u kno when u keysmash but the jumble of letters dont convery the right Feeling so u gotta backspace and re-keysmash to turn ur HKELSXPXA to a JKFSDKAS
Vaguely wondering how future anthropologists will explain this…
*raises hand* Hi. So - the use of a keysmash is emotive. You use it to indicate that you’re so overwhelmed with emotion that you can’t even type, you’re just flailing at the keyboard.
So why is there a difference between a “hkelsxpxa” and a “jkfsdkas” or an “asdfs”?
Because language evolves! It’s actually really exciting to think about, but there’s a reason why slang is continually changing and why Old People are usually characterized by not knowing the slang variants that are being used by The Youth - it’s because the way we use words changes over time, especially in response to technological or environmental changes.
And text-based communication - texting someone on your phone, or chatting with friends on Skype or Discord - is actually really new, this is something which started in my lifetime. And grammatical rules have been evolving and settling into place around that form of communication.
For instance, linguistic researchers have noticed that anyone who’s grown up with texting being a normal thing will usually not end their texts or IMs with a period unless they’re angry or annoyed. This is because it’s a lot harder to do a run-on sentence in those mediums; you can just hit ‘enter’ and go to a new line. A period, then, becomes an indicator of emphasis, instead of an indicator of “there is nothing missing from this sentence” - and it’s an indicator of negative emphasis (rather than the positive emphasis that an exclaimation mark can give).
So, the keysmash has its own grammatical rule. And it’s one that makes sense, considering that it’s entirely possible for a keysmash to be caused accidentally - by something falling onto the keyboard, or a cat walking across it. The rule, then, is that a deliberate keysmash and an accidental one need to be distinguishable.
So a deliberate keysmash will nearly always use keys only in the home row, and usually in a particular order that isn’t likely to have happened purely accidentally.
So, future anthropologists will likely explain it as a marker of language evolving to work with a text-based medium where expressions and body language are difficult-to-impossible to convey. Much like emojis, crytyping, and whether or not you put punctuation at the end of a sentence (and in what context you do so), keysmashing is used to convey how you feel - in a way that body language and facial expressions would usually be expected to fill in the gap.
I did a survey once of people who use keysmash and over half of people reported that they’d adjust a few letters or delete and re-smash when it didn’t look “right” (except for the poor Dvorak users, who had kind of given up on keysmash entirely because their vowely home row made theirs emotionally illegible to other people).
btw, the realization that you can just not say shit about topics you’re not qualified to talk about is both very liberating and one I think alot of you need to make.
like fr, being online doesn’t mean you’re obligated to comment on every little thing, you can just shut the fuck up if you don’t know what you’re talking about
God I will ALWAYS fuck up and be banned from posting or have my posts not posted in anything that’s a homosocial space. They always have a ton more rules to follow
i think it is very depressing that like every aesthetic people try to emulate are of people doing things but they themselves are incapable of being somebody that does things… the mall goth 2005 aesthetic revived in 2022 but nobody goes to the mall to be annoying and weird and nobody lets themselves be cringe… the cottagecore aesthetic but nobody knows how to raise gardens or live self sufficiently … the dark academia aesthetic but nobody actually reads books…. The obsession of looking like you are a type of person who does something without actually doing anything … the Instagram effect
in three years tiktokers are gonna be like “oohh baby im garlic and oil in a pan im providing flavor for the soup” and every bougie little knickknack store is gonna sell soup earrings and soup socks and soup iphone XXIV bluetooth accessories and theres gonna be thinkpieces about teens on tiktok inventing “soupcore” and theyre soooo weird and quirky ~~!! and i will literally still be here on tumblr
i truly believe that a lot of what gets labeled as “yearning” on here is actually deep & profound & excruciating loneliness & i really think we would have more productive discussions about it if we could just call a spade a spade
like loneliness is an incredibly serious mood state that has major implications for your physical & mental health & the pain it causes is far more intense than simple “yearning.” a deep, agonizing longing for human connection is actually a really really big deal
The physical presence of other people who you like and trust is not optional. It is essential. Anything (even and especially mindsets) that moves you further away from having that in your life is a delusion.
