This is what a dying fandom looks like???
Dec. 21st, 2008 08:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ranuelOkay, I've been hearing pretty much since July how that now that the series is over and they haven't announced plans to restart the anime adaptations that Inuyasha is a dying fandom. "Oh, woe!" the cry has gone out. We'll have to be less picky in our awards communities now so we won't drive away the few remaining authors willing to put effort into a thing of the past. Everyone is moving on.
Bollocks!
I'm sure it'll happen eventually but if numbers are anything to go by then the fandom doesn't even have a stuffy nose yet so don't start planning what flowers to send to the funeral.
Back towards the end of September I discovered that I could subscribe to feeds from FF.Net and Media Miner so that I'd get a notice in Google Reader every time a new story was posted in the category I subscribed to. I get the title, author, rating, pairing, summary, posting date, and with FF.Net the completion status, if tagged. In one of the optional views I also can get a count of how many stories have posted since I subscribed.
Inuyasha has had nearly 5000 stories at FF.Net alone. From October 2nd to December 20th. That means that will be OVER 5000 stories for the quarter to chose from when IYFG nominations roll around. Pity things are dying so we don't have as many to chose from any more.
'
Now granted Harry Potter gets 700 or 800 a week and Naruto is up around 1000 a week BUT Inuyasha beats every OTHER category I subscribed to hands down even all the various Batman categories combined. It beats Narnia, Yu Yu Hakusho, Sailor Moon, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Lord of the Rings. Heck, YYH, PotC, and LotR get less in a month than IY gets in a week.
Now, I'll concede that traffic on the message boards I follow related to Inuyasha dropped right after the end of the series but so did the traffic on boards that had absolutely nothing to do with Inuyasha. it was slow at Urban Legends and Folk Lore even though the final months of the US Presidential election were generating a ton of wild rumors that needed to be tracked It was Summer. Traffic always drops in the summer because people take vacations and can go outside and do stuff instead of huddling around their computers. Now that it's not Summer I can't keep up with the between quarter traffic at IYFG. I've been at least a hundred messages behind every day this week.
People are still going to be crying about how the fandom is dying though even in the face of evidence to the contrary until at last, several years from now, they are right. After all, every two or three quarters at IYFG somebody whines about how it's the same authors winning everything and they should be banned for being so good it's not fair to have to compete against them and someone, usually Ren, posts stats showing how the percentage of repeat winners is actually very small and there are new authors who have never won before winning every quarter which gets ignored when the cycle starts again and some of the same people start bitching all over again.
I can see what fuels that mess, people want to get rid of the really good authors so they have a better chance. It's childish and shows a lack of faith in their (or their friends) work but it serves a selfish purpose. I don't really understand what people are getting out of the whole dying fandom myth though. You'd think we'd get enough angst from the fanfic to meet our RDA without generating more.
Bollocks!
I'm sure it'll happen eventually but if numbers are anything to go by then the fandom doesn't even have a stuffy nose yet so don't start planning what flowers to send to the funeral.
Back towards the end of September I discovered that I could subscribe to feeds from FF.Net and Media Miner so that I'd get a notice in Google Reader every time a new story was posted in the category I subscribed to. I get the title, author, rating, pairing, summary, posting date, and with FF.Net the completion status, if tagged. In one of the optional views I also can get a count of how many stories have posted since I subscribed.
Inuyasha has had nearly 5000 stories at FF.Net alone. From October 2nd to December 20th. That means that will be OVER 5000 stories for the quarter to chose from when IYFG nominations roll around. Pity things are dying so we don't have as many to chose from any more.
'
Now granted Harry Potter gets 700 or 800 a week and Naruto is up around 1000 a week BUT Inuyasha beats every OTHER category I subscribed to hands down even all the various Batman categories combined. It beats Narnia, Yu Yu Hakusho, Sailor Moon, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Lord of the Rings. Heck, YYH, PotC, and LotR get less in a month than IY gets in a week.
