random poll

[ratcreature]

As another decade ends (I can't believe it's going to be 2010 in just a few days. yikes!) you see all the usual retrospectives etc.; also I've been editing fanlore (and you should too, the wiki needs more people /end shameless plug). This led me to wonder: if you've been in fandom a long(-ish) time, do you ever feel nostalgia for fandom how it used to be? ("Fandom" in this case intentionally vague as I just mean whatever form of fandom you were involved in the era you are nostalgic for.) And if so, for which time period? So I thought I'd do a poll.

The first is a question of whether you feel nostalgia, and in the second you can check tickyboxes to indicate for which time period you are feeling nostalgia. That I have split into two options for each period for an indication whether you actually were in fandom in that time period and feel nostalgia due to firsthand experience, or feel nostaligia because you have read or heard about that time and wish you had been in fandom then, because it just sounds more awesome to you than fandom now. I did give up to the early 2000s as options to feel nostalgia for, though I am a bit dubious whether you can call it "nostalgia" proper if it's less than ten years ago.

Poll #1929 fandom nostalgia poll

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 158

View Respondents

Do you feel nostaligia for fandom as it used to be?

View Answers

Yes.
32 (20.8%)

No.
29 (18.8%)

Sometimes.
85 (55.2%)

I have not been in fandom long enough to feel nostalgia.
8 (5.2%)

For which time period do you feel fandom nostalgia?

View Answers

pre-1950s fandom, which I knew firsthand
0 (0.0%)

pre-1950s fandom, because it sounds awesome
8 (6.3%)

fandom in the 1950s, which I knew firsthand
0 (0.0%)

fandom in the 1950s, because it sounds awesome
4 (3.2%)

fandom in the early 1960s, which I knew firsthand
1 (0.8%)

fandom in the early 1960s, because it sounds awesome
2 (1.6%)

fandom in the late 1960s, which I knew firsthand
2 (1.6%)

fandom in the late 1960s, because it sounds awesome
2 (1.6%)

fandom in the early 1970s, which I knew firsthand
3 (2.4%)

fandom in the early 1970s, because it sounds awesome
2 (1.6%)

fandom in the late 1970s, which I knew firsthand
3 (2.4%)

fandom in the late 1970s, because it sounds awesome
6 (4.8%)

fandom in the early 1980s, which I knew firsthand
7 (5.6%)

fandom in the early 1980s, because it sounds awesome
6 (4.8%)

fandom in the late 1980s, which I knew firsthand
11 (8.7%)

fandom in the late 1980s, because it sounds awesome
5 (4.0%)

fandom in the early 1990s, which I knew firsthand
22 (17.5%)

fandom in the early 1990s, because it sounds awesome
9 (7.1%)

fandom in the late 1990s, which I knew firsthand
62 (49.2%)

fandom in the late 1990s, because it sounds awesome
12 (9.5%)

fandom in the early 2000s, which I knew firsthand
73 (57.9%)

fandom in the early 2000s, because it sounds awesome
8 (6.3%)

Comments

[ane]

Mostly I just yearn for the days when stories were posted to email groups. It would make it easier to have stories on my iTouch if they were in my email.

[ratcreature]

Hee. Though you wouldn't have had an iTouch back when stories were posted to lists. Sometimes one can't win. That is similar to me thinking (especially upon editing Fanlore) that many of the older zines look kind of cool, except that I could not have afforded to buy many of them had I been in fandom then, especially with not being in the US...

[kass]

I sometimes feel nostalgia for my early days in fandom but mostly I am happy now -- I like dw/lj culture (at least, the corner of it where I spend my time.) I like being able to get more insight into the lives of my fannish friends, and being able to talk both about our fandoms and about our lives without feeling like we're going "off-topic" as in the old list days.

And while I love the one oldschool con I've attended many times (Escapade) I also adore the newer cons which have become part of my life (Vividcon and Muskrat Jamboree)... and things like the OTW and the Archive of Our Own make me incredibly happy, and they are new and shiny and were not part of my original fannish experience.