seeing as we’ve moved on from “this would kill a Victorian child (the same ones that snorted cocaine for a head cold)” to “this would kill a medieval peasant” I just have to say. you can’t eat a meal without your phone or tv blasting shit directly into your brain and you get all of your social interaction and conflict resolution skills from moral posturing on the internet leading to massive arguments inside of discord servers. you think that medieval peasant whose been toiling fields since age 2 unwashed covered in smallpox scars just witnessed a man get dragged through town until his skin got roadrashed off because he stole an apple is gonna melt because they heard your garbage lemon demon playlist? you have to make your mutuals trigger tag naruto because it reminds you of your ex who kinned sasuke mothefucker YOU would melt instantly if you were in the pit at a Shakespeare play
yknow ever since people realized tumblr isnt dead and have decided to flock here from twitter and tiktok ive seen a huge influx of people in fandom spaces who dont reblog anything. at all.
like, i used to have an art blog with 340 followers. not a ton but not a small amount either given how this website works with creators. and in my experience back then even the ones who only left likes still reblogged other things or at least posted their own stuff. literally the only empty blogs were clearly bots.
but on this New art blog, i’ve had so many people with fandom-specific headers and icons with actual usernames as urls and some kind of title or description, but have. Nothing. no posts. all they do is like things. and it’s always public, too. their following list and their likes list.
and honestly all it makes me think is that these people are New and also don’t know how tumblr works. how likes don’t give exposure. not even in a “oh, i know it doesn’t give exposure, but i’m still going to reblog anyways” way, but in a genuine honest to god straight up doesn’t realize tumblr likes don’t work like twitter’s.
PLEASE please if you’re from tiktok or twitter or whatever please reblog people’s art both fandom and original if you like it!! and maybe actually pad out your blog’s content in some way so people won’t potentially see you as a bot and block you.
REBLOG ARTIST’S WORK. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY THEY GET ANY ATTENTION ON THIS WEBSITE OH MY GOD. PLEASE. I BEG of you
WAIT THEY’RE REAL PEOPLE?! I’ve blocked several accounts so far because it was just “blanks space” and I assumed it was a bot.
FOLKS if you’re new, please, please, this is not like Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Reblogging is the way to go. This is how we network on here. This is how you make mutuals. This is how you share new stuff with others.
You are also:
Encouraged to add your thoughts to the post
Engage in conversation freely
Express yourself in the tags if you don’t want to write in the post
In fact, write a god damn essay in the tags - we old members will read it, I promise - the limit on tags per post is insane anyway
Reblog the same thing as many times as you like. Like every time you see it, and you want to reblog it because it brings you joy - go for it!
the idea that it’s ‘creepy’ to interact with things posted a long time ago is so terrible for artists and contributes to the pressure to be constantly creating new work, at an unhealthy and unsustainable rate.
I hate it so much.
The idea that it’s “creepy” to interact with an artist’s old work from a while back is especially stupid since we have entire buildings filled with the old works of various artists for the explicit purpose of creating public interaction with them, and they’re called museums.
and libraries
andarchives
When did this attitude even begin and where?? We put things in permanent places online in order to receive new comments on them forever. I assume I’m failing and something is just no longer liked once comments stop. Perpetual new comments on all work are what all artists want always. When we get a new follower we hope it means a new set of opinions on things all the way back to the earliest uploads, and this was the well known expectation on sites like DeviantArt for most of the internet’s existence.
Original content isn’t supposed to keep being new forever, it’s supposed to be like books or films, where it keeps having a life as long as it can find people who like it.
god the idea of “doubling down” has ruined the fucking internet.
“when anybody commits a minor offense they must immediately and with no hesitancy apologize and start self-flagellating. any attempt to clarify your point or umbrage taken with any insults not only makes the original offense worse, they now have a new problem” does anybody see why this might be bad?
if the human threat response was to lie down on the ground, throw an apple in your mouth, and start marinating yourself for your attacker’s convince we wouldn’t have gotten very far as a species
“Sure, they were harassed by hundreds of people over accusations that were ridiculously minor or patently false, but they refused to apologize for the stuff they didn’t do, and this proves that they deserve all the harassment after all, the problem is not the original thing, it’s their response”
IF YOU’RE READING THIS I NEED YOU to go to neocities.org and make an account.
