On Community · 11:16pm Sep 29th, 2019
Last week, I sat down and watched this video. It's a very good interview, and a great way to get to know Felicia Day if you're not familiar with her. One part of it has stuck with me, though, and I wanted to talk about that a little.
I don't have a time stamp or anything, but suffice to say, despite (or perhaps because of?) being a successful actress and a nerd icon, Felicia Day streams video games on Twitch. This is something I'm very familiar with, as I spend an inordinate amount of time watching videos of the dudes who stream Mario Maker on Twitch. They calm me. <.<
Point, my takeaway from that segment of the interview was that it doesn't matter what games you play, or what your skill level is: what's important is the community you build in your Twitch chat, Discord chat, wherever you can.
I found this odd. When I'm watching someone play video games, I usually want to see them play video games. Sure, personality can factor into enjoyment of a stream -- not all Mario Maker players are made equal -- but we're all here to watch someone either really good at video games be really good, or someone of average skill be bad in ways that are amusing. And yeah, when I'm in Handelabra Live Tuesday nights watching game devs play digital board games, I usually spend most of my time cracking wise or doing something else while I listen; then again, they might hit double digit viewers on a good night, while the Mario Maker streamers average anywhere from fifty to a few hundred viewers per night, again and again. Hit that many, and it's impossible to be heard over the crowd.
This, needless to say, has colored my own attempts to make any kind of splash in online video gaming. (I once made a series of videos for a Doki Doki Literature Club playthrough, figuring it would garner views from people just interested in the game while it was popular. It did not. I still think it's amusing. :B) If I'm gonna sit down and play video games for other people to watch, I'm gonna play video games, right? That's what we're all here for, right?
I guess not.
Fact is, I'm generally disinterested in other people enough that I would think something like that. Like, this makes sense to me as a "you'll never be able to actually do this" kind of thing in my life. That's not the point.
The real question here is, we've got a community here on Fimfiction, and in just two weeks, that community's gonna be all we do have. So does anyone come here for that? What's your definition of "community" on an asynchronous text-based site? What could I do to better cultivate whatever community might hang around my... blogs? Fics? I don't actually even know where the community for Fimfiction exists. I'm kind of lost, is the real point. c.c Help me out.
I'd answer, but I don't even know myself.
~Skeeter The Lurker
If there is such a thing as a FimFic community, I can't say I'd want any part of it, given what it appears to be into.
There are good writers on the site, each with a microcommunity of their fans who read and comment on their works, but as far as a 'greater fimfic community', I posit that there can't be any such thing without it accepting the social mores of the site as a guiding norm.
Watching video game streamers is all about the cult of personality, it has little to do with skill. You're being too specific - it's about parasocial relationships as a whole and the thrill we get from experiencing them.
As for this community, I haven't really been a part of it for a long time. The shared interest was never strong.
My definition of community is "people who willingly interact." FiMfic has always been a network of loosely interconnected communities, and I still see them out there even if they aren't my communities and I'm not sure what the neighborhood is like.
A lot of my communities are dwindling, but not totally dead, and I'm here for the bursts of life (and maybe to provide a few myself.) But I check in daily for those signs of life: contests, pretentious writing advice blogs, maybe a fic if it catches my interest.
For your part, I think maybe promoting discussion and interaction more? The key is getting the people who follow you to know each other as well as you, so your job is giving them reasons to. Discussion or debate topics, contests, highlighting not just fics but comments or blogs... Those all breed familiarity, which leads to more comfortable interaction, which you then give them reason for, which breeds familiarity... Etc.
My best guess is keep doing the things you’re already doing. Those bazillion fimfic denizens didn’t start following you by accident (or at least haven’t kept doing so by accident
).
Personally, I think your reviews are a vital part of the the whole fimfic community. I’m not saying we’d crumble without you, but we’d certainly be impoverished
.
It's hard to say. I've never been central enough to anything like that to say what works, apart from what would be good for me as someone interacting with it. And there, a lot of interest based communities thrive on immediacy, and that's not where I am right now; life outside kind of dictates I only get in touch a couple times a week, say. It helps then to have things that can have a long attention half life, so that occasional users don't end up fully disconnected. Stories, I think, tend to do at least all right in that respect (barring feature box bait, I guess), but I'm not sure what else to suggest. I know that with respect to OMPR, the fixed schedule helped me to always be there, but that was also different in that the interface worked better for that, in that it was an independent and discrete site where going to the latest post isn't going to tell me that there are 20 other things in the feed...