[ratcreature]

I sometimes miss the convenience of huge, centralized mailing lists, before having a ML became easy and so by necessity there were just a couple at most per fandom.

This was a trickier question than I'd initially thought...

[elke_tanzer]

At first, I said yes, sometimes I feel nostalgia for how fandom was, in times when I experienced it firsthand (which was early 1990s 'til now mostly, fwiw), because it was fun and really wonderful at the time (and of course fandom at that time also sucked in various ways). And I sometimes find myself curious about the three decades of fandom right before the ones I experienced, because people talk about the different types of wonderful that fandom was for them then which is different nowadays (and of course fandom at those times also sucked in various ways).

But when I went to click the boxes, I had an overwhelming feeling that I really, really love fandom right now, because for the most part, we've collectively learned how to use new technologies to continue the sorts of wonderful that fandom had before, and also to add new kinds of wonderful that were not previously possible (and of course fandom at this time also sucks in various ways).

So I guess I can't be nostalgic for things I still have, if that makes sense.

I feel nostalgic for specific time periods when there were more fan-creations being created for specific fandoms which hit a peak of activity, and while many of those creations are still available, there's not the volume of new stuff being churned out every day/week/month in that fandom now. But there are other new fandoms with high productivity, and I'm such an omnivore that there's never a shortage of stories to read and vids to watch and art to ogle.

I feel nostalgic for specific conventions, because the specific mix of people who came together to talk about specific things at that moment in time was unique and amazing and in-person discussions and parties and shared-squee is amazing and wonderful and why can't I have that sort of experience every month without travel expenses, waaah. But online equivalents of that do happen all the time, and I do have some geographically close fanfriends that I can squee with and feast with, so that helps.

:-)

Thanks for the reminder to count my fannish blessings, because really, I'm feeling very blessed to be a part of fandom as it is right now.

<3

Re: This was a trickier question than I'd initially thought...

[ratcreature]

Yeah, it is tricky. Looking at all the zine being entered in Fanlore I keep thinking I sometimes that I would have liked being in zine fandom, not even because some of the zines content, but because I really like to collect physical objects. Except I would have likely never gotten to those zines, not to mention the cost that would have been involved for getting the same amount of fanfic and conversation I now get via my internet connection at a moderat cost (which I can use for non-fandom things too). I mean, I know I could collect zines now still either new ones or old zines (and I actually do have a number of zines for comic fandoms I'm involved in), but they seems such a frivolous expense in the present (more so than even other fandom costs I mean), because it is so much easier and more convenient to get electronically.

[shadowvalkyrie]

I occasionally feel nostalgic for the pre-internet days when my (former) best friend and I were all the fandom I knew. But that's more a personal than a fannish nostalgia. *g*

To be honest, I love internet fandom as I've gotten to know it (I've been online with my own computer only since 2006, before that I never dared to look for fannish stuff on my dad's PC). There are so many stories, and so many awesome writers. If fandom was still zines and cons, I don't think I'd ever have had the chance to participate!

[ratcreature]

Getting into fandom via a borrowed computer is tough. My first forays into fandom were via the computer that my older sister used at the university (nobody had private internet then), and there I used the first search thing (that was before there was a web, it was called "gopher" and gave you lists of material on ftp servers, it was the predecessor to the WWW, that must have been 1992 or thereabout) and also browsed comic newsgroups. But I couldn't use the university computer for long, and I could only print out a moderate amount to read later and had to do so discreetly (I still have a file folder with comic fandom stuff from then).

Then when Compuserve first offered private internet in Germany my brother got that, but that was expensive, and I could not go there often to use his anyway. I tried subscribing to a Due South list I had found with his email, but that flooded his mailbox (that must have been 1994 or 1995?), so he was pissed off, so then I decided to wait for my own internet connection for further fandom forrays, which wasn't until 1997. The cost for that once I found fandom was somewhat ruinous though, what without flatrates.

