Attack of the OEAs.
Maciej Cegłowski, the guy who created Pinboard, with a (positive) retrospect on his interactions with fandom.
Probably some chuckles in here for anyone who’s ever been involved with any kind of fandom project, and has experienced the overly earnest deluges of enthusiasm that can sometimes accompany them. Also interesting to see an outsider’s reaction to what, from inside fandom, seem like Entirely Normal Tagging Conventions…
One of the things I think it’s very easy to forget, is that fandom is just as full of, say. Data scientists and librarians and coders as it is with any other profession. People bring in norms and conventions from their day jobs—or make up new, better ones in reaction to things they’ve seen done poorly—and they get adopted by other fans and normalized. To an outsider, I suppose it can seem like some kind of spontaneous, magical, wisdom-of-crowds thing—given that fandom identifies as Fandom, not as Profession—but… it’s really not. It’s just a lot of people with a lot of different experiences and skills and knowledge, all coming together to find the most efficient way of producing and consuming poly tentacle sex pollen fics featuring their favorite characters from film/TV/et al.
