research-article

Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities

Authors:

Brianna DymAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 4, Issue CSCW1

Article No.: 42, Pages 1 - 25

https://doi.org/10.1145/3392847

Published: 29 May 2020 Publication History

Abstract

When online platforms rise and fall, sometimes communities fade away, and sometimes they pack their bags and relocate to a new home. To explore the causes and effects of online community migration, we examine transformative fandom, a longstanding, technology-agnostic community surrounding the creation, sharing, and discussion of creative works based on existing media. For over three decades, community members have left and joined many different online spaces, from Usenet to Tumblr to platforms of their own design. Through analysis of 28 in-depth interviews and 1,886 survey responses from fandom participants, we traced these migrations, the reasons behind them, and their impact on the community. Our findings highlight catalysts for migration that provide insights into factors that contribute to success and failure of platforms, including issues surrounding policy, design, and community. Further insights into the disruptive consequences of migrations (such as social fragmentation and lost content) suggest ways that platforms might both support commitment and better support migration when it occurs.

References

[1]

Morten Bay. 2018. Weaponizing the haters: The Last Jedi and the strategic politicization of pop culture through social media manipulation. First Monday, Vol. 23, 11 (2018).

[2]

Daniel Birke and G.M. Peter Swann. [n. d.]. Network Effects and the Choice of Mobile Phone Operator. Innovation, Industrial Dynamics and Structural Transformation ( [n. d.]), 109--128.

[3]

Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke. 2006. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, Vol. 3, 2 (apr 2006), 77--101.

[4]

Jed R. Brubaker, Mike Ananny, and Kate Crawford. 2014. Departing glances: A sociotechnical account of `leaving' Grindr. New Media & Society (2014), 1461444814542311.

[5]

Kristina Busse and Shannon Farley. 2013. Remixing the remix: Fannish appropriation and the limits of unauthorized use. M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture, Vol. 16, 4 (2013).

[6]

Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson. 2006. Introduction. In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (Eds.). McFarland & Company, Jefferson, NC, 5--15.

[7]

Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson. 2012. Identity, Ethics, and Fan Privacy. Fan Culture: Theory/Practice (2012), 38.

[8]

Julie Ann Campbell, Sarah Evans, Cecilia Aragon, Abigail Evans, Katie Davis, and David P Randall. 2016. Thousands of Positive Reviews: Distributed Mentoring in Online Fan Communities. In Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. 691--704.

Digital Library

[9]

Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Anirudh Srinivasan, Adam Glynn, Jacob Eisenstein, and Eric Gilbert. 2017. You Can't Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit's 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.: CSCW, Vol. 1, 2 (2017).

Digital Library

[10]

Francesca Coppa. 2017. The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.

[11]

Francesca Coppa and Rebecca Tushnet. 2011. How to suppress women's remix. Camera Obscura, Vol. 26, 2 (2011), 131--139.

[12]

John W. Creswell and Vicki L. Plano Clark. 2017. Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research. SAGE Publications.

[13]

Avery Dame. 2016. Making a name for yourself: tagging as transgender ontological practice on Tumblr. Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 33, 1 (2016), 23--37.

[14]

Abigail De Kosnik. 2016. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. MIT Press, Cambridge.

[15]

Sarah Dolfin and Garance Genicot. 2010. What Do Networks Do? The Role of Networks on Migration and "Coyote" Use. Review of Development Economics, Vol. 14, 2 (2010), 343--359.

[16]

Michaelanne Dye, Annie Anton, and Amy S. Bruckman. 2016. Early adopters of the internet and social media in Cuba. In Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. 1295--1309.

[17]

Brianna Dym, Jed R. Brubaker, Casey Fiesler, and Bryan Semaan. 2019. "Coming Out Okay": Community Narratives for LGBTQ Identity Recovery Work. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 3, CSCW (2019), 154:1--28.

Digital Library

[18]

Joseph Farrell and Paul Klemperer. 2007. Coordination and Lock-In: Competition and Switching Costs and Network Effects. Handbook of Industrial Organization, Vol. 3 (2007), 1967--2072.

[19]

Casey Fiesler and Amy S Bruckman. 2019. Creativity, Copyright, and Close-Knit Communities: A Case Study of Social Norm Formation and Enforcement. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 3, GROUP (2019), 1--24.

Digital Library

[20]

Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, and Amy S. Bruckman. 2016. An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. San Jose, CA, 2574--2585.

[21]

Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, Ben Shapiro, and Amy Bruckman. 2017. Growing Their Own: Legitimate Peripheral Participation for Computational Learning in an Online Fandom Community. In Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. 1375--1386.

Digital Library

[22]

Katie Gach, Casey Fiesler, and Jed R. Brubaker. 2017. "Control your emotions, Potter": An Analysis of Grief Policing on Facebook in Response to Celebrity Death. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 2, CSCW (2017), 47:1--13.

[23]

Rich Gazan. 2011. Redesign as an act of violence: Disrupted interaction patterns and fragmenting of a social Q&A community. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2011), 2847--2856.

Digital Library

[24]

Joseph Gonzales, Casey Fiesler, and Amy S Bruckman. 2015. Towards an Appropriable CSCW Tool Ecology: Lessons from the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen. In Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Vancouver, BC, Canada, 946--957.

Digital Library

[25]

Oliver Haimson. 2018. Social media as social transition machinery. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 2, CSCW (2018), 1--21.

Digital Library

[26]

Caroline Haythornthwaite. 2007. Social networks and online community. In The Oxford Handbook of Internet Psychology, Adam Joinson (Ed.). Oxford University Press, Oxford, 121--138.