I've also been in offline comic fandom earlier, ever since I was a kid and found my local comic store. My parents were very fandom friendly, so they paid the expenses for me to go to out of town comic conventions as a teenager, and wrote me notes for teachers so I could skip school and arrive there Thursdays and stay the whole weekend... Also my older sister was a Trek fan (all the novels, merchandise, and I once found drawerfic on her computer) and also collected comics, and my brother was a huge D&D geek...so I've never really been outside of fandom.

[rheanna]

I suppose sometimes I feel a little nostalgic for fandom circa 1999-2001, but that's more to do with where I was fannishly at that time: I got online in about 1998, so that was a period when I was discovering online fandom, and I wrote a lot during those few years. That said, I'm certainly not nostalgic for my life circa 1999-2001, because I hated my job and was miserable (which was partly why I was writing so much fic, as mental escape route).

You know, on the whole, I don't think I am too nostalgic for fandom's past. The internet, for me, has meant participation in fandom in a way I simply would never have done back in the days of cons and zines, because the internet has made fandom so much more accessible. And I think there are some really good things going on right now, with developments like AO3 and DW. If the last decade has been about fandom figuring out how to adapt online networks and applications for its own purposes (eg, using LJ, delicious, etc) then the next decade looks like it's going to be about fandom actually getting organised and created its own bespoke networks and applications, and that's quite exciting.

Edited to add -- actually, the one thing I DO miss is watching things completely unspoiled. It would be impossible for me to go utterly unspoiled these days without turning off my computer for a month. I remember when I first got into the X Files, one of the great pleasures of watching it every week was genuinely having no idea what each episode would bring. But, on the other hand, equally I had no one to squee with about new episodes either, back then. And the X Files was this terrific, cult thing that started quietly and then got huge purely on the basis of its quality and word of mouth. These days, on LJ, when a new show debuts, you've got all these people dissecting it from the first minute of the pilot, trying to determine whether it's going to be the Next Big Thing or not. Which I'm not saying is a bad or undesirable thing, but sometimes I miss the slower fandom lifecycle of 15 years ago.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, realist approaches often squash nostalgia. It's certainly much easier to read fanfic online than to find it in zines.

One of the things I like best about fandom now is how much easier it is for me to get the un-dubbed original sources. First there is that DVDs always have the original language, and of course with broadband these days there's downloads. I still remember what an effort it was to trade for VCR tape copies of The Sentinel, and to get my hands on Due South episodes and so on. The quality was crap and it cost a lot of time and money, and not all fandoms had people willing to make copies for cost. And with not being in an English language country I did not have interesting recordings I could offer to copy in equal trade in return either. Of course now you got all the entertainment corporations whining about "piracy", even though I did the same thing pre-filesharing, it just took many weeks or months to get my hands the tv I wanted to watch.

[sholio]

I'm nostalgic for past eras of fandom but I don't want to go back because I don't want to lose what I have now, if that makes any sense. For one thing, I think my past experiences were influenced hugely by what I was fanning on and who I was at the time. I had fantastic experiences with mailing list fandom in the mid-90s, but now that I'm used to being exposed to the wider and more diverse LJ/DW culture, I don't think I'd want to lose that because I've met so many new people and learned so many new things. (I'm still on a couple MLs, but it's a supplement to LJ rather than a replacement.) If fandom swings back to MLs for whatever reason, it would be a different experience, not the one they had before. I miss the experiences I had, the people I used to know, but I don't think it's possible to recapture that. I don't think the medium was the experience; I think it was more a matter of where I was in my life at that point, and the people that I knew.

