What is this feeling?
Nov. 3rd, 2010 07:42 amI really can't bring myself to any emotions other than sadness about Fiction Alley applying for a Pepsi refresh grant.
When I was 17 and desperate to get out of the town where I grew up, FA was my online home. Its message boards, cheesy though they seem now, were the only connection I had with people out there in the world, people I hadn't known since elementary school, people who had the same interests that I did. And FA very definitely had an elite set of superusers that *everyone* knew were cooler than the rest of us on the site. They were cooler, and they were more powerful, and they were more connected, and they could do seemingly anything.
So, when I heard they were applying for the grant, my first thought was "the hubris of them!" My second thought was "Wait, those guys are still in fandom?" But it sounds like this is a last-ditch measure where fundraising and ad revenue have already failed. This... doesn't fit with my picture of FA as it existed in '01 and '02, the period when I was most active on the site. It does fit with the ongoing story of fandom-specific archives closing to the left and right as most posting moves to places like LJ, DW, and the AO3.
FA doesn't have an army of members to vote them up and help them win money away from homeless shelters and free aerobics classes for children. The maintainers weren't able to raise enough money in its last fundraising drive to do more than see them through the end of this year. There are a few current professional authors who first made it big in Harry Potter fandom, at least one of them on the back of FA. All have cut their ties with online fandom pretty much completely. Because, I guess, in a fannish environment where the goal is to be the biggest name and have the most fans, that's the priority, not staying involved and promoting fandom a la Naomi Novik.
In the comments of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nextian's quite excellent post where she has all the rage I can't conjure up about this mess, there are tons of fundraising suggestions--their current operating costs, for instance, could be covered by 200 people each giving them a dollar a month. So what's going on. Are the FA folks too lazy or stupid to have come up with those ideas? Or is it that they just don't have a userbase that cares about what they're doing anymore?
Given that FA is now hovering around 200th place in the competition, I can see this ending in exactly one way--they'll have no money, no contest win,and NO LIEUTENANT YAR and they'll have lost any lingering goodwill from fandom at large, even those of us who grew up at FA. And that just makes me sad.
ETA:nextian points out that the rank over the first few days is based on time of submission, not number of votes, so maybe they do have a voter army and we just haven't seen the results yet.
When I was 17 and desperate to get out of the town where I grew up, FA was my online home. Its message boards, cheesy though they seem now, were the only connection I had with people out there in the world, people I hadn't known since elementary school, people who had the same interests that I did. And FA very definitely had an elite set of superusers that *everyone* knew were cooler than the rest of us on the site. They were cooler, and they were more powerful, and they were more connected, and they could do seemingly anything.
So, when I heard they were applying for the grant, my first thought was "the hubris of them!" My second thought was "Wait, those guys are still in fandom?" But it sounds like this is a last-ditch measure where fundraising and ad revenue have already failed. This... doesn't fit with my picture of FA as it existed in '01 and '02, the period when I was most active on the site. It does fit with the ongoing story of fandom-specific archives closing to the left and right as most posting moves to places like LJ, DW, and the AO3.
FA doesn't have an army of members to vote them up and help them win money away from homeless shelters and free aerobics classes for children. The maintainers weren't able to raise enough money in its last fundraising drive to do more than see them through the end of this year. There are a few current professional authors who first made it big in Harry Potter fandom, at least one of them on the back of FA. All have cut their ties with online fandom pretty much completely. Because, I guess, in a fannish environment where the goal is to be the biggest name and have the most fans, that's the priority, not staying involved and promoting fandom a la Naomi Novik.
In the comments of
nextian's quite excellent post where she has all the rage I can't conjure up about this mess, there are tons of fundraising suggestions--their current operating costs, for instance, could be covered by 200 people each giving them a dollar a month. So what's going on. Are the FA folks too lazy or stupid to have come up with those ideas? Or is it that they just don't have a userbase that cares about what they're doing anymore?Given that FA is now hovering around 200th place in the competition, I can see this ending in exactly one way--they'll have no money, no contest win,
ETA:
nextian points out that the rank over the first few days is based on time of submission, not number of votes, so maybe they do have a voter army and we just haven't seen the results yet.
