In a case of parallel evolution the dynamic also reminds me of Helldump on Something Awful. SA originated as a place for a soi-disant internet elite to mock and look down on aspects of the internet they considered perverted, stupid, immoral, or otherwise deviant, and it didn't take long for the principle to be turned back on "goons" themselves. It even has the same progression where one user started a thread to denounce another and other people would dig through the suspect's post history to find scandalous quotes to post out of context, and anyone who spoke up for the victim of the internet struggle session was considered an accessory to internet deviancy and targeted as well. It was and still is considered a best practice to not even try to defend oneself when being helldumped (Helldump is gone but Helldump threads live on in the suggestions and complaints forum) but rather hide and hope the whole thing blows over. Something Awful's politics were different from fandom LJ and Tumblr's (originally right-libertarian, now tending towards opposing camps of generic liberals and authoritarian "tankie" socialists) and so is the particular sort of paranoia (that the internet in general and the forums in particular are infested with crypto-pedophiles and sexual freaks) but the dynamic is strikingly similar.
Good call, thanks for sharing! I wasn't on those forums, so I'm curious, did you notice any particular migration patterns? And was there an "audience" outside of the users (and lurkers) as far as you know?
Something Awful was hugely influential in its own way--a lot of banned users (a sort of "ban show" where bans are public and moderators capricious was a big draw for the site) became the core user base of 4chan (and its founder moot was himself an SA goon). The original Weird Twitter personalities like dril mostly had backgrounds on Something Awful, especially the FYAD (Fuck You and Die) subforum. A lot of the famous early memes (All Your Base, Slenderman, Groverhaus, I think also Grumpycat, etc.) originated on the site too. The whole "snark" posturing where obviously enraged people conceal their fury and hate behind blank, empty sarcasm is very Something Awful too. The archetypal meme format with the image and huge Impact text originated there (and in its heyday memes went stale very quickly and you would be punished for posting one older than a week or so). The whole video game streaming with commentary started with slowbeef and diabeetus doing the Let's Play videos on Something Awful. The edgy "dirtbag" internet Marxists who now mostly have been migrating to the far-right where they really belonged all along came out of the Laissez's Faire subforum and can still be seen in a wan imitation of their original forum on the newer C-SPAM subforum (a stupendously, obscenely toxic place that produces most of the current forums' problems but also most of its revenue--people talk about "load-bearing slurs" in radium's old forums code but C-SPAM's posting culture is a load-bearing Holodomor joke). Eron Gjoni first put up the "Zoe post" on Something Awful, got banned immediately for registering just to helldump his ex-girlfriend who didn't even post there, and then posted it elsewhere and started Gamergate.
The substacker Max Read has his own retrospective on SA's influence here:
I've actually suspected a lot of online culture on Livejournal was the precursor to what people blamed on "Tumblr politics" for years, I just never had real "proof" because I was too young (was in highschool when Strikethrough happened) to experience it outside of lurking public journals/communities. A lot of OG Tumblr troublemakers had a reputation before that, but Livejournal being a less public space with "FLocked" posts/communities and cutting friends list "contained" it more. I also know for a fact that a lot of "old school fandom" like Racewank was ground zero for social justice politics becoming this way now, but again, wasn't quite there to experience it.
Yes, it was definitely more contained and decentralized in an odd way. Even though I spent years on there I missed a lot of drama/discourse that I'm discovering through archives.
I do also heavily subscribe to the idea that it's hard to see the water you swim in, so a lot of stuff is clearer in the rearview. Even revisiting my own journal was eye-opening.
I laughed derisively at that Andrew Slack quote, but then again, one of my first forays into internet political and cultural writing was in a Harry Potter forum lol. I was a big Harry Potter fan in early high school, so that's probably how I ended up there. But I didn't stay there to discuss the books themselves. Instead, there was a misc sub-forum where you could discuss things like politics that were totally unrelated to the books. I was comfortable in that space and people sort of knew who I was, so that's where I first publicly expressed and debated grown-up topics. If I never outgrew my HP fandom, I can easily see how that would become infused with my politics too, especially once I left the tiny isolated world of some random HP forum and a bigger universe like LJ or Tumblr or Twitter.