It’s an emergency. Look. People are really getting into it now. Do you want to be the last kid on your block still depending on corporate social media for your self-actualization?
I sharpened my skills making psshaw.neocities.org and it’s still made up of mainly basic code like <img> and <table> tags. It’s only in the later pages that I’ve decided to try advanced stuff like responsive CSS.
I feel like there’s so much personality that’s just waiting to be brought back into Web 1.0. It’s a whole sandbox you can learn how to wrangle, and shockingly fast. I want to see what everyone can do!
Okay, I’ve been on the internet since before the great Y2K scare and *old person voice* Back in my day, everyone had websites like this. I had several. It was normal, everyone’s websites were a reflection of themselves and their interests, and it was beautiful. I’ve been lamenting a lot lately missing this era because of how badly social media has distilled and homogenized the internet experience
Your sites remind me so much of web 1.0 and it’s beautiful. I love this. Please keep doing this. Please keep expressing yourself.
Please everyone bring this back. Bring back personality, bring back individuality, bring back fun
And if you’d like to have a fine pairing to go with your website, I suggest going to proboards.com and setting one up. Still want social media, but want a smaller and more close-knit community without the same constant fear of some rando finding you and sending you threats, or something accidentally going viral and giving you a panic attack? Individual forum communities. You make your own rules, you can make your own aesthetic, and if you use add-ons or know CSS you can get a lot of customization. Also, forum signatures! They’re a great quick little way of expressing yourself! Use imgur.com to host your images!
Seriously, Forums are AMAZING for sharing both long and shortform content, shitposts, art and writing, everything! Love roleplaying? They’re the best and most organized way to do that and be able to have everything tidily archived and easy to search for!
And best of all, you don’t have shit like twitter’s algorithm breathing down your neck or promoted shit being shoved in your face!
Please please please if you hate all this corporate homogenizing bullshit and attempts to do shit like manufacture fandom, this is a way you can fight back and express yourself!
I’m seeing people in the notes going “that sounds nice and all but I don’t know how to code.”
And you don’t have to make a website that looks like a shining, professional corporate product. You can just kind of slap some colours and images on a webpage and add to it from there, as you learn. I learned to build basic websites when I was 10. It’s a little more work than just signing up for a social media profile and filling out a few forms, but it’s so incredibly rewarding when you start to see your idea taking shape.
And there’s a whole community of people out there who want to see you succeed and would be happy to help. Check out the Yesterweb, they’ve got a Discord community and a Mastodon instance and even a Minecraft server. Sadgrl/Sadness, who runs the community, is super sweet and helpful. They’ve got a ton of manifestos from community membersaboutwhy it’s so important to bring back the spirit of the old web. Oh, and they hate crypto, so you know they’re not just a bunch of tech bros.
I’ve also seen people in the notes saying “But nobody’s going to follow me there.” That is always a concern when it comes to moving to any new space on the web, especially if it’s outside the big social media platforms, but even though I’m a huge supporter of reducing and/or entirely removing your presence on the big platforms, there’s no one saying you can’t stay on them in order to keep in touch with the people who matter to you — or even to use those platforms to promote your site! I’ve distanced myself from Facebook, for example, but I still have an account there and keep the Messenger app open. I’ve set it so I appear offline to everyone, but I’ve told the people I care about that I’m still there and they can reach me any time, I just won’t look like I’m online. You can use status updates/tweets/posts/whatever to tell people “Hey, I added an art gallery to my website!”, “Hey, I added my latest fic to my website!”, “Hey, if you’ve ever wanted to learn everything there is to know about snow leopards, they’re my special interest and I’ve built a web shrine to them now, so check it out at this link.” You can set up a guestbook or a forum on your website to keep the lines of communication open. And Neocities is set up in such a way that you can make new connections with other people in the community. So not only can you still keep in touch with everyone you still want to keep up with, but you can also make new friends and follow new people!