Sorry I don't have much useful to say, but I hope that you're successful in keeping yours going. :-(
At this point, I still come here because there is a drive to have that sense of community. Sure, there are others who watch and follow a single show until its eventual conclusion, but how many do the same for a show that is, statistically speaking, far outside the range of those who are expected to be watching said show? Few and far between.
You have friends, those you interact with on a personal level, those you hang around with because you like them as a person. While having a group of friends does not necessarily equate to a community, it can. It just needs the right spark to stoke the flame. MLP and fanfic has been that for us on this site. We may not all be in each others' friendzones, but we do share this home, and that is the root of this particular community. It's a community that is part of the overarching Brony community, and even within this community, the rabbit hole goes deeper. The Groups feature is a good example. There are groups for every niche interest and every genre of both fanfic and people. They also count as communities. While it really comes down to community-ception, the fact remains that in order for a community to form, there must be a base. A shared interest. But there is another facet that keep the flame burning: interaction.
Without interaction or those of a like mind in a community, or without the need/want to interact, people won't. In the case of your community and in the case of communities formed around individuals, participation and interaction is absolutely necessary. One could argue "just be entertaining". There are plenty of entertaining people out there, even those on Twitch, who have zero following. Why? One, they haven't built their platform or don't know how. But once they start to get that base, they need to fan the flames so they don't die out.
Be the fan for your fans.
As someone who frequently (though less so nowadays) posts gaming videos on Youtube, I can say with certainty that "community" has very little to do with popularity. I'm in Discord chat rooms of a few 1 million+ Youtubers, and it's almost always a hot mess. A few people talk frequently, the rest just shitpost or talk about random junk. Everyone just hangs around waiting for the next video to drop. The Youtuber never talks in the chat or they're instantly dogpiled by sycophants. Most people really do want to see the games they like played specifically, routinely, endlessly. They want a charismatic player for sure, but generally charismatic just means someone who has a voice that's easy on the ears and can make a wisecrack every now and again, or in some cases edit their video to literally appear like a Youtube poop from the good old days.
The "community" is a vague mixture of all those types of people. The ones who want the fast editing and constant jokes, the ones who want only Fortnite or a particular Minecraft mod, the ones who for whatever reason worship that particular tuber or streamer, the ones who are on the lookout ONLY for the newest and hottest games on the market, and the ones who want to parasitize the following popular people have. I guarantee almost nobody is there to actually get a sense of community from everyone else, because literally everyone is there for utterly random, different reasons. Real community is found on a far more personal and individualized level, among people who are already friends with each other.
What internet celebrities usually mean by community is they provide a generic, friendly, "cool" persona for masses of people to project whatever desires or values they have onto, by having a nice smile and a nice voice and not saying the n-word or kicking a cat (or sometimes by doing both those things). They pretend to connect to people by answering questions or taking suggestions from the audience. Speaking directly into cameras to give the illusion the person on-screen is actually talking to "you" is extremely powerful in media.
tl;dr everyone gets to pretend that the famous person is their friend, and also that everyone else is watching for the same reasons they are. Hence, community. As long as the illusion of shared values and time isn't broken, as long as that friendly smiling face just sits there and plays the game, that's all most people will want.
As for FIMfic, I have no idea. Have you tried writing RGRE?
Yeah. I can't watch most youtubers play games, I end up closing it in disgust. What I want is: 1) Get out of the videogame's way or at least make comments sparingly and 2) Don't be a scrub. I'm not interested in watching consecutive stupid decisions and low or no skill. I'm middle aged now, I don't have any more patience for watching someone bumble around. So that eliminates like 90% of my search results.
You're doing fine. I've encountered many stories because of your posts that I wouldn't have found on my own that I greatly enjoyed. The writers here have produced works beyond my wildest expectations. If you'd told me 10 years ago that fanfics of MLP would one day move me to tears I'd have laughed at you.
