And A Human Voice Drowned Him · 3:02pm Jul 4th, 2018
OK, Project Ezra Pound is now complete. I started it to explore the phenomenon of nonsensical, obnoxious, or passive-aggressive public bookshelving, and to see what authors do in response to this sort of thing - as a group, not just the people who pop off about it on a regular basis, and as a result, attract the griefers who double down on them, making them... what's it called? Lolcows?
So I set up an alt named Ezra Pound.
He's a T.S. Eliot enthusiast, and the only thing on his account other than a single blog-poem for window-dressing, is a public bookshelf: Until Human Voices Drown Us. The only thing that got put in that bookshelf were featured stories with no humans that I could detect.
(Which is why I was grumbling about proper tagging the other day on fimfiction's Discord #general channel. It breaks the non sequitur aspect of the project if I accidentally add a story with human elements, and there was a spate of featured stories without proper Human, EqG, or Anthro tags.)
In Ezra's six weeks or so of activity, he added 180 stories to a totally irrelevant public bookshelf. He attracted very little attention, aside from a surprisingly small number of people who auto-thank everyone who adds a story to a public 'shelf. No one objected to, or questioned the nonsensical nature of the addition of their stories to this bollocks quoting "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".
He received no PMs, only essentially automated thank-you responses on his user page's comments section.
The last person to comment was the first to show any indication that they'd actually looked at the user page, and was actually quite touching. This blog post is in partial apology to them for having been caught in a social experiment.
I theorized that most people would totally ignore the 'shelfing and get on with their lives. I also wanted to see if anyone would object to the nonsense or engage the alt on what they meant by it. Also, I wanted to see how common was the project of automatically thanking everyone who added a story to a public shelf, since I've noticed that certain authors do that. Is it more common than I thought, or is it just certain specific writers? It's definitely the latter. Almost half of the responses were from one single prolific writer.
I suppose, in a certain sense, I was running the project until I got an actual response. Until a human voice drowned ol' Ezra. Which it did, today. The ghost of Ezra_Pound thanks you, Fiaura. You tried to make a connection. It's more rare than you'd think. And I'll be coming by to say hello on your server, in digital person.
Honestly, that wasn't nearly the strangest bookshelf my stories have been added to. And when you do it to a story on the featured box, all the shelf adds blend together.
Hmm. I'm not sure if I'm trying to explain myself or just make excuses.
4894680
I chose newly featured stories because it was a useful filter against pinging authors who weren't necessarily going to be checking their accounts, or had left the site.
4894680 I second this opinion. Some of those bookshelves are *wacked* (checks list) Nothing too dramatic right now, but I'll confess to about a dozen or two clicks just to see what *other* fics have been put on that Shelf Of Extreme Weirdness.
I love it when I get a notification that someone's added one of my stories to "Not So Hot" or "Meh." I must start thanking those people.