further reflections on fandom size, fandom quality, slushpile/archive-wading

[cimorene]

uh, so, i seem to have started reading sga again, though only from links i find from other people (there's just no way i could go archive-wading again in a fandom that big). it's funny, but i have some old-fandom nostalgia and everything for it even though it hasn't even been a year since i stopped reading and watching it.

on the other hand, while i do dislike giant fandoms for the pure sake of their giantness, another factor which sends me away from them is the increased quantity of bad and mediocre which accompanies the increased quantity of good (and even more particularly the increased quantity of fanon, which is like the opposite of a kink for me - not even a pet peeve exactly, because my boundless fuming rage at fanon is really totally illogical and kind of hair-triggered - but doesn't persist in all fandoms since, like, you could never read highlander or the sentinel or tpm at all if you didn't like fanon sometimes). perhaps going from sga into small fandoms with much lower quality overall has let me regain some perspective, much the way even food you are getting a bit tired of (say, plain mashed potatoes) will seem like a good choice if the other dishes on the banquet table are those really gross fish things that nordic people like to serve for christmas (lax and sill, i think, but that's beside the point; you just have to know that i can only eat like a milligram of them at a time, even smothered in cream sauce).

my point, though i've digressed from it rather, is that in big fandoms there is so much fiction that if it were possible to rank all of it you could split the bell curve into 1/10ths and 1/100ths of a percent; whereas in tiny fandoms, distinctions of quality almost don't exist (and really don't seem to for most of the denizens) because there's so little to draw on that even if you force the grades into a curve the top six ranked stories might go below the mean quality. (and of course in other even smaller fandoms, there might not even be six stories total, but i haven't been reading in ones quite that tiny)(and of course, even if there's a total of 25 stories, which means the top six wouldn't go down to the mean, the sample's still small enough that it might be really improper to force them into a curve). the bigger the fandom, the better the mean story quality is likely to be (although i don't think that's a straightforward positive correlation at all). if you take "mediocre" to mean, say, 20th to 40th percentile, the high end of it is highly readable in a big fandom, whereas in a small one it likely suffers from multiple kinds of mechanical errors and unintentionally hilarious dangling modifiers (which, okay, is readable in the sense that you can read to the end of it, but by the end you're just wheezing with laughter, not taking the story-telling  seriously in any sense).

i can read from other people's recs, but my preferred method is to use those only as an introduction to a fandom; i'm a compulsive completist and never really feel right about it till i've been archive wading. so for my methods of reading, a fandom's size gets inconvenient as soon as it grows past the rate of fic-production that i can somewhat kinda keep up with reading. even if it's going to produce five reccable things a day and even if i had time to read all the bad and mediocre ones in between, the increased quantity of non-reccable will put me off. if it's five reccable things in, say, two weeks, and the accompanying twenty to forty unreccable things that go with them are stretched out over the same period of time, it's totally manageable. but if you prefer reading only from recs everywhere you go, a giant fandom is totally ideal; because you never have to touch anything below the mean quality (hypothetically, assuming reccers agreed about measures of quality, which i know is a counter-factual assumption).

Comments

[eleveninches.livejournal.com]

ITA with everything you said, but also, with smaller fandoms, sometimes I think you end up lowering your standards as well. Because if you're reading mostly fics that are mediocre (or even just plain bad), fics that are above average are suddenly new and exciting. That's my experience with small fandoms, at least.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

yeah. i've bookmarked and even recommended things in small fandoms that i would mock in a big one. (not that i don't also mock them sometimes. *cough*) in comparison with the really awful stuff, i definitely enjoy the mediocre more, so in a way i feel more jaded in big fandoms, and i don't (always) like feeling that way. in small fandoms even stuff that's actually bad can be exciting, if it has some single little element i like like a bit of canonish dialogue or a good slapstick scene or something. (this is when i bookmark them privately because i'm too embarrassed to actually rec them in any way.)

[norah.livejournal.com]

YES! I bookmark some dubious small-fandom stuff (nothing truly awful, but some dubious stuff, you know) because IT EXISTS OMG. And it's not awful! In a small fandom that's enough. Or, I'm going through some of the new due South stuff now, and none of it's blowing my mind, but some of it is hitting my narrative kinks in a way I can't ignore.

I can't read all of any fandom ever, and I don't archive wade, but I see sort of kind of what you're getting at. I've slipped away from SG:A almost entirely because of having no reliable way to find the good stuff and the volume of Other Stuff being so high...

[cimness.livejournal.com]

oh, is the new due south stuff ... somewhat good? i gave up on that fandom over a year ago - when it got really big and all these teenies were rushing in creating new communities and displaying other painfully noobish behaviour. i think china shop was still around, but most of the people whose writing i had been following had stopped being productive and the newsletter was full of rather bad freshman efforts from new people, it seemed like.

but yeah, so i like a medium-sized fandom (and occasionally a small one for variety!) because even if that good stuff isn't that wonderful, i kind of like, at least temporarily, being able to get excited about that more mediocre stuff. (of course after a little while the lack of truly fabulous stuff gets frustrating and i have to find another fandom to read in.)

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Hmm...I think I dislike smaller fandoms. It's more disappointing to me if there are five fics and four of them are bad, than if it's a large fandom and four in five fics are bad. Even in a fandom where it's not that small, it can still be pretty disappointing. With Judewan, for example, of the handful of stuff not written by me, I think I've only found four or five good enough to rec, and those were all by Helens and Ruth. :( So it's a really disappointing fandom to me, not only in that there are that few fics I think are worth reccing, but that there are none by unfamiliar writers, and that several of the fics I wouldn't have even clicked on if it were a larger fandom.

With large fandoms I definitely don't read whole archives or anywhere close. I read a lot from recs and am just pretty picky in general (most stuff I won't even click on). For example, with TPM, makesmewannadie's recs are what I used most, and I think a couple other recs pages she linked to, and while I only found a few in there that I agreed were worth reccing, it was still far less painful than trolling the MA archive, where I could go for page after page without even finding anything that looked appealing.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i'm not sure which one i'd prefer actually. it's a tradeoff, and sometimes i get sick of reading in a small fandom and want a big one, and vice versa. but i definitely dislike both really really tiny ones (which i don't exactly count as proper fandoms in my mind, not seriously) and really really giant ones.