I don't mind giving my thoughts, but please keep in mind that they're only my thoughts on why GR doesn't seem like part of "fandom" to me and why it's different to tumbr and other established fandom spaces. I don't speak for anyone else in fandom. Also I am not trying to "determine what interfaces are and are not fandom." I won't argue with you that there are fans on goodreads, but there is a certain fandom etiquette that's been understood since I joined fandom (ah, the old Gundam Wing egroups days) and most of the folks on GR are not just ignoring that, they don't even know or care that it exists. In fact one librarian was openly hostile about it. So there is definitely culture clash going on, but I don't think it's entirely restricted to or caused by the platform. I think it might even be an inevitable part of the mainstreaming of fandom and this is just the latest iteration.
First I am not really sure this is actually an expansion of fandom. On GR, there's no podfic. There's no meta. There's no vidding or pic spams or even much squee. Heck, from looking at the Goodreads TOS I don't think rpf would be allowed on the site. How about Swordspoint fanfic? Or Outlander fanfic? GR is a select, small slice of fandom being extracted for the purpose of critiquing. Can you imagine if jesswave or Elsa Rolle had suddenly started reviewing fanfic? Or Publishers Weekly or Kirkus? NYT? To me that's the same idea taken to an extreme. I don't like it on a big scale. I don't like it on a small scale. (I do not like green eggs and ham!) Goodreads is about promotion, and that's pretty antithetical to fandom, IMO. Tumblr still falls under sharing with friends to me. You have to search out people with commonalities who post things you like to follow on your dash. I personally feel like I know the people on my tumblr much better than my goodreads friends, yet I've been on goodreads probably three times as long. They're strangers, even the people I interact with on a daily basis.
Second of all, the idea that authors (and maybe artists?) should be forced to have a profile on goodreads to control how their work is presented-- could you imagine if all authors were suddenly forced to get fanfic.net accounts? Or a Dreamwidth acct, or tumblr account, deviantart? IMO, it's kind of ridiculous and the sort of thing that makes fandom people shut down, not embrace it with open arms. Fanfic writers being forced to invest time to police and maintain a profile on a site designed to criticize them? And GR prides itself on not removing database entries ever, for any reason. That's pretty absolute. I may not like people pulling their fanfic down to publish it, or because they're afraid of people finding out about it, or even because they've moved on from fandom, but I would never dispute their right to do it. Yet if Felisblanco succeeds in publishing her book, there's already a fanfic entry on goodreads for it that she shouldn't ever be able to get removed? It should be up there forever to compare with the book's reviews? Is that fair? Doesn't seem right to me. So it's not even principally the reviews that I object to, it's the cataloging and permanent nature of the data. Authors should have control over that without being forced to have a presence on the platform. And it should be opt in, not opt out. (Can authors see where hits on their AO3 fanfic are coming from? Perhaps this shouldn't have come as such a shock? I don't know.) Even AO3 gives them the choice to orphan their works.
Finally, I'm not sure how fandom being googleable relates to this. You have to actively enter something to search for in google. It's active participation. I don't know anyone who browses Google. In goodreads you can just browse tags and lists and reviews, look at what your friends are reading, or wander around and stumble across fanfic with no determining action being taken on your part. Everything is interlinked. They promote reading lists on your GR home page unsolicited and suggest related books and you can't opt out of that, afaik. Goodreads is designed to promote things and reach the widest possible audience. Fandom is not. It's about sharing your work with your intimates and maybe their intimates. Word of mouth, if you will, controlled by the creator, not blast determined by the site coding and an algorithm of hit counters and ratings.
My stealing metaphor... I'm not arguing anything about tumblr. I don't like tumblr as a fandom platform either, so you won't hear me defending it. It's a bit of an echo chamber and you can get a really skewed perspective of what fandom is like just from choosing your dash. But I would argue that AO3 is a protected space. People can lock their fics and disable downloads and remove it from searches, make it private. I've seen at least two comments over on GR where people have said they'll read fanfic, but they don't consider themselves a part of fandom and they'd never browse AO3. They only read the fanfic because of their friends' reviews showing up in their feeds. So no, I don't consider those people a part of fandom. They don't want to be a part of fandom. But I acknowledge that there also are fans being born on GR. There was one girl who was really apologetic for her part in adding fanfic entries and she understood the creator's POV when it was explained to her. But right now there's no happy medium, and until there is, I fall on the side of more anonymity is better, control should be in the hands of the creators, and don't assume that everyone wants to be promoted and publicized all across the web.
