Call for posts!

[melannen]

So as you may have noticed, this community has been more active lately - for the past five weeks, I've been making an effort to put up some kind of open discussion or recs post every day.

I am happy to keep doing this (and unless y'all start telling me it's annoying, I'm probably going to do it for at least the next five weeks, because it's nice to have discussions happening). But I am starting to kind of scrape the barrel some nights, and I wanted to make it clear that other people are very welcome, indeed actively invited, to put up discussion posts or recs calls too!

There's nothing formal about this, everyone is and always has been welcome to make any sorts of fandom-y posts here, and there's no reason we can't have more than one a day, either (though if I notice someone else has put a discussion post up I'll probably take the day off.)

We had a couple of other people posting last month and they made some really great posts, and I'd love to see more of that.

For mine, I have been doing a really lazy version of the principles I outlined in my How To Make Discussion post, but the short version is: post about a fandom-related topic that pretty much everyone will feel like they can contribute to (so: not fandom-specific, no specialist knowledge, no hard work required) and then invite them to contribute. That's about it!

If you're having trouble thinking about how to be not-fandom-specific, the simplest way is to think about something you find interesting in your fandom, and then ask other people how it applies to theirs.

Also it helps a lot to build discussion and community if you reply at least once to all the comments you get but sometimes that just seems too hard, so I haven't always managed it either.

Poll #23875

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 74

Opinion.

You should keep doing daily posts.
67 (90.5%)

You should stop.
1 (1.4%)

I am totally going to try making one soon!
33 (44.6%)

Comments

[falena]

Just wanted to let you know I've appreciated the effort you're making. I'm going to try and see if I can contribute more.

[alexseanchai]

+1

[melannen]

Thanks! I'm just glad to do something even a tiny bit helpful really. :)

[fred_mouse]

I like the daily posts. I currently have zero ideas, but I'm going to give myself 48 hours to come up with *something* and may or may not post something dire.

[melannen]

Hey, no hurry! We've got lots of people interested, and I've got a bit of a backlog of ideas still. Just, if anytime in the next few weeks you do come up with something, do post it!

[gingicat]

Would pointers to the filk fandom Festival of the Living Rooms be appropriate? Not all filksongs are stories, but many are.

[melannen]

Filk is definitely appropriate for the community! I've tried to use "fanworks" instead of "stories" as much as I can but I have probably slipped up. Anyway, yes filk.

A pointer to something else usually doesn't work as a discussion starter, since people just follow the link offsite and don't really have anything to say, but a pointer + a question like "do you have any other good filk-related links" or "what's your favorite filk" or "how would you define filk" or "what's an interesting memory you have involving filk" would probably work!

[jjhunter]

I'm finding posting one haiku a day to my personal journal hard enough, I really appreciate that you've been picking such great topics to post daily (!) here.

*waves pom-poms of encouragement*

I will try to help out more in May when I'm done with my April Haikai Fest!

[melannen]

I appreciate the haikai! Yeah, I think this has been a similar level of effort. :D

I always want to do something for NPM and then forget until the very end. (It's also Blank Verse Blog Week, I believe, but have I done anything for that either? Nope!)

[tielan]

I'm enjoying the daily posts. I wish I could do some, but I don't feel safe asking questions in fandom. In all honesty, I barely feel safe answering.

(That's not a reflection on you and the community, btw, just enough of my fannish experience to make me wary when I'm away from my journal and f-list answering questions.)

[author_by_night]

I do want to point out that LJ and DW tend to be safer than, say, twitter and tumblr. Sadly this wasn't always the case, and I still wouldn't necessarily post something TOO divisive (though if you're already concerned, I doubt that'll be a problem!), but it's not like tumblr where you'll ask a completely innocuous question and people will find ways for it to be problematic. :)

[tielan]

I've been on LJ since 2001. It was actually on LJ and DW that I learned that pile-ons happened and grudges can last for decades and through fandoms.