This is interesting to me because I remember '00s Livejournal *not* being a dogpile space. Nowadays I look back at my old Livejournal account frozen in amber and marvel at how civilized the political conversations were (when they happened, which wasn't often). That was a marked contrast to Tumblr, which seemed to be built for dogpiles from the very start.
I'd never heard of Racefail before, but it does sound like a precursor to early-'10s Tumblr social-justice warfare. It seems like certain corners of Livejournal may have been this way, but they could be avoided if you weren't looking for them. Whereas there seemed to be so little coming out of Tumblr that *wasn't* some sort of "OP IS A TERF DO NOT REBLOG" witch-hunt. (Well, unless it was porn.) Tumblr may have basically taken the bad tendencies that remained relatively self-contained on Livejournal and amplified them.
>> It seems like certain corners of Livejournal may have been this way, but they could be avoided if you weren't looking for them.<<
Definitely! In fandom spaces as you got to know which the "crazy" fandoms were and just avoided them. In my time Supernatural, HP and LOTR were big ones that I steered clear of. Anonymous memes was my first personal encounter with this stuff.
When I went through my journal years ago I discovered that I had participated in way more high school type cliqueish behaviour than I remembered (very humbling to realize!) I also distinctly remember the "friends cut" tradition that no doubt helped turn online following/subscription into a personal thing.
What I find interesting as well is that LJ often had the meme of "my feed/flist is better than yours" -- so in a way proudly proclaiming that you have selected good accounts to follow. These days I see more complaints about what makes it onto people's feeds--in large part due to algorithms, for sure, but Tumblr doesn't have algorithms but the nonsense has spread so far it's now unavoidable.
I did pretty well on Tumblr for a long time as well--until I fell into the 1D rabbit hole, and it was as vicious and pitchforky as rumored. Imagine my shock when this approach spread into mainstream because the stan energy was good for business...
So glad you wrote about Livejournal - agree that many people seem to have missed that entirely. A lot of what I’m seeing about Tumblr is clearly written by people is clearly from people with no familiarity with online spaces or how they flowed into one another. I definitely remember LJ moving into Dreamwidth. I’d dropped out and never did Tumblr. Tumblr evolved out of the rest and the culture seems to have gone more extreme with it.
Also - icons!! My friends and I loved these, we used to print them and put them on our school notebooks too haha. I probably still have some saved in my old HD somewhere.
I wonder if that's just part of the "perpetual present" problem where pre-2010s internet seems to have been forgotten. There is an insistence that zoomers are the first digital natives, but that only makes sense if you erase what came before. Meanwhile, I lived online to a disturbing degree long before Tumblr was ever invented.
If I had access to colour printers I probably would have done the same! I still have hundreds saved.
Yeah, the kids (of each generation) always seem to think they are the first to discover the thing. Hubris of youth maybe?
It’s weird because even I have forgotten so much of that, and I spent so much time on there! Your post really brought it back. The very nature of being online is so transient - when you’re there time loses meaning as well, so maybe that is why it has a kind of half-remembered dream-like quality in my head.
Finally! Someone wrote about Livejournal! I'm so happy to read this. I've also noticed a lot of discussion about Tumblr lately and a complete lack of acknowledgment of what I consider Tumblr's most important influence/predecessor: LJ. All of the language I see in fandom/SJ circles now was commonplace by the mid-00's on drama communities and fandom communities.
One thing I remember from my Livejournal days, which may be a result of the greenhouse effect you mention, is the LJ drama/meta communities like LJ_drama, stupid_free, sf_drama, etc. went from irreverent "we're laughing at everyone" groups to hyper-vigilant spaces consisting mostly of slapfights about who is more progressive. It felt like it changed overnight, but if I had to make a guess I'd say it took a few years, maybe ranging from '03 to '07 before the mass exodus to Dreamwidth & co, and Tumblr. I think so many people flooding Tumblr at once thanks to the Livejournal buyout, makes it impossible to ignore that this culture was imported directly from LJ and morphed into something similar but more aggro on Tumblr (thanks to its format, as you highlight).
