Snowflake Challenge #15: Predictions

[rodo]

snowflake_challenge: Challenge #15:
In your own space, opine on the future of fandom.

So, this is a bit difficult for me, since I haven’t really had my finger anywhere near the pulse of fandom in over a decade, and I’ve happily been doing my own thing at the fringes every since, but I’ll give it a try.

1. Fandom will continue to mostly congregate around franchises and/or remakes. This is partly due to the fact that genuinely original canons seem to get more and more rare these days, but also due to the fact that the built-in sense of community an existing fandom provides helps organise people.

2. East Asian live action canons are going to increase in popularity. This is going to happen in bursts, whenever there’s a new canon coming out that hits the nerve of fandom, as has happened in the last couple of years. Western producers are going to try to cash in on the hype and miserably fail to adapt one of these canons in a western way at least once, because they don’t get why people love the original in the first place.

3. At some point, the social media fandom sphere might collapse or at least diminish because the business model of social media is going to come into conflict with political and legal realities around the globe, such as consumer protection laws, worker protection laws, laws against certain types of hate speech and so on – and managing those types of requirements would require more money than the advertising-based business model brings in (and no, algorithms aren’t going to solve the problem because they’re not good enough to keep pace with humans yet.)

Take all of these with a huge grain of salt because I’m shit at predicting stuff, and also, things might turn out very differently if there’s a war with China.

Comments

[yelp]

Very reasonable predictions, thanks for sharing! I've been especially bummed about the business model of social media recently. It really does seem to stoke the worst and most dramatic of fandom behaviors, and also makes it super visible too.

[rodo]

I don't even think fandom behavior is the worst of it, even if I've heard it's pretty bad. I think the crux of it is that social media as it is now needs a lot more moderation, but you'd need people for that, algorithms just can't do context, and sometimes mess up languages. The German article "die" has gotten more than one person in trouble.

[pronker]

That "die" became problematical is an amazing analogy - thanks for pointing that out. needs more moderation another interesting point. I'm mostly active on a moderated site, theforce.net, and appreciate moderators.

[rodo]

"Die" mostly becomes a problem when people use Denglisch - a mixture of German and English that's super common in Germany, but that seems to confound computers.

Moderation is a thankless job, but it's also very necessary, and it makes everyone's experience more pleasant when a mod knows what they're doing and enforces rules. I think that might be why I still hang out on reddit, as opposed to other sites that are popular with fandom. The moderation there can be sketchy, but at least it exists.

[pronker]

I'm glad to discover this about reddit - I've an account but go there rarely. I'm into twitter and tumblr 90 percent for the fanart and hardly ever interact with fellow fans; deviantArt has the politest folks I've met on the internet in 14 years of being online in a non-lurker fashion.

[rodo]

Yeah, subreddits tend to have rules and moderators, but a lot depends on which subreddit you hang out in. And now I'm missing deviantArt. Maybe it's time to dip my toes back in!