[author_by_night]

Oh, yeah! LJ back then was vicious. I meant to add that actually, that I don't think things are AS bad.

Hell, I almost left LJ altogether at one point because I broke a taboo and got a lot of flack And now that I think about it, even just two years ago I got piled on due to a misunderstanding. However, it was a strictly political post, not fandom. (And to be fair, I can see why it rubbed people the wrong way, but they definitely overreacted.)

[melannen]

I understand that feeling. I spent a long time after the first big conflagration I lived through on LJ not willing to speak up, and it doesn't take much to make me leap back and go completely quite for awhile.

If you want to try reaching forward, you are welcome to post locked to this community, if that helps any, and community mods can help with comment moderation if needed. And the nice thing about being OP is you don't actually have to express any opinions! You can just say "What do you think about "thing"? and then step back and watch. But I totally get if you would rather not be the nail that sticks up.

[author_by_night]

I will happily come up with topics! I wish I'd known you were scraping the barrel before. Do you want us to let you know ahead of time, do you want a schedule...? Or is it okay if sometimes there are two posts in one day? *Facepalm* You already addressed this! Sorry about that. I should finish my caffeine before I comment on posts.

Also, daily posts are great, but please don't stress yourself out to do it, especially if a lot of people are willing.

[melannen]

I mean, scraping the bottom of the barrel has sometimes been yelling at at bedtime "What should I post to DW today I almost forgot!" so I will tell her her help is appreciated. :D

It's nice for me to have routine, but I certainly don't mind taking days off, and I've been spending less time online than I expected, tbh, especially now that the family has started an Epic Spring Cleaning.

[j00j]

Your work is seen and appreciated. I am going to try to post soon but between family and (remote) work my energy is variable.

[melannen]

I absolutely understand that, yes.

[primeideal]

I appreciate your posts! I'd like to contribute more, but most of the things I come up with are fandom-specific, we'll see.

[melannen]

You are also welcome to post fandom-specific stuff here! It's just a toss-up if anyone else knows your fandom enough to have anything to say. But "This is a thing in my fandom, how does it work in yours?" really does seem to work, if you can find something that applies to.

[mythicmistress]

I appreciate you trying to post every day! I'll try to get some posts of my own ready for discussion.

[melannen]

Cool!

[cuddyclothes]

I love these posts! I can definitely work up some posts.

[melannen]

Cool!

[stefanyeah]

While I often don't feel like I've got something to contribute to your posts, let alone think of an own post myself (I'm becoming more and more of an old crazy hermit by the year…), I do enjoy your posts and would like to see them coming. Maybe I'll be lured out of my hermit cave more often again.

[melannen]

I'm glad people are enjoying them! There've been some good ones since I posted this, too.

[rosefox]

Asking people to sign up for particular days might work well for getting them past "I keep meaning to...".

[melannen]

Yes, but that sounds like work! And pressure! :P

I have actually thought it would be cool to host a formal posting-fest on this community, with like a schedule and prompt-claiming and stuff, and if anyone would like to do the work of organizing it and sending reminders to participants and so on, go for it! :D

In the meanwhile if it helps anyone, feel free to claim a date in these comments and treat it as a deadline for yourself.

[rosefox]

covidcoffeecorner asked people to claim days and followed up with reminders, which is why I'm actually going to remember to make a post there tomorrow. :) But it is work!

[melannen]

Yeah, I ran a meta fest in that style on a different community awhile ago, and it was fun, but I found that sending the reminders was a lot of mental overhead work for the mod, and if you didn't send multiple staggered custom reminders you had a *lot* of defaults, and then there keeping the calendar straight and scheduling for missed days and the deadline pressure for the participants (and the deadline making it seem like they needed to produce something extra substantial). I didn't really want to *add* stress to people! Especially me! :P

It would totally be worth it if we were trying something more formal, where you want to make sure there's only one post a day and you don't want to risk accidental duplicate topics, or something like that, but this is really just me trying to ramp up the kind of things I wish people were randomly posting here all the time. :D