Fanthropology - The Study of Fandom

Purpose
One of the assumptions with in some of the discussion over BoldThrough from people condemning LiveJournal's decision to ban two users over fan art and the subsequent fall out regarding how LiveJournal handled that decision is that it will lead to a loss of LiveJournal users, to the extent that it may cause LiveJournal monetary losses. The claim was also made that LiveJournal users who were on LiveJournal before the sale to Six Apart were more likely to leave and that LiveJournal wanted to get rid of this group. The claim was also made that paid users were the ones most likely to leave, taking their money with them. This sort of begs the question, "Is this true? Has the fall out been that large? Have the actions of LiveJournal created a situation where people will and actually are leaving? Are those groups leaving in higher numbers?" The purpose of this piece of meta is to try to answer this question.

Procedure for Analysis
The following question with responses was asked on four personal journals and one community:



The original questioned was asked on caseybrienza's LiveJournal and prompted the meta. This was a public post. The question was then asked in an FLocked post on my LiveJournal. At my request, virdilak posted the question FLocked, as did lennoxmacbeth who made the post public. This question was then asked by me on gsa_lj in a public entry. None of these entries were broadcast, or otherwise generally plugged. Knowing the size was limited, the goal was to get a different cross section of responses than from those who were actively participating in the on going dialog.

The polls were all up for between 24 and 48 hours. This was to give people time to respond. After that period ended, the results were compiled from all four locations into an Excel spreadsheet for analysis. Information regarding account creation date and account type was pulled from respondent's user info page.

In compiling responses, all answers besides Yes and No were lumped into a category "Depends / If others leave / Other" which covered a number of different response types but all such responses generally indicated that the person was not planning to leave as a direct result of LiveJournal/Six Apart's actions in the BoldThrough StrikeThrough situation.

Results
The following were the results from these polls.



The above chart shows the count of people's responses from all five polls, with out being separated by category. Broken down percentage wise, 7% of people are planning to leave LiveJournal, and 68% are not planning to leave.



The above chart shows the count of people's responses based on their account type: Basic, Paid, Permanent, Plus. Percentage wise, 4% of Basic and 5% of Plus users indicated they will leave. This compares to 7% for paid and 10% for Permanent. 71% of Basic and 75% of Plus users indicated they will not leave LiveJournal. This contrasts with 65% for Paid and 68% for Permanent users.



The above chart shows the count of people's responses based on the creation of their LiveJournal compared to the date of the Brad's announcement regarding the sale of LiveJournal to Six Apart on January 5, 2005.

59% of respondents who came to LiveJournal after that date indicated they were not leaving as a result of the aforementioned events. 0% indicated they were leaving LiveJournal. 8% of respondents who were on LiveJournal indicated they were leaving. 71% said they were not.



The above chart shows the count of people's responses based on the year they created their journal. 14% of respondents who created their LiveJournals in 2004 indicated they would leave. The next highest year was 2001 with 8%.

Discussion
What does other mean? Other, based on the comments and selection, tended to generally mean that the person would leave if others left. In at least two cases meant that the person who responded had no clue what was going on and, rather than choose no, chose other. In a few other cases it meant that person had backed up their LiveJournal to other sites for safety in case they were kicked off. In a few other cases, it meant that the person was waiting to see what LiveJournal did next. The person wasn't ready to leave quite yet but if LiveJournal continued to do actions that they perceived as attacking fandom, and giving poor customer service, they would leave.

It is interesting to look at the before and after LiveJournal was sold groups. 71% of the before were not leaving. 59% of the after group said they weren't leaving but 41% chose other. Some of this might come from the fact that some of those users might be more acclimated to chasing after peer groups who hop from service to service. In my own case, I've watched some of the fandom people I hung out with on FanFiction.Net back in 2000 move constantly. Some created their own boards, went to LiveJournal, then went to MySpace and then went to FaceBook. If I want to keep up with that, I've got to move. That 41% may just be part of a core group of Internet users that accepts such behavior as the norm, not attributing any particular importance on a site.

That plus users are the group that is not leaving in the greatest percentage does not surprise me. These users chose to have ads on their pages by choice. They may see a service that they find valuable but do not want, or cannot afford to pay for. Still, they want the benefits of a paid type account. To a degree, they may also be the audience that LiveJournal wants the most because the earning potential based on two or three ad clicks a month are potentially higher than LiveJournal could earn from one month of paid time.

The polls themselves generated a fair amount of discussion. Some of it cast additional light on why there isn't more outrage on a wider scale regarding this.

Fandom itself was problematic for some people. In fact, the virulent attack of LiveJournal engendered by some people in fandom created more support for LiveJournal. There was the view that fandom is filled with crazy people who have over reacted to the extreme. Some people felt like LiveJournal did the right thing, specifically in cracking down on child porn and felt that LiveJournal should continue to crack down on that sort of material coming out of fandom. The continued, ongoing discussion with out "fandom" getting anywhere but continually harping on the subject was creating for some people a sort of BoldStroke fatigue and they really just wanted people to shut up about it already.

