On reccing
24 Oct 2019 22:08![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
extrapenguinWords aren't coming for the WIP, so some thoughts on reccing. Potentially unpopular? IDK.
Namely: the purpose of reccing is to give people links to stuff they might have otherwise missed.
So a rec list that's the first page of the fandom tag when sorted by kudos is a failure of a rec list. Everyone knows those fics, everyone has read them or made an informed decision about not reading them, yes even the newbies. The purpose of a rec list should be to tell people about good fic that, whether due to the author's NNFdom or sparse tagging, might not rise to the general fandom's attention.
(Note that I'm talking about unsolicited recs – the "I have made a reclist and am informing the void about it" type thing. Solicited and targeted recs à la "here's every Lin Jing h/c fic like you asked for" or "here is a selection of 5 fics that you, my BFF, will probably like" have their own lines.)
Namely: the purpose of reccing is to give people links to stuff they might have otherwise missed.
So a rec list that's the first page of the fandom tag when sorted by kudos is a failure of a rec list. Everyone knows those fics, everyone has read them or made an informed decision about not reading them, yes even the newbies. The purpose of a rec list should be to tell people about good fic that, whether due to the author's NNFdom or sparse tagging, might not rise to the general fandom's attention.
(Note that I'm talking about unsolicited recs – the "I have made a reclist and am informing the void about it" type thing. Solicited and targeted recs à la "here's every Lin Jing h/c fic like you asked for" or "here is a selection of 5 fics that you, my BFF, will probably like" have their own lines.)
no subject
Date: 2019-10-26 15:57 (UTC)(I also don't really read stuff for fandoms I'm not in, and am approximately 0% trope-motivated. Fanfic is about love of the setting and characters etc for me, and my narrative preferences are better-served in origfic.)
The person above was probably me. Do you have anyone to suggest who recs/shares/links to fics that aren't the usual rec-culprits?
no subject
Date: 2019-10-26 16:12 (UTC)I'm curious about something you said in an above comment, now that I've had a chance to back-read what others said. Are other people really that narrowly read, or is there something else going on?! .... I'm struggling to get your meaning here, can you help me? I mean, there are certain tropes that exist by default in a fandom's source material that tend to draw people to that fandom who particularly enjoy those tropes. Identity porn in Guardian, for example, seems popular with a subset of fans. Twincest for another subset, perhaps (I'm assuming for that one, since anything SW/YZ I tag blacklist nope right out of, but ... it probably exists? since you can only have twincest in a fandom where there are twins, lol). So I'm struggling to wrap my head around what I am reading as you equating "popular" with "narrow". People like what they like, and DNW what they DNW, obviously, but why does it seem strange that subsets within any fandom might cluster around certain pairings and tropes more than others just based on preferences and tastes (and that in a fandom of smaller size that would simply be more visible in the raw data set)? What else is it that you think might possibly be going on? ... bribery? A cabal? Secret society? Sockpuppets? lol ... I mean I'm joking but ... is there something else going on got me thinking about what might possibly be going on and I'm drawing a blank as to what sinister forces might be at work that are causing people to - like popular things. Multi-chaptered fics posted sequentially on different days/times are always going to draw more attention and get seen by more eyes. Authors with a lot of subscribers already from other fandoms for example are always going to draw more attention than newbies, no matter how deserving those newbies may be. Rarepairs are, well, rare and etc. Outside of the logic of how reach works within a fandom structure, what do you propose might else be driving certain fics/pairings/etc to the top of the lists?
no subject
Date: 2019-10-26 16:23 (UTC)There is an unhappy ending in the drama (by some tastes) which draws people who want to write and read fluff and fix-its.
There is AMPLE whump in the drama canon and thus draws people who love h/c and want to write/read it, because it's already in the source, so like moths to a flame they flit about.
There is identity porn and twins as mentioned above.
So to me it is not a surprise that certain things which draw people into the canon and more importantly, keep them active in creating/reading/drawing/reccing/commenting/etc (participating in whatever way) would be the same things that float to the top of the fandom's content preferences.
