👓 The Fans Are All Right | Pinboard Blog

Read The Fans Are All Right (Pinboard Blog)

I've had a couple of emails and tweets asking somewhat cautiously why the popular page has filled with slash fiction. That's because the fans are coming!

I learned a lot about fandom couple of years ago in conversations with my friend Britta, who was working at the time as community manager for Delicious. She taught me that fans were among the heaviest users of the bookmarking site, and had constructed an edifice of incredibly elaborate tagging conventions, plugins, and scripts to organize their output along a bewildering number of dimensions. If you wanted to read a 3000 word fic where Picard forces Gandalf into sexual bondage, and it seems unconsensual but secretly both want it, and it's R-explicit but not NC-17 explicit, all you had to do was search along the appropriate combination of tags (and if you couldn't find it, someone would probably write it for you). By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation retrieval, collaborative editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock.