Particularly for those who were kind enough to participate in our survey last week, or to share it even after we halted data collection (because we received so many responses so quickly!), I wanted to give you something interesting right away. As you know, the academic writing and publishing process can be lengthy, so who knows when you might get a full paper from us! But in the meantime, this was the analysis I did this weekend.
The survey asked for participants to indicate what platforms they use/used from a given list, and also to indicate a date range (e.g., Tumblr 2006-2018). I parsed those date ranges in order to determine for a given platform how many of our participants were active in a given year. (This actually gave me an excuse to write some code for the first time in years. Jupyter Notebooks are super cool.)
(Click on the image above for full resolution!)
The Y axis is number of survey participants who indicated using the platform during a given time, and the X axis is year. (This starts at 1990, though I’ll note there were 10-ish participants who indicated using usenet, email lists, and/or messageboards in the 1980s.)
Some interesting things to note: (1) See how fanfiction.net has a spike where there was a big drop off but then it stabilized? That’s around the time that they cracked down on adult content. (2) I expected to see Livejournal decline drastically sooner, but it actually continued to climb a bit after Strikethrough and related things, until Tumblr and AO3 both started getting very popular. Based on what I’ve seen qualitatively so far, I do think that people were starting to leave, but that there had to be critical mass elsewhere in order for that leaving to start going en masse. There were also a lot of people who continued using Livejournal while they picked up other platforms as well. (3) As my PhD student collaborator Brianna said, we have “a beautiful arc of AO3 and Tumblr being besties forever.” (This makes sense to me based on some findings from my previous work about AO3, and how Tumblr filled in the gap of social interaction left by Livejournal.)
In the “other” category of fan platforms used, the most popular was Discord. This doesn’t surprise me! For the most part, participants had only been active in it for the past couple of years, which is why it didn’t show up specifically in the survey (which was constructed based on interview data we already had). We also saw less frequent mentions of Facebook, reddit, delicious/pinboard, and IRC.
Digging into the qualitative data will give this data much more explanatory power, but I think this is very interesting!
We also asked participants what their primary fandom was for each platform they used. Based on a pretty simple analysis (most popular words!), here are the top five fandoms from each platform:
Usenet: Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Star Wars, Sailor Moon
Email Lists: Harry Potter, Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Gundam Wing
Messageboards: Harry Potter, Buffy, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Sailor Moon
Fandom-Specific Archives: Harry Potter, Buffy, Stargate, X-Files, Doctor Who
Fanfiction.net: Harry Potter, Naruto, Buffy, Star Wars, Gundam Wing
Livejournal: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Stargate, Doctor Who, Merlin
DeviantArt: Harry Potter, Naruto, Kingdom Hearts, Supernatural, Final Fantasy
Dreamwidth: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Marvel, Stargate, RPF
Archive of Our Own: Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Supernatural, Teen Wolf
Tumblr: Marvel, Star Wars, Supernatural, Harry Potter, Teen Wolf
Twitter: Star Wars, Supernatural, Marvel, RPF, Yuri on Ice
Note that this is NOT necessarily representative of the overall popularity of certain fandoms on these platforms. Our survey, because it was targeting research questions about fandom migration, asked for participants who had been in fandom for 10+ years. This means that our results skewed older (mean 31; median 30; SD 8.6). And of course, most of the participants are currently in fandom, which means that it also misses people who have left fandom.
It is interesting to see the change across platforms and over time though! My favorite tidbit is how Star Wars was popular, dropped off, and then came back with gusto.
This is only the tip of the iceberg on this data analysis! If there’s anything else that is easily shared as we do this analysis, I’ll continue to do so. Otherwise, wish us luck and I’ll eventually share a completed analysis if/when (fingers crossed!) we publish on this.
I have a list of emails from everyone who participated and wanted to give us that info to share the results. If you’d like to be added to that list, send me an email at casey.fiesler@colorado.edu. Or just feel free to follow me here, or myself and Brianna on Twitter.
the same people who scream “I’m leaving, this is the final straw” every time staff fucks up are here five minutes later shitposting spongebob memes. let’s be real you were here through the porn bots apocalypse, you gonna be here through the titty prohibition.
So what’s the plan? Dreamwidth? Pillowfort? We open a dialogue with the OTW to make a Network Of Our Own a reality? Tumblr is singing its swan song right now and it sounds like a wet fart.
I made some semi-cryptic tags on one of my posts the other day because I’d gotten a passing hint that tumblr was going to change its policies towards something a little while back – which I put together with the sudden ongoing purge of way more than just CP and went ‘yeah, it’s probably a n sfw ban’.
this got me a lot of asks, but I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to answer b/c the information about the policy change was potentially NDA-protected. but here it is: the official announcement.
Tumblr is banning N SFW content entirely – and no doubt fandom is about to migrate in response.
(more thoughts and the asks I got about this under the cut.)
You sound like a fandom pearl-clutcher who hasn’t been through one of these purges. I have been through SEVERAL.
Each time this happens, we split up–some may go to pillowfort, some may go to twitter, some may go to dreamwidth, some may go to discord, some will stay right here, and some will leave us forever.
What you don’t seem to understand is that we’re being divided. People will lose long-lasting relationships over this, having their blogs deleted and losing any ability to find each other again. I had loads of friends during the more livelier times of LiveJournal, and I couldn’t find them ever again, no matter how hard I tried.
These kind of events harm people, turn off countless creators who can and will lose the content they have worked tirelessly over because it’s not saved elsewhere. Have you ever lost a laptop to a crash? It’s this, but in WIDE SCALE. I have thousands upon thousands of words and drawings forever lost to LiveJournal and FFnet’s banishments, things I worked so hard on, and I know countless others have experienced the same.
It’s also not just porn being affected. It’s everything that isn’t squeaky fucking clean for little children. The female nipple, consensual sex, ART IN GENERAL. Censorship is a slippery fucking slope, even on a private website like this, and you’re supporting the silence of people who have worked hard through their lifetimes on the things they love.
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