Really, the only big drawback is that you’d have to accept that it’s a bit of a slower space. The old web wasn’t about a constant deluge of new content from one source — it was about exploration. It was about going down rabbit holes and finding all the weird content that makes you happy in a bunch of different places, and keeping those sites bookmarked for whenever you want to check them out again rather than following their feed. But you even can follow them on a feed — even if they’re not on Neocities — if you use RSS. And with RSS, there’s no algorithm and no advertising. It’s just simple, chronological updates.
There’s a bit of an extra learning curve if you want to get in on this stuff, but it is so, so worthwhile, and honestly so much better for your mental health. A slower web built around your specific interests means less algorithmic outrage culture: you’re not constantly being shot with a firehose of all the most controversial content to keep you angry and clicking. You’re just having a nice time building your little dedication to nice things that you like, or expressing yourself, or learning new things, and meeting new people who are interested in those things. It’s lovely and especially if you were never around for the old web, you deserve to experience it.
if you look up “[tumblr name].tumblr.com/search/[a word]”, you will have a bunch of posts from this tumblr that features that word, either in the body or in the tags. ie: if you type up “versegm.tumblr.com/search/bird”, you will find a bunch of posts I have made and/or reblogged that feature the word “bird”. This function is famously shit and will hide posts away from you for no discernible reason. It is useful if you’re just trying to get a bunch of posts on a single topic, it is less so if you’re looking for one specific post.
If you look up “[tumblr name].tumblr.com/tagged/[a word]”, you will find all the posts that have been tagged with that word. ie: if you type up “versegm.tumblr.com/tagged/bird”, you will find all the posts I have tagged as “bird”. This function does work but is dependant on the tumblr owner actually tagging shit.
It is possible to have nuanced and productive conversations online in text-based interactions.
Some of the skills that are important online overlap with the skills that are important offline, eg:
Making sure that you’re understanding someone correctly and that you’re understanding them correctly (some of the mechanisms are different, but the need to remember to do it is the same).
Remembering that no one knows everything, including you.
Remembering that you can decide who you want to talk to, and that you don’t have to have intense conversations with everyone who pays attention to you.
Keeping in mind that the person you’re talking to is also a real person.
Some skills that can be useful in person don’t work online, for instance:
Paying attention to other people’s body language can be useful in person, but online no one can see body language.
Expressing your thoughts through body language can be useful in person, but online no one can see body language.
Making or faking eye contact can be a useful way of signaling respect or attention in person, but it doesn’t work online. (It’s not always useful or possible in person either, it just can be sometimes for some people.)
Paying attention to tones of voice can be useful in person, but tones of voice aren’t available in text in the same way. (There are other ways to convey tone online though.)
In person, clothes or physical space can sometimes express certain things about what kind of conversation it is. Online, this is much less possible even if you post pictures.
(A caveat: I’m mentioning these skills because they are things that a lot of people rely on heavily, but none of them are universally useful or universally possible. For instance, sometimes eye contact can make it impossible to have a conversation.)
Some of the skills used for online conversations are different from the skills used in person, for instance:
Making good guesses about which publicly-viewable conversations your input is and is not welcome in.
Tl;dr: Having good conversations on the internet is very possible, but some of the skills are different from the skills of in-person conversations. It can be a learning curve, especially at first — and it helps to keep in mind that it’s possible.
The internet is real. The internet exists in the world and it affects the rest of the world.
I’m a person all of the time. I don’t stop being a person when I log on, and neither do you. It matters how we treat each other, and it matters what kind of culture we build through online interactions.
Further, no one can opt out of being affected by the internet. The interactions that take place online impact the whole culture, not just those who are directly participating online. For instance, whether or not someone ever uses a smart phone or takes a selfie, if they spend any time in cities, they’re going to encounter others doing so — and if they go to events, they’re likely going to encounter backdrops made for that express purpose. There’s no way to opt out of being affected by the existence of selfies and selfie culture.