I could say so much more since LJ was such a huge part of my life back in the day, but I'm just so happy to see someone publishing this. I don't think it should be left out of the conversation.
There is so much more to say!! I had to cut this down a lot to be digestible--from the drama communities as well, the secrets comms, the anonymous memes, ONTD with its political and "feminist" offshoots, the collapse of the 4th wall... LJ really was a one-stop-shop for so much.
Holy shit, Fandom_Wank was my go-to for some time. Go look up Snapewives or this one girl called Victoria who ran this Hobbit-related charity thing that turned out to be a scam, started a lesbian relationship with some redheaded woman, but then Victoria started to claim she was a man who happened to be the reincarnated Frodo, and it all went downhill from there, including fake suicides and name changes. That was peak Fandom_Wank for me, nothing that came after that was as interesting. Other standouts: that one time a fan girl sent Superman gay porn to one of the actors of Smallville. Oh, and the incest fanfics about the brothers from Supernatural. (I think I lost interest simply because I didn't watch any of those shows.)
I feel like a fossil. I remember the LJ days, but before that I remember Usenet (long missed, died due to an influx of spam), and before that I remember pre-Internet fandom.
I'm not old enough to remember this personally, but fan lore tells me that a lot of the same dynamics existed already in SF fandom of the ***1950s***, with different cultures between convention-goers and people who only communicated by fanzine or letters.
I mean, you're reading Henry Jenkins, you know how old these dynamics are.
Almost all of the arguments, analyses, and discussions over social vs. antisocial behavior on the Internet already happened with Usenet. It's the same stuff repeating.
In a case of parallel evolution the dynamic also reminds me of Helldump on Something Awful. SA originated as a place for a soi-disant internet elite to mock and look down on aspects of the internet they considered perverted, stupid, immoral, or otherwise deviant, and it didn't take long for the principle to be turned back on "goons" themselves. It even has the same progression where one user started a thread to denounce another and other people would dig through the suspect's post history to find scandalous quotes to post out of context, and anyone who spoke up for the victim of the internet struggle session was considered an accessory to internet deviancy and targeted as well. It was and still is considered a best practice to not even try to defend oneself when being helldumped (Helldump is gone but Helldump threads live on in the suggestions and complaints forum) but rather hide and hope the whole thing blows over. Something Awful's politics were different from fandom LJ and Tumblr's (originally right-libertarian, now tending towards opposing camps of generic liberals and authoritarian "tankie" socialists) and so is the particular sort of paranoia (that the internet in general and the forums in particular are infested with crypto-pedophiles and sexual freaks) but the dynamic is strikingly similar.
Good call, thanks for sharing! I wasn't on those forums, so I'm curious, did you notice any particular migration patterns? And was there an "audience" outside of the users (and lurkers) as far as you know?
Something Awful was hugely influential in its own way--a lot of banned users (a sort of "ban show" where bans are public and moderators capricious was a big draw for the site) became the core user base of 4chan (and its founder moot was himself an SA goon). The original Weird Twitter personalities like dril mostly had backgrounds on Something Awful, especially the FYAD (Fuck You and Die) subforum. A lot of the famous early memes (All Your Base, Slenderman, Groverhaus, I think also Grumpycat, etc.) originated on the site too. The whole "snark" posturing where obviously enraged people conceal their fury and hate behind blank, empty sarcasm is very Something Awful too. The archetypal meme format with the image and huge Impact text originated there (and in its heyday memes went stale very quickly and you would be punished for posting one older than a week or so). The whole video game streaming with commentary started with slowbeef and diabeetus doing the Let's Play videos on Something Awful. The edgy "dirtbag" internet Marxists who now mostly have been migrating to the far-right where they really belonged all along came out of the Laissez's Faire subforum and can still be seen in a wan imitation of their original forum on the newer C-SPAM subforum (a stupendously, obscenely toxic place that produces most of the current forums' problems but also most of its revenue--people talk about "load-bearing slurs" in radium's old forums code but C-SPAM's posting culture is a load-bearing Holodomor joke). Eron Gjoni first put up the "Zoe post" on Something Awful, got banned immediately for registering just to helldump his ex-girlfriend who didn't even post there, and then posted it elsewhere and started Gamergate.
