farla | and now to quietly flee

Current Mood: drained

Entry tags:

fanlib,
fic

and now to quietly flee

Ugh. Won the fanlib crazy mass posting contest of doom and it's done. Not a moment too soon, I think some of the denizens have already begun organizing the lynch mob and now is a time for hiding.

For those of you interested, my fanlib account has a bunch of stuff that's not posted on FFN, including a lot of extremely random bits of Ice and some spur of the moment original fiction. Much of it's in 500 minichunk format, though.

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I really enjoyed your posts on the message boards. Some of your comments I felt were pretty spot. They had some valuable insight that was amongst some of the best meta on writing and feedbacking that I'd seen in a while.

Thanks. I'm not really sure how much longer that would last, unfortunately, as I'm now hovering at three or four irritated other posters and it's hard to hold a conversation if everyone else wants to keep yanking it back to talking about how what's really important is how it's very wrong to be mean. Hopefully things will cool down in a few weeks.

I can relate to that. I gave up commenting because the perspective was very author centric. The vast majority of people in fandom appear to be readers. (Only 25% of accounts on FanFiction.Ne seem to have stories attached to them.) And wanking it back to how it is mean to authors, feh. :/ This discussion has been going on in fandom for over 35 years. That camp is never going to win. If they were, it would have happened long ago. What they end up doing, and what their own supporters have said, is that they actually discourage overall feedback, and discourage people from expressing opinions regarding work in order to avoid getting attacked (the person leaving threats for one stars? *sighs*) or offending people or taking the fun out of it for authors who take the fun out of it for them. The saving grace is likely that they've never heard of or had their works MSTeds, featured on GAFF, or sporking communities where the negative behavior that they lambaste is a community norm.

I can't help but wonder if it is winning there, though. The social networking emphasis seems to enable dogpiling anyone who disagrees, and the PMs I get that don't open with HAY BITCH often mention that they've stopped reviewing and commenting and talking in the forum due to the negative responses.

I don't really think it's something sustainable, but at least for now it's pretty well cordoned off.

Have you been reporting the HAY BITCH stuff? Screen capping and sending it on to the moderators? I had a pretty offensive comment which involved the N word. I screencapped and e-mailed the PM to FanLib and that seemed to have temporarily solved the problem with at least one poster. I was impressed with how they handled it.

The whole negative thing is an issue that isn't just on FanLib sadly. :/ I posted a lot of reviews on FanWorksFinder and some authors were massively POed, even when I wrote positive reviews because they were where authors couldn't see them. And the negative ones drove them even more nuts. They were not helpful for authors. It pretty much killed my desire to read even authors I liked, and give feedback for authors period for a good period of time. But yeah, some of the negative responses I've gotten on FanLib have made me hesitant to do much beyond rating. :/ (Which makes it even worse: Some folks complain about anything but praise, blast those who give it. They get one stars in response. They blast people for not explaining but a lot of that is in response to their actions.)

There really needs to be a better discussion in fandom, where people aren't willing to back down, on how authors should handle feedback they don't like. The whole "Just shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" thing just drives it more to the fringes. GAFF, sporkings, MSTs, that is all out there in the fringe and viewed as entirely wanky because you can't discuss giving concrit or valid reasons for giving negative feedback in a lot of places with out getting "But it is a hobby! You shouldn't harsh on the squee!"

*babbles* That wasn't as coherent as I wanted it to be... but really, I do like reading your comments and agree with some of the POV you put forth.

I probably should, but I'm really pro-free speech. Then again, they're probably going to go harass other people when they're done with me...

FanWorksFinder - a great idea that can't seem to get off the ground. I wonder if a partial solution might be to set it up so that reviews could be emailed to the author? That'd at least eliminate the complaints about not knowing of the reviews. But I'm not sure if that'd really be feasible to set up there, and might just cause new problems since it'd make the not-helpful camp more aware of things.

