we have an access problem in fandom
I watch a lot of dumb youtube background noise and in a recent thing I won't mention I saw this great post that summarizes a huge issue that fandoms have today, which I believe is caused by the prevalence of twitter/microblogging and the collapse of fan spaces into one huge consolidated space.
"ccs" stands for "content creators", ie the objects of their fandom.
back in the old days, the most mortifying thing in the world, the last thing you'd ever want, is for the creator of the thing your fandom was of to see the fan art and fanfics you were making. You made these for yourself and other fans who "got it", and internet communities on livejournal and fan forums existed where everyone there "got it". You were among peers and because you never had to couch your sicko proclivities in cynical irony for normies who had no idea what was going on, you were really allowed to let loose, so to speak, and people made friends quickly. This did lead to a lot of weird insularity, but that's what the internet was FOR.
fast forward to sites like tumblr and twitter, where the borders that shielded and contained fandoms for and about and by themselves, no longer existed. Sure, there's "fandomtwt", but that was just a title- anyone could see whatever you posted at any time and could jump in and laugh at you, or worse- cancel you for the wrong shipping couple. Nobody had the time to recap years of discussion that showed people understood it was weird, no need to tell them this... it was total context collapse.
why get rid of something like that? mostly because people spent more time on their phones with access to the latest updates, and further, if you DIDN'T, you'd start to miss things, which re-enforced the need to constantly be scrolling. Not to mention, getting everyone to create one huge unifying profile for themselves made you so much easier to advertise to, and you became the product that made twitter rich. Remember: twitter doesn't exist for your communication needs, it exists to sell advertisers access to your eyeballs.
Forums never had this issue, because you'd have no problem reading up the thread's posts and then you were as informed as anybody else. No more searching for thread history or begging for context or coming into a convo half-baked. Being on the same page unified everybody- and in fact if you didn't read up, you were chastised instead of catered to with explainers to save the egos of these fans from looking weird.
But twitter's final stake in the heart of fandom spaces was how it gave people access to these creators the fandoms revolved around. Now, these artists/writers/creators/etc had a twitter account and could post about whatever, a fan could reply, and where before you had to wait in line 30 minutes, you might actually get a response. This was the fatal mistake of twitter, now people felt this immediate parasocial attachment and entitlement to the private acknowledgement from the people making their favourite thing. The power trip was immediate and there was no going back from getting a fav or a "nice!" from your idol, but it got even worse:
people would then try to show these creators their fan pieces; they'd tag them in it or reply to their posts with it, and the ones that creators responded to or liked, would be given a special significance that might as well be canon! They liked your drawings of their characters?! it's almost like you're the official artist for it now! You were more legit than people doing doodles for the fun of it. Fan artists would start emulating those artists' interpretations of characters after they got that stamp of official approval to maybe get a crumb of that acknowledgement and this would create a sort of concentrating of what was "correct" and what wasn't, a caste system of fans. Back in the old days we called these people "BNFs", or Big Name Fans, but that was only among other fans in a community. For this you were ABOVE other fans, beyond them.
and it even got worse from there. Soon the mentality was, if them faving your interpretations of their characters is making it official... maybe you could also start influencing the creator back? Maybe if a headcanon was prolific enough, it might become actual canon, and you could tell yourself you were co-creator of this thing you like. A few media properties began to do this as nods to the fans, which poured jetfuel on this weird clout system. You see, it no longer was enough to be a fan, you had to also be in control. If not of the property itself, than the rest of the fandom. The tallest of the chaff. The fandom Obergruppenfurer. Nothing was more confirming than seeing other smaller fans police and cancel artists when they didn't adhere to the fanon YOU defined. You alone had the say whether other sub-fans had their contributions sanctified or not, folded into the enforced "fanon". That sort of power is intoxicating to people who haven't earned it, and for people who wanted it.
So now, with artists creating fanart with the sole purpose of showing the creators and competing to become The Most Legit, the state of fandom in general has become so toxic and so unhealthy that many have given up on even participating in the wonderful community of fun and excitement with your beloved peers that fandom used to be like. The constant onslaught of blows like the death of fandom spaces like forums or livejournal comms, of consolidated social spaces like twitter, of the requirement of being terminally online at every moment to not miss anything, of the entitlement of fan cops policing what others do and how they behave like beat cops would, and so on have driven a lot of people away.
This is why I miss fan forums and fan communities. They still exist but sometimes it just isn't worth it anymore. We're relegated to making one or two friends who also love it, and keeping it in a group chat like we're criminals or something. That's no way to live. Maybe fan forums will return one day...