The substacker Max Read has his own retrospective on SA's influence here:
https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-most-influential-man-on-the-internet
I've actually suspected a lot of online culture on Livejournal was the precursor to what people blamed on "Tumblr politics" for years, I just never had real "proof" because I was too young (was in highschool when Strikethrough happened) to experience it outside of lurking public journals/communities. A lot of OG Tumblr troublemakers had a reputation before that, but Livejournal being a less public space with "FLocked" posts/communities and cutting friends list "contained" it more. I also know for a fact that a lot of "old school fandom" like Racewank was ground zero for social justice politics becoming this way now, but again, wasn't quite there to experience it.
Yes, it was definitely more contained and decentralized in an odd way. Even though I spent years on there I missed a lot of drama/discourse that I'm discovering through archives.
I do also heavily subscribe to the idea that it's hard to see the water you swim in, so a lot of stuff is clearer in the rearview. Even revisiting my own journal was eye-opening.
I laughed derisively at that Andrew Slack quote, but then again, one of my first forays into internet political and cultural writing was in a Harry Potter forum lol. I was a big Harry Potter fan in early high school, so that's probably how I ended up there. But I didn't stay there to discuss the books themselves. Instead, there was a misc sub-forum where you could discuss things like politics that were totally unrelated to the books. I was comfortable in that space and people sort of knew who I was, so that's where I first publicly expressed and debated grown-up topics. If I never outgrew my HP fandom, I can easily see how that would become infused with my politics too, especially once I left the tiny isolated world of some random HP forum and a bigger universe like LJ or Tumblr or Twitter.
This is interesting to me because I remember '00s Livejournal *not* being a dogpile space. Nowadays I look back at my old Livejournal account frozen in amber and marvel at how civilized the political conversations were (when they happened, which wasn't often). That was a marked contrast to Tumblr, which seemed to be built for dogpiles from the very start.
I'd never heard of Racefail before, but it does sound like a precursor to early-'10s Tumblr social-justice warfare. It seems like certain corners of Livejournal may have been this way, but they could be avoided if you weren't looking for them. Whereas there seemed to be so little coming out of Tumblr that *wasn't* some sort of "OP IS A TERF DO NOT REBLOG" witch-hunt. (Well, unless it was porn.) Tumblr may have basically taken the bad tendencies that remained relatively self-contained on Livejournal and amplified them.
>> It seems like certain corners of Livejournal may have been this way, but they could be avoided if you weren't looking for them.<<
Definitely! In fandom spaces as you got to know which the "crazy" fandoms were and just avoided them. In my time Supernatural, HP and LOTR were big ones that I steered clear of. Anonymous memes was my first personal encounter with this stuff.
When I went through my journal years ago I discovered that I had participated in way more high school type cliqueish behaviour than I remembered (very humbling to realize!) I also distinctly remember the "friends cut" tradition that no doubt helped turn online following/subscription into a personal thing.
What I find interesting as well is that LJ often had the meme of "my feed/flist is better than yours" -- so in a way proudly proclaiming that you have selected good accounts to follow. These days I see more complaints about what makes it onto people's feeds--in large part due to algorithms, for sure, but Tumblr doesn't have algorithms but the nonsense has spread so far it's now unavoidable.
I did pretty well on Tumblr for a long time as well--until I fell into the 1D rabbit hole, and it was as vicious and pitchforky as rumored. Imagine my shock when this approach spread into mainstream because the stan energy was good for business...
