I think my greatest resentment with the 2020 influx of newbie non-fandom people is how much and how quickly they fucked over the spirit of community. Just waves of people who consume content, view artists and writers as content machines, rather than fellow fandom lovers. And the ever growing hustle and algorithm culture, that just grew even more obnoxious and insidious.
I'm a dumb bitch, and I know that fandom has become less community oriented for a while before, especially with the dying of forums and "fandom islands" as big name social media like xitter, facebook, insta, tiktok, etc took over, but the level of fandom deterioration during-after 2020 was so strong that even I noticed it in the little piss splatter fandoms I was in back then, and is even more noticeable now that I've been in a few massively growing fandoms.
Fandoms suddenly feel like they explode much more violently as well, and violent is a keyword here. Fandom hate isn't new, attacking the creators of the source media isn't new, but it feels even more violent and dehumanizing and targetted now, all to fizzle out and die just as quickly. Harassment was always a risk, but now it's almost "mandatory" that people completely lacking human social skills and with no fandom etiquette experience go completely berserk at indie creators.
Especially the even more aggressive lack of personal curation, and almost expectations everyone cater to their sensibilities, again: not new, but just feels so much more. Like a toddler that hasn't yet realized the world doesn't just revolve around them.
The fucking fact that I see people treat fanfics like fully published works, that they are entitled to review as if they'd paid money for it. Which they fucking didn't, and nobody made them read it. Fuck off and leave. Why are fic reviews on goodreads? Why are people posting fanfics on youtube and making money, without the author's consent? Why do I see people name drop, and lead people to fics, while making videos how "bad and cringe" they are?
Or the entire growing shame culture around socializing in the comments of your own fics! How people will call it "cheating" to respond to comments, or that it's weird for author's to write personal author's notes, talking about their life, or addressing their readers.
That actually wanting to be a part of a community is bad, and how dare you actually want to be seen as another human in fandom? Using your fics to interact with fandom? "Haha how pathetic!"
A lot of similar shit with art.
I know we've always had these problems, but I'm tired of how fast and destructive it has been these past few years, all because people who hate fandom decided to join it, not because they actually enjoy fandom, but because it's another "content machine" that allows them to consume without regard.
Lockdown made everyone's existing financial anxieties and mental illnesses far more of an issue while also granting some of us a lot of free time in which to cause trouble online. Results were predictable.
But the overall patterns aren't due to lockdown. To the extent that this is a real pattern, a bunch of the ramping up is post-lockdown. A lot of it also depends where you hang out. AO3 has seen changes because AO3 got a lot more popular in a couple of particular waves.
Some of this, though, is just your personal experience. The big blowup I remember about people reviewing fic on Goodreads was from 2012 or 2014 or something.
The actual thing happening here is partly one's own natural life cycle in fandom and partly a general horrifying trend towards gigification and hustle culture everywhere.
"You want community? Criiiinge!" and its ilk are something every generation of 20-somethings with serious depression they're in denial about does. It's harder to avoid now because we exist in less moderated spaces that are more vulnerable to drive-by debbie downer nonsense. The main source of that I see is one specific mentally ill person who resents me for being happy. There are spaces where it's a more widespread view, sure, but it's still often a handful of people making their mental illness everyone else's problem.
People were nutbars who wanted to violently attack others in the past too. They usually got ejected from polite society by the moderators of whatever forum they were on.
Now, we don't have moderators.
