farla

So Fanlib's announced they're shutting the doors and, being Fanlib, there's no further explanation and the moderators write explanatory posts explaining that this is news to them too.

This means all the fanlibbers are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, or graduating high schoolers (same thing), about how they've going to lose all the friends they've made. Fanlib has CREEPY community senses. After the contest was over and I stopped posting, I got a PM from someone apologizing over what was actually the most minor fight I got into on the forum and asking if that was why I'd left because they hadn't seen me on for some time. When I went there this morning the threads on the forum were about half and half OMG WHY??? and threads trying to compile where everyone's going. Now the forums are entirely made up of redundant threads on where everyone's going and I'm getting PMs from people telling me this stuff because we're all friends!!! (We're not all friends) They're talking about how they don't want to lose touch with people, how their community is breaking up, making forums to gather on so they can keep together, etc. Over on FFN they've made both a forum and a C2 to gather all the stories written by members.

I'd normally go "Hey, free advertising!" but I really don't want anything I write to be tarred with that brush if I can avoid it. (Some of the people say they're not going to FFN because it's too confusing. So I want everyone to stop a moment and think about this: When we talk about FFN being full of the absolute dregs of writers, we're talking about a site that has filtered these people out.)

Anyway, this wouldn't be so creepy if it were a matter of collecting information from those you wanted to stay in touch with. But it's the same crazy thing that kicks in when people make any transition, where they make a big deal over "all you guys in the community", even if they don't technically know most of them. (Or, in my case, when we hate each other. DAMMIT I WORKED FOR THAT ANIMOSITY STOP WITH THE ROSE COLORED GLASSES ALL IS NOT FORGIVEN.) For that matter, the lion's share of it isn't collecting other people's information, it's passing their own around. It's probably partly that for a lot of people this was their first major community interaction and fanfic site so they're overreacting, but even still...seeing how glowingly they talk about their close community just makes confirms my desire to put as much distance between us as possible.

(On a more general note I think that, between this and metafandom, anywhere people think fanfic=community is a place that should be avoided if you want fanfic, rather than community. People who write fanfic to participate in a community are writing crappy fanfic with crappy attitudes on criticism or improving.)