::sigh:: I set up a thread for discussion on fanlib, intending to leave it be and have everyone just work stuff out. Three pages later, I've learned asking for consensus apparently now means I desire to impose a fascist dictatorship and that everyone else thinks having to define terms each time is endless fun. Discussion in general seems a lost cause, though I have absolutely no idea of why. (I seem to have better luck on FFN forums, but that might just be that other people are scared of me.)

Trying to move FWF to my server at the moment. :/

I think the problem is that in fandom, a lot of people don't trust projects that group up organically from their own sources. There are just too many politics involved and it is really hard, with out behaving like a company, to get enough attnetion. OTW is a classic example: Fandom project that has a lot of people distrusting it for various reasons. It doesn't, based on the current behavior, look like it will capture a wide audience. Fan History also sort of suffers that in some quarters: People don't trust it because I run it. The largest places for fanac are frequently commercial oriented. At least with a company, you know that they won't generally fuck you over because of fandom politics. They'll generally work towards making themselves marketable to the largest possible audience as that is needed for long term viability. It is easier to embrace that attitude than with a fan run project where that isn't the goal.

That'd at least eliminate the complaints about not knowing of the reviews.

Meh. That would kind of be annoying. The nice thing about FWF is that everything is clearly written FOR other readers. There really isn't the availability of the excuse for authors that they were offended and the comments weren't helpful because like, you know, they shouldn't be as those comments weren't for authors to begin with. If they want drama, that is the author wanting drama.

Three pages later, I've learned asking for consensus apparently now means I desire to impose a fascist dictatorship and that everyone else thinks having to define terms each time is endless fun.

I saw that and commented to mostly agree with you. You can't have a conversation with some one about flames if you don't know what they're talking about. If flame means "three paragraphs of praise but one line of slightly critical commentary" to one person, means "you posted this to the wrong category. I suggest you fix that before it gets reported" to another person and means "U suck. eye hop3 u di3!!!" to a third person, you can't really have any sort of conversation.

It isn't fascism to share the same language.

FanFiction.Net I think is different... because there are so many stories. There are no ratings and one of the tricks for FanFiction.Net is to write popular pairings, woo popular authors into feedbacking you and if you misbehave, then your reviews will really fall off. FanLib seems to have a different set of dynamics, mostly centered around the idea that the author is paramount. (Nothing wrong with that in some cases... when you have an automatic audience of five, you can afford to do that as it is about small community. When you have an automatic audience of one hundred, you can't afford to treat the masses that way.)

Ah, well, I like reading what people say about my stuff when it's not directed at me because it strikes me as more sincere, but I'm certainly a minority.

The reviewing dynamics on Fanlib seem a bit weird to start - there's a really high reviews to hits ratio for some reason, though that might just be part of it being a small site. I'm kind of curious if it'll die back a bit now that they're not running the giveaway and rewarding people for writing reviews. (I know another heavy reviewer seems to have stopped now that April has rolled around.)

Hey, I've got to declare, I love your internet site. The shades, the layout, the overall style, each of them proceed flawlessly together. Anyway, that is all I truly had to claim.

Posting contest of doom? o.O

So, you got the 1000 pts? Or whatever it was?

Yep!

You're amazing, Farla. You eat up my day when you pull things like this, but I don't mind.

The latest review for "The Daughters' Lot" is... amazing in the other sense. *stares at it*

I choose to believe they were being sarcastic.

Mainly because I don't want to consider the alternative.

My personal theory is that she saw you had written a Biblefic called "Traditional Values" and reviewed without reading a word of it. I wouldn't put that sort of stupidity past someone whose most recent and conspicuous fanfic is entitled "My Secret Love With Draco."

Also, she appears to read every story she can find with the word "angel" in the title, and she comments on all of them with some variation of "i love angels!"

Oh! Also! She commented on my weird little Demiurge POV saying, "we all need to love God" And gave it five stars.

I get the feeling reading comprehension is not this one's strong suit.

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