Now, I'll concede that traffic on the message boards I follow related to Inuyasha dropped right after the end of the series but so did the traffic on boards that had absolutely nothing to do with Inuyasha. it was slow at Urban Legends and Folk Lore even though the final months of the US Presidential election were generating a ton of wild rumors that needed to be tracked It was Summer. Traffic always drops in the summer because people take vacations and can go outside and do stuff instead of huddling around their computers. Now that it's not Summer I can't keep up with the between quarter traffic at IYFG. I've been at least a hundred messages behind every day this week.
People are still going to be crying about how the fandom is dying though even in the face of evidence to the contrary until at last, several years from now, they are right. After all, every two or three quarters at IYFG somebody whines about how it's the same authors winning everything and they should be banned for being so good it's not fair to have to compete against them and someone, usually Ren, posts stats showing how the percentage of repeat winners is actually very small and there are new authors who have never won before winning every quarter which gets ignored when the cycle starts again and some of the same people start bitching all over again.
I can see what fuels that mess, people want to get rid of the really good authors so they have a better chance. It's childish and shows a lack of faith in their (or their friends) work but it serves a selfish purpose. I don't really understand what people are getting out of the whole dying fandom myth though. You'd think we'd get enough angst from the fanfic to meet our RDA without generating more.
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Date: 2008-12-22 01:12 am (UTC)it is and they're very active in general. they've taken the change well and many of them have stepped up when things were rough. it's just so different; i was drawn into it even though i'm not a sess/kag writer.
Having the nom form in the profile and a constant link to the voting form was very, very handy: no search required.
that's our webmistress, Miss Kagura, she's the brains behind the website :)
but there's no way they can have voting in two places (website + Yahoo)
true; when we switched to the website we left the yahoo group open to collect nominations and votes. the website activity far outweighed what came out of the group. after that it was no contest, the group was out, and we made a clean break away from yahoo.
Indeed! I'm probably one of the few "newbies" who's actually gone back and read the archived messages (cuz I'm a big nerd like that) and I see that the guild has struggled with its existence for most of its lifespan.
yeah, it's pretty ugly sometimes, especially toward the end of 2005. as i recall there were major problems with the lead moderator at that time. when the older people complain about mods stepping over the line it pretty much comes back to those episodes.
Unfortunately, it seem the people who took over after you stepped down as head mod have some issues with regards to running the list as efficiently as you did.
i put a lot of effort into the group (one of the reasons why i resit leaving it comepletely) and for the most part rl issues don't knock me out like it does others. i don't have kids to take care of, and stuff like that. i know a couple of the mods had serious rl issues. i got to say the job is a major drain; i had to leave 'cause it was dominating too much of my life and, yeah, i get tired of dealing with the same bs :/
no subject
Date: 2008-12-22 01:50 am (UTC)Indeed. I wonder if the forum environment helps foster that sort of participation, too - it's much easier to chat and get your point across on something like that (with threads) than on a list. I really dislike the list format.
i put a lot of effort into the group (one of the reasons why i resit leaving it comepletely) and for the most part rl issues don't knock me out like it does others. i don't have kids to take care of, and stuff like that. i know a couple of the mods had serious rl issues. i got to say the job is a major drain; i had to leave 'cause it was dominating too much of my life and, yeah, i get tired of dealing with the same bs :/
Well, that's the thing - you had the perspective to step back and say, okay, I can't do my job anymore. I don't think the current mods have that. I'm not saying "OMG they can't have real lives and the issues that come along with it" - no, I'd never say internet fandom is more important than dealing with RL. And we all know shit happens. But there's nothing wrong in acknowledging that and taking a step back, before you end up acting foolishly.
I know what a thankless job it is to be an admin/mod. (Been there, done that.) It really sucks, and you have to *want* to do it to make it work. I just question the motivation sometimes. If nothing else, at least be honest with your members - hey, we're having problems, but we're attempting to get back on track. Silence is deafening, you know?
But yeah, I second ranuel down below - thanks for sticking around and helping out. A lone voice of reason in the last bit of wank-spolsion, haha. You're seriously appreciated, even if we maybe don't tell you as often as we should :)