Since I got into a pre-Internet fandom (Wiseguy) last year and started collecting zines, it's been making me nostalgic for something I never experienced -- fandom pre-Internet. But this is tempered by reality, because I couldn't have gone to cons, and my ability to participate in zine subculture would've been heavily influenced by my lack of money and access. (Obviously, I guess ... since I was totally oblivious to the fact that it even existed despite having been solo-fanning for a number of years before the Internet!) I really do love sending and receiving mail, and I really enjoyed having pen pals before getting email, but it is so much easier to maintain social networks in an era of instant communications. If I wanted my social life to be mail-based, I could shut down my computer and start writing letters ... but obviously I'm not doing that. :D

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I wouldn't trade present day fandom against past one either. Not least because of how hard it was for me to get undubbed tv sources even in the 1990s because there were no multi-language DVD releases and no broadband, and the original version never air here and dubbed ones only ages later. Tape trading was a pain.

I do feel a bit wistful about having missed the zine era, because I do like collecting objects. I mean, one of my pleasures in comics besides reading them has always been the collection aspect, and online versions just don't give that jolt. But considering how expensive that would have been, I'm happy that fanfic is easier to read online.

I am, and yet I'm not

[angel_negra]

I find what I'm most nostalgic for is what fandom used to be for me. Back when anything seemed IC so long as the names and proper descriptions were attached. When I didn't mind epithets instead of names for 99% of the fic. Back when I could read POVs that switched randomly every few sentences. Back when Mary Sues were awesome, original characters to read and write.

There was so much more fic I could read and enjoy back then.

I mean, I like where I'm at now. I see things in canon narratives that just blew over my head back then. I've grown considerably as a writer, and as a reader, when I do find what I consider good fic, it's that much more treasured because of all the badfic - bad to me - that I had to slog through to find it.

And I like how fandom as a whole has grown. That so many people are multi-fannish and with the addition of journaling services, you can get to know people. (I've made far more friends online thanks to the journals.) And they are also platforms for sharing fandoms. And then you factor in the ease of screencaps nowadays. And the places online to gain access to shows that wouldn't normally air in your country. And vidders! I remember a vidder once mentioning how you'd have to make a fanvid with at least two VCRs and starting and stopping and just how far we've come now with computer programs and webcams. And podcasts, and even podfic!

I miss the old days sometimes, but not as much as I love it in the here and now.

Re: I am, and yet I'm not

[ratcreature]

Back when anything seemed IC so long as the names and proper descriptions were attached. When I didn't mind epithets instead of names for 99% of the fic. Back when I could read POVs that switched randomly every few sentences.
I remember my honeymoon phase phase with my first online fandom fondly too. :D

[melusinahp]

I miss fandom of three years ago. HP fandom has changed radically since then.

[ratcreature]

yeah, most fandoms change a lot when canon closes, because the pace gets different. Or do you mean something more? To me it did not seem as if HP changed more than other fandoms I've been in when they made that step.

[msilverstar]

My fandom (LOTR RPS) peaked maybe a year after I got into it, notably at oscars 2004, and I'm deeply glad that I was there, but damn I miss it.

[ratcreature]

I think missing activity or a point in your fandom is different from nostaligia in a more general sense for the shape of fandom.

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

I miss the days when the fandoms were small enough that you could know everyone. They were like neighborhoods, and everybody was in each other's business, and helped each other write, and if there were arguments then it was even money people would actually make the effort to make up afterward.

Now fandom is more like Los Angeles than a small town. The meta's almost always cross-fandom, and groups don't have the history invested in each other like they used to. So when there's wank, they all bitch and leave, and no one bothers to try to heal the rift.

It makes me sad.

[ratcreature]

Fandom never seemed more intimate to me. I got into online fandom on mailing lists in the mid-1990s and also read newsgroups a bit before, and the lists were large, even with fewer people overall online. I mean, SGA fandom at its height for example felt not larger to me than The Sentinel fandom at its peak. (I mean, HP felt huge and disorienting to to me, but well, that was more a function of it being HP I think than of time or technology changes.)

I agree that there was this feeling of having a regular group of the frequent posters, and everything seemed more centralized, so it was convenient to be able to follow just a couple of lists, but I did not really feel like I knew anyone in fandom.

And not being a writer it was worse than now. I once got flamed off-list and told to "shut up or put up" just because I mentioned that I did not like a certain fanfic trope (not even specific criticism, just in a general discussion), and while that was somewhat extreme, the idea that you only count in fandom if you write fanfic was even worse then.