One last thing. i might have overlooked it but off the top of my head, I can't think of any of your posts where you had politics as the main discussion. I appreciate that.
5130229
I'm not sure I've ever actually experienced that thrill. c.c
5130249
Yeah, this is the kind of thing I was thinking about. I just... never can think of prompts for things like that. And I always end up wanting to talk about my opinions or what I like, without any particular interest in others'.
Maybe I just shouldn't worry about it.
5130407
Oh my god. XD
5130415
Well, I know better. :B
5130456
You can not worry about it if you want to, but if you're mostly interested in your own opinions, one option is to throw out hot takes or wild theories that you're willing to defend. It takes time and energy, but answering objections works just as well as a discussion starter (see: everything Bad Horse posts.)
(And if you want to avoid drama you can keep it tongue in cheek.)
[Post-writing disclaimer: thoughts and opinions which I set forth in this comment are not set in stone and nothing should be conflated as stated fact.]
In my limited experience, 5130407's words hold true for more than just YT gamer communities, and that is almost exactly how it plays out. Out of a few thousand people lurking, you see a few dozen regularly chatting. Even in the channels with topics the usual difference is that the random junk/shitposting loosely has a theme. In my experience, there are still a couple of people who
live responsible livestend to regularly promote more tasteful and productive conversations, but you can usually count them on the fingers of one hand.I'd say Fimfiction appears to be different, but I'm not actually on the Fimfiction server for a proper comparison. The asynchronous side of things is generally more refined than I've seen in game forums, but we may also be the more-dedicated remnants whereas the peak of the show's popularity in earlier seasons would offer the best comparison for that side of things.
This is getting more ramble-y than I expected... Maybe I'll try this (mind you, I'm trying to put my thoughts on this into a cohesive form, this is a first draft that I might even get wrong): I don't like those people (as a generalized group – individual preferences may still vary as I get to know them), the ones who seem to appear in droves and seem to primarily shitpost and/or talk about their celebrities and/or circles and/or random garbage (...which I'm not sure I have a definition for yet). I get the impression that many or most of them have no idea what kind of effort goes on behind the scenes and my knee-jerk reaction to that is to think "they don't appreciate what the person they're here for is doing as much as I do". In the cases where I might like to ask a question or say something to said person, I get the sinking feeling that it won't work because I'm going to be drowned out by thousands if not tens of thousands of other people, some of which are probably like me and many of which are the ones who I think talk too much for no good reason.
Here, though, I don't get that feeling. The numbers are a bit smaller, by an order of magnitude or three, but I know I don't have to worry about standing out in a noisy crowd if I want to say something to a horsefamous person here. It's kind of like we know that the other users are real people and treat them as such far more than you find on þe Average Large Discord Server or YouTube comments.
Maybe it's because we all have at least one shared interest here, so we all have some of the same things to talk about seriously, whereas if you are a population of the aforementioned "everyone [who] is there for utterly random, different reasons", random garbage and shitposting is your common thread.
In your case, PP, I think you're already doing pretty well with letting us hang around as we like. Personally (and with some experience running a group or five in various contexts), I find the best environments are laid back yet tasteful, where a new individual doesn't feel pressured if they want to step in and say or do something, but conversation and attitudes remain firmly more tasteful than shitposting.
Online and offline, it is usually better to have a small, high-functioning group of people than a large, poorly functioning one.
Like most others have already said, keep on keeping on. Talking about stories, yours and those of others, and occasionally asking us questions, like this, is *ahem* perfect. Don't stop.
Also, keep coming to conventions. What I learned from back in the BBS days, in-person interaction changes on-line interaction almost always for the better, for all parties. It gives us a true shared experience as well as something to talk about before and after it is all done.
5130484
Yes2
I'm on another MLP site, toy oriented, and I'd hazard to say there are no more than two dozen really active users, that is those who post regularly. Maybe ten times that post or comment, like myself, on rare occasion. Still I check things out at least twice a day. It's got a decent, long running community, one confident in itself.
I hope to see FimFiction described that way in another five or ten years.
Community is the people whose stories I read.
The people who read my stories.
The people I talk to about writing and reading stories, even if I've never read theirs and they've never read mine.