Fandom as a whole feels like it’s become really negative, bitchy and critical for some reason, like I’ll even be scared to make a stupid little casual post about characters just in case someone with a different headcanon than mine comes by and starts screeching He Would Not Fucking Say That Did You Even Play The Game at me
Here’s the thing. Fandom has always, always, always had big pockets of haters and negativity in it. There used to be whole blog communities dedicated to “sporking” and “wank”.
But what social media has done is made those haters and that negativity inescapable.
Instead of having an environment made of up a million interconnected little communities of forums and blogs and archives with their own rules and moderators, where we could choose the type of environment we wanted to be in–
–now we all are in one BIG community with NO moderators and NO rules and everyone’s uncomfortable and we all have to see one another’s shit that we don’t want to see all the time, and we can’t do anything about it.
There’s no way to effectively manage your community.
There’s no “pokemon funtimes SFW” forum, and “pokemon afterdark for adults” and “pokemon haters anonymous” and “pokemon serious discussion forum”.
There’s just “the pokemon tag” (fill in any fandom here). And the people who want to see SFW funtimes also have to see the adult posters, and the serious discussion people all have to see the funtimes, and the haters have access to all our posts.
And because there’s no moderation, people have started trying to self-moderate through witch hunts and callouts.
Which makes everyone afraid to interact AT ALL for fear of getting witch hunted or called out.
Its a fucking mess.
of course its more negative now– we can’t just have our own little corners.
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