There’s also no way to opt out of the way the internet can be used to attack people. For instance, for over a decade, ratemyprofessors.com had a hotness rating, and female professors couldn’t opt out of being affected by the way that encouraged sexual harassment. Similarly, Monica Lewinsky and others who have faced internet-aided attacks could not have made them go away by logging out.
Online interaction is even being used as a form of warfare. Most notoriously, Russian intelligence agencies successfully used Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to interfere with the United States presidential election in 2016. Even if I logged off today and never touched a computer again, I could not opt out of being affected by the fact that Donald Trump became President of the United States in early 2017.
At the same time, marginalized people are also using the internet to build forms of power and solidarity that we didn’t have before. Before I found disability selfie culture online, the only images of people like me I’d ever seen were all illustrating tragic stories about our parents. Connecting with other disabled people online made it possible for me to realize that I could be fully human without being cured — and that I could be taken seriously without becoming normal.
Similarly, not everyone uses Twitter or hashtags, but everyone lives in a culture in which #BlackLivesMatter, #YesAllWomen, and #MeToo are uningnorable. Privileged people have lost some of their power to silence and isolate people — and marginalized people have gained a lot of power to find and support each other.
The internet is real, and the things we do online matter. We can make better choices when we remember that what we’re doing is real.
IF YOU’RE READING THIS I NEED YOU to go to neocities.org and make an account.
It’s an emergency. Look. People are really getting into it now. Do you want to be the last kid on your block still depending on corporate social media for your self-actualization?
I sharpened my skills making psshaw.neocities.org and it’s still made up of mainly basic code like <img> and <table> tags. It’s only in the later pages that I’ve decided to try advanced stuff like responsive CSS.
I feel like there’s so much personality that’s just waiting to be brought back into Web 1.0. It’s a whole sandbox you can learn how to wrangle, and shockingly fast. I want to see what everyone can do!
Okay, I’ve been on the internet since before the great Y2K scare and *old person voice* Back in my day, everyone had websites like this. I had several. It was normal, everyone’s websites were a reflection of themselves and their interests, and it was beautiful. I’ve been lamenting a lot lately missing this era because of how badly social media has distilled and homogenized the internet experience
Your sites remind me so much of web 1.0 and it’s beautiful. I love this. Please keep doing this. Please keep expressing yourself.
Please everyone bring this back. Bring back personality, bring back individuality, bring back fun
And if you’d like to have a fine pairing to go with your website, I suggest going to proboards.com and setting one up. Still want social media, but want a smaller and more close-knit community without the same constant fear of some rando finding you and sending you threats, or something accidentally going viral and giving you a panic attack? Individual forum communities. You make your own rules, you can make your own aesthetic, and if you use add-ons or know CSS you can get a lot of customization. Also, forum signatures! They’re a great quick little way of expressing yourself! Use imgur.com to host your images!
Seriously, Forums are AMAZING for sharing both long and shortform content, shitposts, art and writing, everything! Love roleplaying? They’re the best and most organized way to do that and be able to have everything tidily archived and easy to search for!
And best of all, you don’t have shit like twitter’s algorithm breathing down your neck or promoted shit being shoved in your face!
Please please please if you hate all this corporate homogenizing bullshit and attempts to do shit like manufacture fandom, this is a way you can fight back and express yourself!
I’m seeing people in the notes going “that sounds nice and all but I don’t know how to code.”
And you don’t have to make a website that looks like a shining, professional corporate product. You can just kind of slap some colours and images on a webpage and add to it from there, as you learn. I learned to build basic websites when I was 10. It’s a little more work than just signing up for a social media profile and filling out a few forms, but it’s so incredibly rewarding when you start to see your idea taking shape.
And there’s a whole community of people out there who want to see you succeed and would be happy to help. Check out the Yesterweb, they’ve got a Discord community and a Mastodon instance and even a Minecraft server. Sadgrl/Sadness, who runs the community, is super sweet and helpful. They’ve got a ton of manifestos from community membersaboutwhy it’s so important to bring back the spirit of the old web. Oh, and they hate crypto, so you know they’re not just a bunch of tech bros.
