Love all of those "you don't need to constantly produce to belong in a fandom" posts. They're so blatantly untrue it's painful. Unless you're producing art (and high quality, multiple days work art. Not stick figures or chiken scratches) or writing fanfic (and again high quality fanfic, not 100-200 silly drabbles) then is as if you do not exist in fandom.
And this doesn't only happen in new fandoms of new media that are already corrupted with hyper consumerism and programmed obsolescence thanks to corporations turning fandom into another profiting tool, I'm seeing this on fandoms who existed before this consumerism/corporativism frenzy. Back before all of this dystopic development, one could post their silly hc of their blorbos and wake up the next day with hundreds of notes and other people branching off of them. It felt like a community who shared the same tastes. Do that in nowadays fandom culture, you'd be lucky if it ends up reaching 20 notes.
It's either producing and producing and PRODUCING high quality stuff and manage to create a small community around it or better stay in the sidelines consuming, consuming, and consuming. Because your contributions will never be enough to satisfy this horrifying mindset that has been installed in our minds thanks to subtle yet insistent propaganda:
And sadly, we probably won't go back to the good old days in where your silly 100 words crack drabbles of your blorbos could become fandom classics, or when a silly doodle would end up sparking a whole AU within the canon material. We are part of a disgusting and depressing corporative internet, and sadly, we're here forever. And it becomes more and more true with the death of livejournal, the disappearance of dreamwithd and kink memes and with the turning of fanfic.net into an adware farm.
Maybe I'm in the wrong, and things will end up changing in the future. We may end up creating another internet like the one from the past. But with how the world is regressing and how corporativism, programmed obsolescence and hyper consumerism culture are praised to high end, is hard to have hope.
TL;DR: Fandom has turned into another "you're only good as long as you're producing high quality products" industry thanks to rampant corporativism and the capitalization of fanmade media. And with it belonging to the corpotrative internet, it will stay like that for a very, very long time.