Here via metafandom

[blnchflr]

Considering how fast time moves on the internet, I think you can most definitely feel nostalgia for something even just a couple years back :o) !

Re: Here via metafandom

[ratcreature]

Yeah, that had occurred to me, hence the early 00s option. Also more people around here and now have experienced that, so there are more feelings on it.

[aris_tgd]

I miss some specific things that are now gone, but I don't so much miss the fandom, y'know? Like, there was a specific message board for Babylon 5 which was so full of fannish energy it was unreal. There was group storywriting which was almost like RPing, it was so immediate. I miss that.

Of course, the quality sucked and it was totally full of Mary Sues, OMG. But that's internet adolescence for you.

[ratcreature]

Yes, I feel nostalgic for specific times in fandoms I loved too. And B5! <3! I was never active in discussions in that fandom, but I did read the fanfic and the meta.

[lilacsigil]

Oh, no, I love journals and comms SO MUCH! This is my sixteenth year in fandom, and I think it just keeps getting better (except for those damn kids! *shakes fist*) Seriously, though, the wank is bigger but less personal - in that there's always somewhere else to go - and I love seeing all the new fandoms come to life.

[ratcreature]

That is true, kerfuffle avoidance is much easier now. On lists there was just no escaping short of a split (and I've been through some splintering flamewars in TS and those were exhausting). Though the passionate side of flamewars was also fun in a way. Though that also may have been a function of my age at the time, and of having the arguments for the first time, so it was all new and shiny.

[sporangia]

I entered fandom with Star Trek, I was already an SF fan, and was reading fanzines in the late sixties which is how I found out about Spockanalia which became the first Star Trek zine I collected.

I loved fanzine fandom. But for me fandom was mostly centered around the Star Trek and SF clubs I was a member of. I have been in either a Star Trek club or an SF club since 1970. The current club I belong to is a gourmet Star Trek group, and we have dinner together every Friday night. Five of us in the current club have been reading fanfiction since the seventies (me the sixties), but only three of us have been active readers in every decade.

I love fandom it all its manifestations, but the seventies were a very special time. What do I miss?.... The all night K/S discussions.... the 8 hour phone conversations with people you have never met...... driving to New York Conventions, in Pinto with 6 people.....sleeping in a hotel room with 12 people....Having strangers sleeping in your hotel bathroom bathtub, so they can read the fanzine stash you hauled along....Learning filk songs...meeting other fans.....Seeing Star Trek Reborn....seeing Star Wars for the first time, and meeting the woman with her baggie of what I thought was confetti, and it turned out to be her ticket stubs from all the times she's seen Star Wars (after 32 years still mind boggling).....Meeting the actors for the first time....Entering a costume contest.....publishing art and stories in fanzines....But most of all I remember the laughter, lots and lots and lots of laughter.

I was in an astonishing club, with astonishing people, in the seventies we thought of ourselves as a typical college SF club, we always felt we were on the periphery of fandom, not like the big clubs in the midwest or the the big cities. I have long since changed that opinion I was in one of the best clubs in the country, at one of the best times to be in an SF club.

I have only recently come to Lj and DW, so I'm now enjoying a more expansive kind of fandom. It really isn't all that different from what was happening before but as Friendshipper stated there is much more diversity, and a less insular SF centered culture. I hope the internet can help forge the same kind of life long bonds that I have had, and I wonder what fandom will be like 40 years from now?

[ratcreature]

Yeah, from all accounts I've seen the 1970s were a fun time in Star Trek fandom. The only fandom I've been in offline before the internet was comic fandom, and that is quite different from media fandom, in that there were really only few women around at the conventions I've been to.

[roga]

Via metafandom. I divide my fandom experience into pre-LJ and post-LJ, which is late-90s to 2003 and post 2003 for me, and honestly? I loved pre-LJ fandom, but I'm not nostalgic for it. I love LJ.