I’ve also seen people in the notes saying “But nobody’s going to follow me there.” That is always a concern when it comes to moving to any new space on the web, especially if it’s outside the big social media platforms, but even though I’m a huge supporter of reducing and/or entirely removing your presence on the big platforms, there’s no one saying you can’t stay on them in order to keep in touch with the people who matter to you — or even to use those platforms to promote your site! I’ve distanced myself from Facebook, for example, but I still have an account there and keep the Messenger app open. I’ve set it so I appear offline to everyone, but I’ve told the people I care about that I’m still there and they can reach me any time, I just won’t look like I’m online. You can use status updates/tweets/posts/whatever to tell people “Hey, I added an art gallery to my website!”, “Hey, I added my latest fic to my website!”, “Hey, if you’ve ever wanted to learn everything there is to know about snow leopards, they’re my special interest and I’ve built a web shrine to them now, so check it out at this link.” You can set up a guestbook or a forum on your website to keep the lines of communication open. And Neocities is set up in such a way that you can make new connections with other people in the community. So not only can you still keep in touch with everyone you still want to keep up with, but you can also make new friends and follow new people!
Really, the only big drawback is that you’d have to accept that it’s a bit of a slower space. The old web wasn’t about a constant deluge of new content from one source — it was about exploration. It was about going down rabbit holes and finding all the weird content that makes you happy in a bunch of different places, and keeping those sites bookmarked for whenever you want to check them out again rather than following their feed. But you even can follow them on a feed — even if they’re not on Neocities — if you use RSS. And with RSS, there’s no algorithm and no advertising. It’s just simple, chronological updates.
There’s a bit of an extra learning curve if you want to get in on this stuff, but it is so, so worthwhile, and honestly so much better for your mental health. A slower web built around your specific interests means less algorithmic outrage culture: you’re not constantly being shot with a firehose of all the most controversial content to keep you angry and clicking. You’re just having a nice time building your little dedication to nice things that you like, or expressing yourself, or learning new things, and meeting new people who are interested in those things. It’s lovely and especially if you were never around for the old web, you deserve to experience it.
omg i can have a geocities (NEOcities, haha i love it) site again!
In internet / social media commenting culture there’s the sort of assumption that’s so subtly and almost ubiquitously present that I can only really put a finger on it in its absence. This almost-universally expected element for comments and statuses in an online context could be labeled wit I suppose, which is vague but I can’t quite think of any other single word or brief phrase that captures it. The expectation is present both in social media statuses and in comments under statuses or in many types of online forums.
The expectation is that whatever you’re writing, whatever point you’re making, is either very heavily serious/sentimental (e.g. announcing the death of someone close to you or deploring a tragedy in the news) or a commentary, either as part of the discourse or a relating of someone happening in one’s own life, which must have a sharp (and preferably somewhat original and non-cliche-sounding) point to it. There has to be some subtle degree of humor behind the point being made, at least if it isn’t a purely argumentative response to someone else’s view. There is typically some very minor inference left for the audience as to whatever broader point (political, personal, or whatever) the commenter/status-writer is gesturing towards. Things are never spelled out 100% bluntly and baldly somehow.
And the reason I’m having trouble describing what I mean in the above two paragraphs is that I believe this is ingrained in our social media and discourse culture as such a low-key undercurrent that I don’t consciously notice it the vast majority of the time – again, it’s more that I notice its absence at once on the rare occasion when it’s absent. Recently it’s been on my mind because I’ve been perusing a small online space where it’s conspicuously absent by (of all random things) gradually going through the archive of old For Better or For Worse comics on the website GoComics: occasionally there are commenters who post under these comics and there’s somehow a complete lack of attempt to be incisive or make a new point or do anything but straight-up explain the joke a lot of the time (hereandhere are typical examples). I’m oversimplifying over thousands of examples obviously but there overall seems to be a complete lack of “wittiness culture” in that space, and I honestly can’t think of any other online space I frequent where this is the norm – the closest I can come to it is the way boomer-age people often seem to act on Facebook (but the regular commenters under the FBoFW comics come across as quite young). I notice something similar on the Peanuts archives at GoComics, except that there are more commenters such that every day there’s exactly one featured comment available which on average is of only marginally higher intellectual quality.
