve built along the way.” I’d love to hear what you think! Fiesler, Casey. “Owning the servers: A design fiction exploring the transformation of fandom into ‘our own.’” Transformative Works and Cultures 28 (2018).
cfiesler	I’m reblogging this in the wake of the announcement about Tumblr’s banning of adult content because the piece linked here was basically a fanfiction about the best outcome for fandom in this exact circumstance:  “What I hope this thought exercise emphasizes is that fandom is not helpless to external forces—to platforms, industries, or even policies. Though of course the realization of the optimistic legal and cultural changes I described here would make our work much easier, part of the story as well is that we can help drive them. The success of AO3 already suggests that we can do the impossible. And though we might only have influence and not control over the law or the media industry, there are some things that we can think about, like organizing around technical education for interested fans.” In other words: All is not lost. The result of this happening ten years ago with LiveJournal was OTW and AO3.  Maybe we need a Social Platform Of Our Own.  Maybe we can do that.

The results of the study:

cfiesler

Survey Results: Fan Platform Use over Time Particularly for those who were kind enough to participate in our survey last week, or to share it even after we halted data collection (because we received so many responses so quickly!), I wanted to give you something interesting right away. As you know, the academic writing and publishing process can be lengthy, so who knows when you might get a full paper from us! But in the meantime, this was the analysis I did this weekend. The survey asked for participants to indicate what platforms they use/used from a given list, and also to indicate a date range (e.g., Tumblr 2006-2018). I parsed those date ranges in order to determine for a given platform how many of our participants were active in a given year. (This actually gave me an excuse to write some code for the first time in years. Jupyter Notebooks are super cool.) (Click on the image above for full resolution!)* The Y axis is number of survey participants who indicated using the platform during a given time, and the X axis is year. (This starts at 1990, though I’ll note there were 10-ish participants who indicated using usenet, email lists, and/or messageboards in the 1980s.) Some interesting things to note:  (1) See how fanfiction.net has a spike where there was a big drop off but then it stabilized? That’s around the time that they cracked down on adult content. (2) I expected to see Livejournal decline drastically sooner, but it actually continued to climb a bit after Strikethrough and related things, until Tumblr and AO3 both started getting very popular. Based on what I’ve seen qualitatively so far, I do think that people were starting to leave, but that there had to be critical mass elsewhere in order for that leaving to start going en masse. There were also a lot of people who continued using Livejournal while they picked up other platforms as well. (3) As my PhD student collaborator Brianna said, we have “a beautiful arc of AO3 and Tumblr being besties forever.” (This makes sense to me based on some findings from my previous work about AO3, and how Tumblr filled in the gap of social interaction left by Livejournal.) In the “other” category of fan platforms used, the most popular was Discord. This doesn’t surprise me! For the most part, participants had only been active in it for the past couple of years, which is why it didn’t show up specifically in the survey (which was constructed based on interview data we already had). We also saw less frequent mentions of Facebook, reddit, delicious/pinboard, and IRC. Digging into the qualitative data will give this data much more explanatory power, but I think this is very interesting! We also asked participants what their primary fandom was for each platform they used. Based on a pretty simple analysis (most popular words!), here are the top five fandoms from each platform: Usenet: Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Star Wars, Sailor Moon Email Lists: Harry Potter, Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Gundam Wing Messageboards: Harry Potter, Buffy, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Sailor Moon Fandom-Specific Archives: Harry Potter, Buffy, Stargate, X-Files, Doctor Who Fanfiction.net:  Harry Potter, Naruto, Buffy, Star Wars, Gundam Wing Livejournal: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Stargate, Doctor Who, Merlin DeviantArt: Harry Potter, Naruto, Kingdom Hearts, Supernatural, Final Fantasy Dreamwidth: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Marvel, Stargate, RPF Archive of Our Own: Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Supernatural, Teen Wolf Tumblr: Marvel, Star Wars, Supernatural, Harry Potter, Teen Wolf Twitter: Star Wars, Supernatural, Marvel, RPF, Yuri on Ice Note that this is NOT necessarily representative of the overall popularity of certain fandoms on these platforms. Our survey, because it was targeting research questions about fandom migration, asked for participants who had been in fandom for 10+ years. This means that our results skewed older (mean 31; median 30; SD 8.6). And of course, most of the participants are currently in fandom, which means that it also misses people who have left fandom. It is interesting to see the change across platforms and over time though! My favorite tidbit is how Star Wars was popular, dropped off, and then came back with gusto. This is only the tip of the iceberg on this data analysis! If there’s anything else that is easily shared as we do this analysis, I’ll continue to do so. Otherwise, wish us luck and I’ll eventually share a completed analysis if/when (fingers crossed!) we publish on this. I have a list of emails from everyone who participated and wanted to give us that info to share the results. If you’d like to be added to that list, send me an email at casey.fiesler@colorado.edu. Or just feel free to follow me here, or myself and Brianna on Twitter.

* The image referenced here is the same one I've pasted at the top of this DW post.