So glad you wrote about Livejournal - agree that many people seem to have missed that entirely. A lot of what I’m seeing about Tumblr is clearly written by people is clearly from people with no familiarity with online spaces or how they flowed into one another. I definitely remember LJ moving into Dreamwidth. I’d dropped out and never did Tumblr. Tumblr evolved out of the rest and the culture seems to have gone more extreme with it.
Also - icons!! My friends and I loved these, we used to print them and put them on our school notebooks too haha. I probably still have some saved in my old HD somewhere.
I wonder if that's just part of the "perpetual present" problem where pre-2010s internet seems to have been forgotten. There is an insistence that zoomers are the first digital natives, but that only makes sense if you erase what came before. Meanwhile, I lived online to a disturbing degree long before Tumblr was ever invented.
If I had access to colour printers I probably would have done the same! I still have hundreds saved.
Yeah, the kids (of each generation) always seem to think they are the first to discover the thing. Hubris of youth maybe?
It’s weird because even I have forgotten so much of that, and I spent so much time on there! Your post really brought it back. The very nature of being online is so transient - when you’re there time loses meaning as well, so maybe that is why it has a kind of half-remembered dream-like quality in my head.
Finally! Someone wrote about Livejournal! I'm so happy to read this. I've also noticed a lot of discussion about Tumblr lately and a complete lack of acknowledgment of what I consider Tumblr's most important influence/predecessor: LJ. All of the language I see in fandom/SJ circles now was commonplace by the mid-00's on drama communities and fandom communities.
One thing I remember from my Livejournal days, which may be a result of the greenhouse effect you mention, is the LJ drama/meta communities like LJ_drama, stupid_free, sf_drama, etc. went from irreverent "we're laughing at everyone" groups to hyper-vigilant spaces consisting mostly of slapfights about who is more progressive. It felt like it changed overnight, but if I had to make a guess I'd say it took a few years, maybe ranging from '03 to '07 before the mass exodus to Dreamwidth & co, and Tumblr. I think so many people flooding Tumblr at once thanks to the Livejournal buyout, makes it impossible to ignore that this culture was imported directly from LJ and morphed into something similar but more aggro on Tumblr (thanks to its format, as you highlight).
I could say so much more since LJ was such a huge part of my life back in the day, but I'm just so happy to see someone publishing this. I don't think it should be left out of the conversation.
There is so much more to say!! I had to cut this down a lot to be digestible--from the drama communities as well, the secrets comms, the anonymous memes, ONTD with its political and "feminist" offshoots, the collapse of the 4th wall... LJ really was a one-stop-shop for so much.
OMG - who gives a flying fuck?
You might not be interested in social media but social media is interested in you.
Holy shit, Fandom_Wank was my go-to for some time. Go look up Snapewives or this one girl called Victoria who ran this Hobbit-related charity thing that turned out to be a scam, started a lesbian relationship with some redheaded woman, but then Victoria started to claim she was a man who happened to be the reincarnated Frodo, and it all went downhill from there, including fake suicides and name changes. That was peak Fandom_Wank for me, nothing that came after that was as interesting. Other standouts: that one time a fan girl sent Superman gay porn to one of the actors of Smallville. Oh, and the incest fanfics about the brothers from Supernatural. (I think I lost interest simply because I didn't watch any of those shows.)
I feel like a fossil. I remember the LJ days, but before that I remember Usenet (long missed, died due to an influx of spam), and before that I remember pre-Internet fandom.
I'm not old enough to remember this personally, but fan lore tells me that a lot of the same dynamics existed already in SF fandom of the ***1950s***, with different cultures between convention-goers and people who only communicated by fanzine or letters.
I mean, you're reading Henry Jenkins, you know how old these dynamics are.
Almost all of the arguments, analyses, and discussions over social vs. antisocial behavior on the Internet already happened with Usenet. It's the same stuff repeating.
The impact of Goons, Sh*t Reddit Says et al on spreading proto-wokeness cannot be understated.