I feel like I’m still not quite getting at what I mean very well, but maybe someone else knows what I’m talking about and can describe it better than I can?
So apparently round umpty-zillion of “people are killing fandom by not commenting” is going around, and I’ve seen a few posts trashing people for lurking/viewing/reading instead of actively participating.
My journal and my fic has always been a lurker-friendly zone. I think lurkers are great and people can fight me on this. Here’s why:
We all started out as lurkers. Or at least most of us did. Come on. I’m sure some people out there must’ve jumped into fandom with both feet and started writing and commenting right away, and good for you if you did! But I sure didn’t. I lurked for YEARS. And even now, though I’ve been in fandom since before Y2K, whenever I get into a new fandom or a new social media platform, I still lurk. I hang out around the fringes for awhile to get a feeling for the place before starting to participate. Back in the mailing list/bulletin board days, it was usually recommended that people do that on purpose, watch and listen and learn the local lingo and social rules before diving in. So you know what? You are not doing anything wrong and you are not doing anything that most of the people you see out there commenting and creating and reccing things haven’t done themselves.
We all have lurker days, weeks, months …. Nobody is 100% “on” all the time. Participating in fandom (commenting, reccing, creating content, and so forth) is WORK. It may be fun work, but it still takes effort! Even if you’re sometimes very active in fandom, then you’ll have life fall on your head or the brain weasels flare up, and you won’t have the time and energy to give. Don’t feel guilty about not being able to give fandom your extra spoons. No one in fandom has a right to demand a single spoon from you that you don’t want to give.
Some of today’s lurkers may be your friends tomorrow. How do I know this? Because I’ve made friends with some of them myself! I’ve had people delurk in my comments to say hi after YEARS of reading my fanfic without saying a word. Which I am totally okay with, by the way. And some of these people are good friends today.
So, in conclusion:
It is okay to feel too shy to come out of lurkerhood in fandom until you feel more comfortable there. It is fine, in fact, if you never do.
It is okay to be too busy and have too few spoons to comment or create stuff. You still have a perfect right to be in fandom and read and reblog whatever you want.
It is okay if you meant to comment on that fic or go back and press the kudos button but never got around to it.
It is okay if you have too many accounts already and don’t want to create a new one just to comment/participate on a social media platform.
It is okay if your personal situation (a stalker ex, controlling parents) makes it unsafe for you to create an account or comment on things.
It is okay if you can’t or don’t want to comment or do any of the other things that constitute non-lurkerhood, and you don’t owe anyone an explanation for why.
IT IS OKAY TO BE A LURKER.
This post is a good way to balance a lot of the “COMMENT ON FIC COMMENT COMMENT COMMENT” stuff that I post here. Content creators will always be happy to receive comments, and comments do in fact breed more content but… sometimes you can’t, and you aren’t obligated to. It’s fine to passively enjoy content for whatever reason.
I was a decades long lurker. You all are welcome here.
I’m still trying to find my place in the fandom, please lurk, and enjoy and join in as you feel comfortable.
Also if you are low energy, please don’t make promises you can’t or are unable to keep. I’d rather people just lurk and say nothing at all then promise to review and then don’t do anything for months.
It creates a false pretense and obligation that just puts more pressure on you when that’s not something you need right now, but also can make an author feel jilted when that promise is not followed through.
So be kind to yourself and be kind to your favorite authors. Comment when you can, but don’t invent obligations when you don’t have to, it’s not healthy.
lifehack: when you see a Take One candy bowl in a restaurant, wait until noones looking and shovel candy into your pockets. god may judge you but his sins outnumber your own
“God may judge you but his sins outnumber your own.” We really need to start collecting and sourcing these Potent Quotables.
