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Talking about my past attempts at running communities, fannish or otherwise.
My experience with this is mostly from several years ago when I was on LJ, although there is one community that I started but never could really get off the ground. There were a lot of fan communities on LJ, and yet there were a few communities that I would've joined that I couldn't find. So I ended up trying to make a couple myself.
Most of my experiences with communities have been brief. I think a lot of people were in the same boat. There's an idea (at least there was with me) that when you start a community, all you really have to do is find enough like-minded people to post a few things here and there. After a while you hit a critical mass of sorts, where enough people are posting to the community on a regular basis that it stays active, and then more people find it, and it keeps growing (or at least holding steady.)
It takes more work than that. I never quite got that, and I never really had the time or energy to spare to do all of the promotion and the maintenance required, because you have to keep the conversation going and keep making people feel welcome. If there's no one else posting, you have to be willing to start a few conversations. And if people decide to be jerks, you have to be able to end that. It takes a lot more work than just creating the name and posting in promo communities and hoping people find you.
That was my experience, anyway. It takes someone who can take the time, who wants to take the time, to keep things going. And I honestly don't know how people do it by themselves; even when I had more free time I couldn't seem to manage it for more than a few weeks. I'm probably not going to try it again, not on my own. (I'm still tempted, now and again, to go back to the feedback-centered community I started a while ago and try to bring it back. But I know it'll end badly, and I wish I could just pass it off to someone who doesn't have such a lousy attention span.)
The only community that I helped to moderate in any capacity and didn't suck at it was when I was helping with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
crescentisle. And that was fun, partially because I wasn't the only moderator, partially because the rules were fairly relaxed, and partially because it was a community for a small fandom and so didn't attract as many people anyway. It did fizzle out eventually, especially when people started moving away from LJ after a lot of highly unpopular changes, but it worked well while it lasted.
Anyway... a lot of the newer fandom hangouts, especially tumblr, don't have that same feeling. With tumblr it feels more like anarchy - you throw a few things out there with appropriate tags, and then whatever happens, happens. No maintenance is needed, just luck. But as several people before me have said, well, it's tough to find an audience there, and even harder to have a conversation. (Having a way to save messages beyond replying to them would be nice. ;p) It works for me sometimes, because I have such trouble remembering to have conversations anyway, but I'm just kind of tired of the craziness of it right now.
(I changed today's topic because I decided I didn't want to review the book after all. Not yet, at least. I should read it again and refresh my memory on a few things.)
My experience with this is mostly from several years ago when I was on LJ, although there is one community that I started but never could really get off the ground. There were a lot of fan communities on LJ, and yet there were a few communities that I would've joined that I couldn't find. So I ended up trying to make a couple myself.
Most of my experiences with communities have been brief. I think a lot of people were in the same boat. There's an idea (at least there was with me) that when you start a community, all you really have to do is find enough like-minded people to post a few things here and there. After a while you hit a critical mass of sorts, where enough people are posting to the community on a regular basis that it stays active, and then more people find it, and it keeps growing (or at least holding steady.)
It takes more work than that. I never quite got that, and I never really had the time or energy to spare to do all of the promotion and the maintenance required, because you have to keep the conversation going and keep making people feel welcome. If there's no one else posting, you have to be willing to start a few conversations. And if people decide to be jerks, you have to be able to end that. It takes a lot more work than just creating the name and posting in promo communities and hoping people find you.
That was my experience, anyway. It takes someone who can take the time, who wants to take the time, to keep things going. And I honestly don't know how people do it by themselves; even when I had more free time I couldn't seem to manage it for more than a few weeks. I'm probably not going to try it again, not on my own. (I'm still tempted, now and again, to go back to the feedback-centered community I started a while ago and try to bring it back. But I know it'll end badly, and I wish I could just pass it off to someone who doesn't have such a lousy attention span.)
The only community that I helped to moderate in any capacity and didn't suck at it was when I was helping with
crescentisle. And that was fun, partially because I wasn't the only moderator, partially because the rules were fairly relaxed, and partially because it was a community for a small fandom and so didn't attract as many people anyway. It did fizzle out eventually, especially when people started moving away from LJ after a lot of highly unpopular changes, but it worked well while it lasted. Anyway... a lot of the newer fandom hangouts, especially tumblr, don't have that same feeling. With tumblr it feels more like anarchy - you throw a few things out there with appropriate tags, and then whatever happens, happens. No maintenance is needed, just luck. But as several people before me have said, well, it's tough to find an audience there, and even harder to have a conversation. (Having a way to save messages beyond replying to them would be nice. ;p) It works for me sometimes, because I have such trouble remembering to have conversations anyway, but I'm just kind of tired of the craziness of it right now.
(I changed today's topic because I decided I didn't want to review the book after all. Not yet, at least. I should read it again and refresh my memory on a few things.)