People in fandom who weren't leaving were not always happy with the anti-LiveJournal reaction. They viewed it as a good thing that LiveJournal got rid of the material that normal people would view as offensive and / or as being child porn. It was leading others who saw this discussion as characterizing the whole of fandom being composed of people who were in it for the kink and the porn. This wasn't helped by the fact that the people who were upset with LiveJournal continually used terms to define themselves as representing them. Some of the people who did have a problem with LiveJournal did not want to be associated with such behavior.

At least three respondents in fandom was not happy with how parts of the anti-LiveJournal crowd were characterizing LiveJournal as being anti-fandom. They mentioned how LiveJournal has historically had a number of people who were members of fandom on LiveJournal's abuse team. At least one of the people involved was a big name fan in the Final Fantasy fandom. Some of the fandom members on the abuse team eventually moved into paid positions with LiveJournal. There was burn out amongst abuse team members, but according to the one commenter, it was no higher than for any other group. Fandom members continue to be involved there. It was also mentioned how LiveJournal has always been rather tolerant of fan fiction and continues to be so. The material in question that led to the suspension was fan art posted in a community that had previous problems, where after LiveJournal let them know of problems, the community did not take active steps after strikethrough to insure the type of material in question would not be posted.

Some people were surprised that people were surprised by this. Given situations like the one with MySpace and pedophiles, it seemed to some people that such a crack down was obviously going to happen. They saw the people who were upset as inviting such action on the part of LiveJournal on themselves. They cited how post strikethrough, the community did not clean up but seemed to have flaunted that they could get away with the actions they did, even as other social networking sites were cracking down on it. There was the view that these people were shortsighted and deserved to be kicked off the site. They supported LiveJournal's decision to do so and would stick with the site because of it.

Some people, especially common amongst those feeling fatigue over the issue, felt that the anti-LiveJournal crowd should remember that LiveJournal is a private enterprise, a private company. They can do what they want. If people didn't like it, they could just leave. No one is making them stay. And if they had a problem with LiveJournal, which they obviously don't, they'd do the same thing: Leave.

There were a few people who indicated they would stay because they have perm accounts and really, all those benefits are really hard to give up. There isn't a service which has all that and the built in audience that LiveJournal provides.

For people in the other, the ones on the fence regarding LiveJournal's actions, they felt LiveJournal, if they can clearly define what material is and is not acceptable, and if they feel they can live with it and the other benefits of LiveJournal, they will stay. There was some concern about material that they felt might be borderline which could leave to being ToSed, like reviewing fan works on other sites which contained material that likes of which led to ponderosa being suspended or pictures of the respondent doing real life things which some might find offensive.

Some people in other category are really doing a sort of wait and see. Will the vast majority of their friends leave? If they do, they will leave. It really doesn't have much to do with the LiveJournal's actions but maintaining their peer group and ability to access certain materials.

Of the people leaving, there were basically three reasons why they indicated they were leaving. For this group, they did not discuss it in as much depth as the people who were staying or who chose other. The discussion was not as long either. Admittedly, some of this might be because in my own LiveJournal, I did not engage in dialog with those users as much. Their positions were clearly articulated all over my FList. Similar engagement did not generally occur in the other journals where this poll was posted.

One of the major reasons cited was the slippery slope idea. LiveJournal suspended ponderosa for something related to what they did. That means they might be next. If LiveJournal is listening to outsiders, making decisions based on what outside, agenda driven, conservative groups are doing, they could go after them next. It would be the gays and the lesbians next. It could be all adult material created in fan fiction, regardless of children or not.

The second major reason cited was that LiveJournal was poor customer service and how badly LiveJournal handled the ponderosa situation. This was not fully articulated in most comments. Based on material elsewhere on my FList and elsewhere, they argue that LiveJournal was ignoring their users, that they were not being clear with users regarding expectations, that they had not honored their Terms of Service. It was bad news all around and had broken their trust in the company.

The last major reason cited was that LiveJournal had historically allowed racist speech, self harm communities, homophobic communities, other groups involved with hate speech, communities that were all about posting porn and groups like proanorexia which encouraged people to commit self harm.

One issue that has come up in some places that LiveJournal's decision to suspend for the content they did was homophobic. This would, they argue, cause problems with in the GLBT community who would not stand for it. It was one of the reasons the poll was cross posted to gsa_lj. Most of responses did not even mention the issue of the actions taken being potentially homophobic. Of the responses that did, there was not consensus as to whether or not LiveJournal was actually being homophobic in their suspension of ponderosa. The suspension of ponderoda, BoldThrough, isn't an issue that the GLBT community necessarily feels is important and relevant to them.

Conclusion
So in conclusion, LiveJournal has the potential to lose a chunk of their user base over this issue. They may lose more if people actually do leave and convince those on the fence to move too. At the same time, their actions may have helped keep some of their user base by ensuring that they will take action against material which is objectionable to the majority. Such action may lead to increased positive attention which could lead to more users joining the site.