Seeing some discussions of early-internet fandom vs current, & what I haven't seen mentioned is the fact that EI fandom was filled with a lot of unlabeled, discrete boxes. Things weren't as interconnected & labeled the way they are now. Think of... garage sales vs Amazon. (1/?)

With garage sales, you can drive around and look for signposts or just hope to discover a sale. In EI fandom, sometimes things would be advertised elsewhere, sometimes you'd just hear about it from someone else. This was pre-Google, or before Google's dominance. (2/?)

Mailing lists, webrings, and rec lists were KING. Finding a reccer who updated regularly, shared your tastes, and provided a lot of info about fics was GOLD.

Part of this was bc sometimes even authors wouldn't provide info about their fics. (3/?)

Authors weren't obligated to provide pairings, ratings, content warnings, summaries... Esp if they were hosting their own fics on their own pages. Unlabeled boxes in discrete spaces. Rolling up to a garage sale & not knowing if you'd find Beanie Babies or vintage Playboys. (4/?)

Fast forward. There were raging debates about whether slash (queer content of ANY kind) should be allowed... anywhere, really. The arguments about using content warnings EVER were UGLY. (5/?)

Templates were created for fic headers - included stuff like title, author, pairing, rating, filesize (pre-wordcount), summary, DISCLAIMERS (oh the flashbacks) - but they varied according to venue, and some things were considered optional. (6/?)

Fast forward again. Livejournal interconnected fandom more, but individual community standards still varied. Communities could label themselves, advertise easier, but they were opt-in (sometimes locked!), and you couldn't find things thru tags yet. (7/?)

Like mailing lists, sometimes you had to jump through hoops to join lj comms. Provide an age statement, know someone who'd vouch for you, get invited personally. You might not know those comms existed otherwise. (8/?)

Some of these unlabeled boxes, both in pre-lj and lj days, had some nasty shit in them. On rare occasion, you'd falsify an age statement and REGRET IT. And sometimes you were so starved for content (slash especially!) that you'd take what you could get. (9/?)

Okay. So. Strikethrough & AO3's founding happened; those've been extensively discussed elsewhere. But let's look at AO3's post *structure*:

Obligatory title
Obligatory summary
Obligatory cw (or the deliberate Choose Not To Warn)
Recommended pairing, content tagging, etc.

(10/?)

That's directly from the old header templates from mailing lists, PLUS SEARCHABLE TAGS. Some things are optional, some things aren't. I'm sure there were fierce debates behind the scenes about every one of them.

(11/?)

(yes, I'm skipping over ff. net but like. This is not a comprehensive history bc there WILL be an eventual point to this and imo, ff. net was and is a weird larval thing that I don't think has ever properly hatched out of its cocoon.)

Early Internet fandom was cliquish by virtue of the designs: discrete, unlabeled boxes, remember? Drama had its own tenor, when a single misstep according to the whims of a moderator could fracture a comm, implode a mailing list, cause the deletion of a whole archive. (12/?)

This, btw, was why confessions blogs and anonymous wank comms sprang up. When you can't dissent with popular opinion or speak truth to power without losing your access to a community... You need SOMEplace to vent. (13/?)

Ok, on to Tumblr/Twitter. Fandom turns into Amazon: warehoused, commodified. FLOODS of content, a tag search away. No communities, no moderators. NO GODS NO MASTERS.
Freedom to critique toxic structures, freedom to spam tags with ANYTHING, in equal measure. (14/?)

Yes, when the tag search on Tumblr became supplanted (though not wholly erased by) the current Generic Search function, there was a shift. But I'd argue that the major tectonic shift had already happened, this was just another waypoint on the new trajectory.

(15/?)

Okay, enough background. On to my point:

Internet fandom has improved in ways that are invisible to people who weren't there for the changes, BUT it's lost some things, & it still has TONS of room for improvement. I'll tackle them in order, & of course it's all imo/ymmv. (16/?)

Things internet fandom has lost: the ability to lock away content & moderate spaces w/sensitive content w/out turning back the clock & disconnecting from popular fandom venues entirely. "Opt-in" spaces vs opting-out of content via add-ons (blocklists, Tumblr savior, etc). (17/?)

Things fandom has gained:
- fanwork info/content warnings are more common;
- tags! posting to, searching by, organizing with;
- the ability to critique itself openly/publicly/freely. (18/?)

No, that last bit is a GOOD thing, hand to god. Yes, ppl have used those tools to harass, but I promise you, harassers have always & will always use whatever tools are at hand, & a community's ability to self-reflect and grow is BETTER than cliquish stagnation. (19/?)

Other thing fandom has gained: accessibility! It's easier than ever to create, share, and FIND fanwork, and other fans of similar mindsets/tastes/etc. (20/?)

Unfortunately, due to the opt-in/hard-to-opt-out structure of modern fandom platforms, that means that you're also more likely to be exposed to content that you find objectionable or even triggering. This is something that we need to improve somehow. (21/?)

AO3 has made a recent improvement in this arena, in allowing people to filter out stuff from their search results, though I'd also argue* that there're ways the Archive can continue to improve in this vein. Tumblr/Twitter have proved to outright decline in this vein. (22/?)

(* I'm not arguing specifics in this thread though, that's not the point of this thread. I'm talking broad strokes, here.)

Another way that fandom can improve: a willingness to listen to legitimate, nuanced critique, especially when discussing kyriarchal biases (racism especially). Fandom is not divorced from reality or mainstream media, but derived from it. We carry our biases everywhere. (23/?)

Again, harassers/abusers exist everywhere, in every community, & use the tools @ hand. Critique is =/= to abuse, & vice versa. Communities resistant to critique foster kyriarchal toxicity & defensive violence (ppl critiquing fandom racism have been harassed too!). (24/?)

Anyway. Internet fandom has grown a LOT! This is just an abbreviated history, built for a purpose. A lot of it is lost to time or easy to overlook, but how people have *experienced* fandom will dramatically impact their perspective on where we are now. (25/?)

Even 2 ppl who came from the mailing list days, or the lj days, or whenever, might have different perspectives because they lived in a different neighborhood, with different garage sales nearby. (26/?)

You can still curate yr experience w/effort, TO A POINT, but it's not the way it was before. And this is not to say that ~Fandom Olds~ have BETTER opinions bc of experience! Just that our POVs *are* different, and inform our approaches to convos. Please keep that in mind. (/fin)