I do miss certain aspects of forming friendships over email -- on LJ I rarely communicate with people in private -- but it doesn't reach levels of actual nostalgia.

[ratcreature]

I never had many private off-list conversations in ML fandom either. I always thought it was because I don't write fanfic, which had you feeling even more left out then in the fandoms I was in than now.

[merryish]

Mostly I feel nostalgic for the days when I wrote a lot and it was easy. =D

[ratcreature]

Hee. That's understandable.

[lotesse]

My nostalgia tends to be mixed with regret - because I was at the edges of some cool stuff in the late 90s/ early 00s, but I was too young and shy and lurky to really get into it. So I don't want to go back, so much as I want to have a chance at late 90s fandoms with the social confidence and writing skills I've got now!

[ratcreature]

I was never a lurker. I wrote fb to the author of the very first online fanfic I've read, squeeing about finding fandom through her site (that had also episode guides and such which I was initially searching for). I never heard anything back from her. I expect I must have come across somewhat oddly, especially as English isn't my native language and back then I had only really used it in school settings so writing responses took much longer at first. Fandom was good practice. I didn't let that discourage me though and soon after joined my first mailing list, where I read the FAQ/rules (at least I had that much sense) and then posted the same day, without ever lurking first to get a feeling for the place, which I now know is advisable. I mean, I lurk in fandoms sometimes if I only read, and don't do much else, so I mostly lurked in XF while I was participating in the Sentinel, but not out of shyness.

From Metafandom

[ingridmatthews]

Sometimes I miss the USENET fandom culture because it was so hilariously (scarily?) over-the-top but since I'm easily stressed these days, I appreciate the control I now have over my fannish experience. It's also easier to be pan-fandom with my journal as the centralized area - I can write in any fandom I like on any given day, so for a small-fandom lover like myself, it's been a real boon.

Re: From Metafandom

[ratcreature]

I've never been active on usenet, though I did read comic newsgroups even before finding fandom mailing lists. But yeah, that did seem scarier than mailing lists. Though I think I would have gotten over that if my fandoms at the time had had really active newsgroups, but I only read XF and ST fic, and wasn't really into discussing those. And TS was more on mailing lists, though I think there was a newsgroup, but it wasn't the hub.

[dancing_serpent]

I miss the time when I was still so into HP that I couldn't read anything else beside it. I was strictly fandom monogamous then, and there was soooooooo much to read.

2007 everything stopped for me. DH left me totally disenchanted, so much so that I can barely touch HP fic now. I still have several thousand fics saved to my harddrive. Sometimes, when I see the HP folder, I feel nostalgic. But mostly I feel very sad.

I never thought I'd fall out of love with a fandom, but with HP I did. It left me quite bitter.

[ratcreature]

Aw, that sucks. I've sometimes been disappointed with a source, but never that badly. Also I've never been fully monofannish, though I was less multifannish. I mean, when Sentinel was my main fandom I was monofannish for discussion, but read fic in other fandoms sometimes. So even if I suddenly hated some fandom, it wouldn't change my fandom experience that radically.

[rubyfruit]

I kind of miss Late-90s fandom. I was fully into fandom when I was eleven.

As much as I love fandom now (flash drives on which to keep fanfics before Geocities or FF.net deletes them! Broadband!), I think I miss the Age of Webrings and Shrines.

I feel so old. Maybe because I threw myself full force into it?

Merry Winter Holidays (because I know people celebrate more than just Christmas)!

[ratcreature]

I suspect the enthusiasm of the first fandom flush just never comes back, so the first times in fandom will always feel special, no matter when they happened, and cause some nostalgia when looking back.

I have to say that I do not miss shrines, though, lol.

And happy holidays to you too.

I wouldn't be nostalgic even if I could.