But I'm a data driven person, so I'm gonna look at it this particular way. Not everyone will slice and dice the fandom via the same methods.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-26 16:26 (UTC)I mean not what you thought, but rather that – okay, let's use Guardian and identity porn. Imagine that there are a fair number of identity porn-y fics posted. Nevertheless, only three authors' works get recced ever, even if others wrote good identity porn. And people only ever reccing identity porn, which I also don't understand, since surely the reccers must enjoy at least two things enough to rec them? It's not like Guardian is a firehose of content with 10 identity porn fics posted every minute.
(That said, I do think that "popular" is a narrow thing, since the field of things that are popular is always a narrow subset of the things that are possible. And as I mentioned earlier, I don't get the trope-based interaction with a canon where everything goes in service of a trope.)
I wasn't imagining some shady sockpuppet cabal or anything, no, just ... leaving the door open for me not getting something here. (Humans are on occasion baffling to me.)
I mean, the original point of the post was, stripped to the basics, "Why are people telling their friends about the existence of things they already know exist, instead of the much more understandable ‘OMG I discovered an instance of [Favorite Thing] I hadn't found yet!’" I can understand the latter. A repeated – let's call it a circlejerk – of people reccing the same fic to each other over and over again just makes me boggle.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-26 16:40 (UTC)I mean - your premise is based on the assumption that everyone already knows a thing exists and everyone else should assume that everyone already knows that thing exist. Which I think is a premise that is flawed at its core because you can neither prove nor disprove the base assumption.
But let's assume that the premise is literal, and accurate, i.e. "everyone" really has already seen "every" popular story. So in that case think of it like this: people who say something to another person like "the weather is beautiful today" are not telling the person next to them something they don't already know, since both of them are ostensibly looking at the same weather at the same moment - but they are inviting starting a conversation about a shared topic, or even just a commiseration on "hey we both like this kind of weather and are reinforcing the happy feeling it gives us by sharing it with someone who agrees". Which is part of the communal nature of humans. And we can extrapolate that to fandom. "I enjoyed this" often leads to others saying "Me too!" or "I know, right?" and contributes to a feeling of community and shared happiness.
^^^the above is just one example of what else might be going on. There are certainly others. Some of which may in fact involve secret cabals reccing each other to create a power feedback loop and take over first the fandom, then the world, but probably we're not supposed to talk about that and if you never see me again you'll know they found me
no subject
Date: 2019-10-26 16:56 (UTC)...
(Sometimes, I feel like an alien anthropologist.)
Huh. I don't think I've experienced "the weather is beautiful today" -type remarks as anything but an opening remark for an in-depth discussion of the coming weather and/or what should be done while the weather's nice, so someone responding to "I enjoyed this!" with "Me too!" doesn't count as bonding/responding-responding the same way. (The "correct" response would be elaboration – "I loved the way it explored the contents of Zhao Yunlan's refrigerator!" or some other thing that's not just the verbal/textual equivalent of "Read 19:53". Hmm.)
no subject
Date: 2019-10-26 17:08 (UTC)Your definition of any particular response as "correct" (therefore implying that all others are "incorrect") and your repeated attempts to apply your specific, personal tastes and experiences to other human beings, then being confused that we are not all coming from exactly the same place in how we interact with a source and with other fans, is a main source of the disconnect, if I can just speak freely. Why are you trying to take dynamic, multi-faceted human beings with a myriad of cultural and philosphical differences and backgrounds, and trying to stuff them all into one box as to how they may correctly experience fandom according to the way you have defined as the right way?
no subject
Date: 2019-10-26 17:25 (UTC)I was basing the whole "seen it recced" thing on examples I'd seen in the wild, and added the remark on numbers as a means of excluding the hypothetical case of something being recced by the only two people who'd clicked on it. So, restricting my analysis to popular things where people know they're not the only people to read it, and can relatively easily see that it's popular.
I very intentionally used scare quotes there, as you noticed. I was attempting to clarify where I was coming from.
I'm not? I grumbled that I'd rather people not do something I find pointless, you explained that the thing I find pointless is socially equivalent to small talk (I assume), I posted a waffly thinking-out-loud comment, and now you're annoyed. Is this a case of tone not carrying over the internet, or did I miss something?
no subject
Date: 2019-10-27 03:49 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-27 10:28 (UTC)