I do think that your experience with published nonfiction is fundamentally different from fanfic however. I assume you had editors, marketing, a target demographic, the goal was perhaps to make money? You published knowing that it would be reviewed and criticized and judged. I don't think fandom creators have that same mindset, nor should they. They put their works out there for different reasons. Gift economy and all that.
no subject
I don't mind giving my thoughts, but please keep in mind that they're only my thoughts on why GR doesn't seem like part of "fandom" to me and why it's different to tumbr and other established fandom spaces. I don't speak for anyone else in fandom. Also I am not trying to "determine what interfaces are and are not fandom." I won't argue with you that there are fans on goodreads, but there is a certain fandom etiquette that's been understood since I joined fandom (ah, the old Gundam Wing egroups days) and most of the folks on GR are not just ignoring that, they don't even know or care that it exists. In fact one librarian was openly hostile about it. So there is definitely culture clash going on, but I don't think it's entirely restricted to or caused by the platform. I think it might even be an inevitable part of the mainstreaming of fandom and this is just the latest iteration.
First I am not really sure this is actually an expansion of fandom. On GR, there's no podfic. There's no meta. There's no vidding or pic spams or even much squee. Heck, from looking at the Goodreads TOS I don't think rpf would be allowed on the site. How about Swordspoint fanfic? Or Outlander fanfic? GR is a select, small slice of fandom being extracted for the purpose of critiquing. Can you imagine if jesswave or Elsa Rolle had suddenly started reviewing fanfic? Or Publishers Weekly or Kirkus? NYT? To me that's the same idea taken to an extreme. I don't like it on a big scale. I don't like it on a small scale. (I do not like green eggs and ham!) Goodreads is about promotion, and that's pretty antithetical to fandom, IMO. Tumblr still falls under sharing with friends to me. You have to search out people with commonalities who post things you like to follow on your dash. I personally feel like I know the people on my tumblr much better than my goodreads friends, yet I've been on goodreads probably three times as long. They're strangers, even the people I interact with on a daily basis.
Second of all, the idea that authors (and maybe artists?) should be forced to have a profile on goodreads to control how their work is presented-- could you imagine if all authors were suddenly forced to get fanfic.net accounts? Or a Dreamwidth acct, or tumblr account, deviantart? IMO, it's kind of ridiculous and the sort of thing that makes fandom people shut down, not embrace it with open arms. Fanfic writers being forced to invest time to police and maintain a profile on a site designed to criticize them? And GR prides itself on not removing database entries ever, for any reason. That's pretty absolute. I may not like people pulling their fanfic down to publish it, or because they're afraid of people finding out about it, or even because they've moved on from fandom, but I would never dispute their right to do it. Yet if Felisblanco succeeds in publishing her book, there's already a fanfic entry on goodreads for it that she shouldn't ever be able to get removed? It should be up there forever to compare with the book's reviews? Is that fair? Doesn't seem right to me. So it's not even principally the reviews that I object to, it's the cataloging and permanent nature of the data. Authors should have control over that without being forced to have a presence on the platform. And it should be opt in, not opt out. (Can authors see where hits on their AO3 fanfic are coming from? Perhaps this shouldn't have come as such a shock? I don't know.) Even AO3 gives them the choice to orphan their works.
Finally, I'm not sure how fandom being googleable relates to this. You have to actively enter something to search for in google. It's active participation. I don't know anyone who browses Google. In goodreads you can just browse tags and lists and reviews, look at what your friends are reading, or wander around and stumble across fanfic with no determining action being taken on your part. Everything is interlinked. They promote reading lists on your GR home page unsolicited and suggest related books and you can't opt out of that, afaik. Goodreads is designed to promote things and reach the widest possible audience. Fandom is not. It's about sharing your work with your intimates and maybe their intimates. Word of mouth, if you will, controlled by the creator, not blast determined by the site coding and an algorithm of hit counters and ratings.
My stealing metaphor... I'm not arguing anything about tumblr. I don't like tumblr as a fandom platform either, so you won't hear me defending it. It's a bit of an echo chamber and you can get a really skewed perspective of what fandom is like just from choosing your dash. But I would argue that AO3 is a protected space. People can lock their fics and disable downloads and remove it from searches, make it private. I've seen at least two comments over on GR where people have said they'll read fanfic, but they don't consider themselves a part of fandom and they'd never browse AO3. They only read the fanfic because of their friends' reviews showing up in their feeds. So no, I don't consider those people a part of fandom. They don't want to be a part of fandom. But I acknowledge that there also are fans being born on GR. There was one girl who was really apologetic for her part in adding fanfic entries and she understood the creator's POV when it was explained to her. But right now there's no happy medium, and until there is, I fall on the side of more anonymity is better, control should be in the hands of the creators, and don't assume that everyone wants to be promoted and publicized all across the web.
I do think that your experience with published nonfiction is fundamentally different from fanfic however. I assume you had editors, marketing, a target demographic, the goal was perhaps to make money? You published knowing that it would be reviewed and criticized and judged. I don't think fandom creators have that same mindset, nor should they. They put their works out there for different reasons. Gift economy and all that.