[thirdblindmouse]

I haven't been around fandom for 10 years, but... I think that's not happenstance. I actually did go looking for fannish things when I first discovered the Web, and on the way stumbled across such things as fanfic, shipping, etc., but not so much the thoughtful meta and discussions I was looking for. Only Tolkien and Sherlock Holmes fandoms had anything like what I was looking for, and pre-Web 2.0, the barriers (internal and external) to entry seemed too high, so I just lurked.

As for pre-Internet fandom, well, that sounds costly, clandestine, and clique-ish. Also, when they say "Vids today just aren't what they used to be", that's a very, very good thing. *hearts the future*

Re: I wouldn't be nostalgic even if I could.

[ratcreature]

Huh. I'm reading much less meta now than when I first got into online fandom. Part of it is preference because I'm less interested now, but part of it is that on mailing lists it was easy to check out meta, because long mailing list posts with analysis would just arrive in your inbox in the mixed bag of list discussion. Now I have to browse for it, and that's just not worth it for me most of the time. I browse for fanfic and for fanart, but I don't go looking for meta (or vids either for example, both of that are things I mostly come across as via recs). Which just shows how much more customizable for both good and bad effects fandom experience is on journal platforms, because you cherry-pick which section of your fandom you see most.

[anya_elizabeth]

I love technology. I believe fandom is improving. JUST LOOK AT THE SEXY DREAMWIDTH!

That said, I do get all gooey about the 'old days', i.e. a few years ago, when everything was fresh and new to me, when the HP canon was still open, and and I wasn't even remotely jaded by anything complicated like wank or strikethroughs.

Thankfully, I know that's just the rose-tinted glasses. Things change, and so do I.

I love fandom – now, then, and probably forever. <3

[ratcreature]

Technology has some definite advantagesfor fandom. Not just the internet, also things like DVDs. It's now much easier for me to get non-dubbed sources.

[artistbettyanne]

1997-2002: The era when badfic writers were still able to be ridiculed/harassed until they bawwed and quit posting to the Usenet group they were on, when some level of literacy was expected in list/board/e-mail postings, and when artists were actually expected to be able to take whatever comments were thrown their way. Having archives that allow solid blocks of poorly-edited text or options that allow you to request only squee and happy comments are some of the worst things that have ever happened to fandom.

The thing I don't miss about that era: seventh-gen VHS fansubs of anime. -_-;

[ratcreature]

I was in Sentinel fandom at the time, which had an automated archive on the slash side and on the gen side an archive that also accepted everyone, so there wasn't any quality control (aside from killfiling people yourself -- I still remember an awful slash epic that was written from the perspective of a teddy bear or something).

And the lists before the epic flamewars and splits that led to Prospect-L had the option to ask for no negative feedback, or forbid critical comment of specific fanfic completely, and the the atmosphere was such that I got flamed once for discouraging writers when I just said that I didn't like a genre (without mentioning any examples). So I remember the feedback/criticism culture of that era in fandom as much more stifling than the one now.

[rosalita]

I've been in fandom since 1995, when everything was on Usenet. I have to admit that sometimes I really miss the free-for-all that was Usenet. alt.tv.x-files, baby. I also miss mailing lists. Right now I'm really regretting not getting into Angel fandom. I just started watching the show and my Angel/Wesley love is making me kick myself for ignoring the show when it was on the air. Thank God for DVDs.

[ratcreature]

I watched Angel at the time (though I lost interest somewhere in its last season, so I've never actually seen the end), but wasn't all that fannish about it. But DVDs are definitely one of the good things about being a present-day fan.

[maire]

I had a huge jump fandomwise, from the late 80s to the 2000s. It's odd connecting the two in my head.

[ratcreature]

So you took a break from fandom inbetween or just kept mostly in offline fandom?

I'm in a fanclub I've been in since the early 1990s, and the club has existed since the 1970s, and there's still a zine three or four times a year and a newsletter for members I get on paper in the mail, and there's small cons to meet (though I only went to one), and smaller local gatherings, though I haven't been in years. So the previous modes of fandom are still alive and kicking. I only recently discovered that actually now the zine also has a wiki and all the articles are online now. That was odd to see.