I FUCKING KNEW IT.
SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.
AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.
I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.
It doesn’t matter.
Once upon a time – in the era before anyone had heard of google – if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.
GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.
And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on – it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space – but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.
Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history – a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.
(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)
And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…
Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.
And watch as the flames take everything.
Brush the ash from their hands.
Walk away.
Once upon a time – in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” – fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon – or as many years late – as you wanted to.
Because there was a tagging site – del.icio.us – that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.
They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it – many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.
It is like fandom suffered – collectively – a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.
We have never yet recovered.
Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.
I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.
I do not think Yahoo is “bad” – I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.
But they are, historically, bad for US.
And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.
…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.
i forgot that yahoo was the one that destroyed both de.li.cious and geocities too, dang. But yes – tumblr is a loss and the writing is on the wall. Yahoo won’t run this site purely for charity reasons, so unless something wildly changes, tumblr’s days are numbered.
(Maybe now is a good time to check out pillowfort.io …)
The current brouhaha reminded me of this post.
I have been involved in online fandom since AOL was new, and yes, I witnessed the destruction when Geocities went dark. It was a real loss. The Wayback Machine saved some pages, but not all.
But I think it’s wrong to blame Yahoo. They weren’t the only ones. And they won’t be the last. It might seem like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are here to stay, but that once seemed true of AOL, Geocities, MySpace, etc. If it stops being profitable, it goes away…or becomes a useless shadow of what it used to be.
AOL still exists as a company, but the fannish message boards, filled with discussion and fanfic, are gone forever. So are all the personal webpages where fans used to archive their stories. Free mailing lists at Yahoogroups, Onelist, and Egroups were once the heart of fandom – where people posted discussion and fanfic, and expected them to be archived forever. Yahoogroups ended up absorbing the rest, then put Draconian limits on posting and archiving that basically made the mailing lists useless for fannish purposes.
Usenet is still around, but the archiving services (Remarq, DejaNews, etc.) mostly went away. Because of the nature of Usenet, it was pretty useless without multiple archives (posts tended to get lost, they were only available for a couple of weeks, and you couldn’t depend on one ISP or one archive to get them all – a pain if you were trying to read a 30-part story).
So, I am wondering how long Tumblr will be a viable platform for fandom. Yahoo recently sold off Flickr, and the new owner is making huge changes. You used to get 1 terabyte of space for photos; now you only get 1,000 photos, no matter what size they are. If you don’t buy a membership for $50/year, they will start deleting your photos until you are under the limit, oldest first. If they decide to sell Tumblr as well, who knows what the new rules will be.
Many Flickr users are upset at the changes. They expected their photos to be archived there forever. Now that won’t be the case, even if they pay – since once you die and stop paying the fee, your photos will be deleted.
I fear that applies to fannish works as well. Switching to Pillowfort.io or Dreamwidth isn’t really a solution. They are likely to face the same pressures Yahoo, etc. faced. Any commercial service can’t be relied on.
I’m reminded of something a biographer of Steve Jobs said. He writes a lot of biographies, and said Jobs was difficult, because his early journals were on magnetic tape and other obsolete media, written with software that is no longer readily available. Leonardo da Vinci was easier, because his handwritten notebooks can still be read. I guess there’s something to be said for dead-tree fanzines.
A good post to revive!
I don’t think it’s the commercial nature of a site by itself that’s the issue. DW never really took off like a lot of us hoped and never created that second era of LJ-style fandom, but it has been chugging happily along ever since. Its ambitions were modest and its business plan sound.
The problem is that most commercial sites are venture capital startup nonsense that does not have a clear business plan that will be sustainable in the long run. The aim is to drive users to the site in such numbers that they feel unable to abandon it, then inflict advertising or new fees on them after they’re stuck. “We’ll figure it out later” is a key feature of all of these, but the assumption that lots of users mean lots of ways to monetize isn’t always valid.
Squidge-style sites also don’t usually have good long-term plans. (IDK about Squidge in particular though.) The ones that last are the ones run by fans with deep pockets and good offline fannish support networks. Many others die when the owner forgets to renew the domain name or gets tired of paying or can’t pay any longer.
Look at the Smallville Slash Archive: it was one of many fannish sites that Minotaur hosted. When he died unexpectedly, his many fannish friends stepped in to save his work. SSA ultimately got imported to AO3 to preserve it. This worked because he had plenty of actual friends in fandom–people he saw offline at cons too–and not just casual acquaintances who followed him on social media. It’s true that donation drives can be signal boosted on social media, but all of the liking and goodwill in the world won’t do jack if nobody has access to the hosting/business side of a site to use those donations to keep it open.
This is one reason a lot of older fans I know have started talking about fannish estate planning. All those paper zines are a better archival format than any computer drive, but they also often get thrown in the trash by clueless relatives. Out of an original print run of a couple hundred, how many are extant?
AO3 is distinctive in that it has an entire organization in place to make sure it continues. (So while nothing is forever, AO3 is about as solid as it gets.) But I’d probably trust DW second most, and I’d trust it over many single-owner not-for-profit fannish spaces.
Not to hijack the thread, but this is Walter from Squidge.org. Yes, we’re still out here, though we’re such a small part of fandom now as opposed to the early 90s when we started. Squidge has a future, I think, and I’m looking at replacing several of current sites (Peja’s WWOMB, NCISFiction.com, and a couple more eFiction sites) with a single AO3-based archive.
And as for the future, yes, we’re all getting older. I have a will that bequeaths Squidge.org fandom sites to the OTW (the folks that run AO3). My husband has instructions, and OTW has been told of my wishes.
Great to hear you’re around! I used to read WWOMB so often–and again whenever I get into a new-to-me old fandom. There are so many fics on older archives that aren’t crossposted anywhere else.
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just moving along like everyone else 