[27]

Alex Heitmueller. 2006. Coordination Failures in Network Migration. The Manchester School, Vol. 74, 6 (2006), 701--710.

[28]

Karen Hellekson. 2009. A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture. Cinema Journal, Vol. 48, 4 (2009), 113--118.

[29]

Serena Hillman, Jason Procyk, and Carman Neustaedter. 2014. `alksjdf;lksfd': Tumblr and the Fandom User Experience. In Proceedings of the ACM DIS Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. 775--784.

Digital Library

[30]

Steven J Jackson, Tarleton Gillespie, and Sandy Payette. 2014. The Policy Knot: Re-integrating Policy, Practice and Design in CSCW Studies of Social Computing. In Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. Baltimore, MD, 588--602.

Digital Library

[31]

Samantha Jaroszewski, Danielle Lottridge, Oliver L Haimson, and Katie Quehl. 2018. "Genderfluid" or "Attack Helicopter": Responsible HCI Practice with Non-Binary Gender Variation in Online Communities. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2018), 307:1--15.

Digital Library

[32]

Henry Jenkins. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge.

[33]

Raghav Pavan Karumur, Bowen Yu, Haiyi Zhu, and Joseph A. Konstan. 2018. Content is King, Leadership Lags: Effects of Prior Experience on Newcomer Retention and Productivity in Online Production Groups. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2018), 506:1--13.

[34]

Charles Kiene, André s Monroy-Herná ndez, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2016. Surviving an "Eternal September": How an Online Community Managed a Surge of Newcomers. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1152--1156.

Digital Library

[35]

Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick. 2014. Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. MIT Press, Boston, MA.

[36]

Cliff Lampe and Paul Resnick. 2004. Slash (dot) and burn: distributed moderation in a large online conversation space. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2004), 543--550.

Digital Library

[37]

Matt Law and Colleen Morgan. 2014. The Archaeology of Digital Abandonment: Online Sustainability and Archaeological Sites. Present Pasts, Vol. 6, 1 (2014), 1--9.

[38]

Everett S. Lee. 1966. A Theory of Migration. Demography, Vol. 3, 1 (1966), 47--57.

[39]

Paige Leskin. 2018. Tumblr users are leaving in droves as it bans NSFW images. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/tumblr-alternatives-that-allow-nsfw-2018--12

[40]

William J. Luther. 2016. Cryptocurrencies, Network Effects, and Switching Costs. Contemporary Economic Policy, Vol. 34, 3 (2016), 553--571.

[41]

Douglas S. Massey, Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino, and J. Edward Taylor. 1993. Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal. Population and Development Review, Vol. 19, 3 (1993), 431.

[42]

J Nathan Matias. 2016. Going Dark: Social Factors in Collective Action Against Platform Operators in the Reddit Blackout. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2016), 1138--1151.

Digital Library

[43]

Jason Mitell. 2009. Sites of participation: Wiki fandom and the case of Lostpedia. Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol. 3, 8 (2009).

[44]

Edward Newell, David Jurgens, Haji Mohammad Saleem, Hardik Vala, Jad Sassine, Caitrin Armstrong, and Derek Ruths. 2016. User Migration in Online Social Networks: A Case Study on Reddit During a Period of Community Unrest. Proceedings of the AAAI ICWSM International Conference on the Web and Social Media (2016), 279--288.

[45]

Celia Pearce and Artemesia. 2009. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Digital Library

[46]

Nathaniel Poor and Marko M. Skoric. 2014. Death of a guild, birth of a network: Online community ties within and beyond code. Games and Culture, Vol. 9, 3 (2014), 182--202.

[47]

Laura Portwood-Stacer. 2013. Media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: The performative and political dimensions of Facebook abstention. New Media and Society, Vol. 15, 7 (2013), 1041--1057.

[48]

Jenny Preece and Diane Maloney-Krichmar. 2005. Online Communities: Design, Theory, and Practice. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. 10, 4 (2005), 1.

[49]

Joseph Seering, Felicia Ng, Zheng Yao, and Geoff Kaufman. 2018. Applications of Social Identity Theory to Research and Design in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 2, CSCW (2018), 201:1--34.

Digital Library

[50]

Bryan Semaan and Gloria Mark. 2012. `Facebooking' Towards Crisis Recovery and Beyond. Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (2012), 27--36.

Digital Library

[51]

Mel Stanfill. 2018. The Unbearable Whiteness of Fandom and Fan Studies. In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, Paul Booth (Ed.). Wiley, 305--317.

[52]

Stefan Stieger, Christoph Burger, Manuel Bohn, and Martin Voracek. 2013. Who Commits Virtual Identity Suicide? Differences in Privacy Concerns, Internet Addiction, and Personality Between Facebook Users and Quitters. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, Vol. 16, 9 (2013), 629--634.

[53]

Chenhao Tan. 2018. Tracing Community Genealogy: How New Communities Emerge from the Old. Proceedings of the AAAI ICWSM International Conference on the Web and Social Media (2018), 395--404.

[54]

Yla R. Tausczik, Laura A. Dabbish, and Robert E. Kraut. 2014. Building loyalty to online communities through bond and identity-based attachment to sub-groups. Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (2014), 146--157.

[55]

Rebecca Tushnet. 2008. User-Generated Discontent: Transformation in Practice. Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts, Vol. 10, 2007 (2008), 101--120.

[56]

Rebecca Tushnet. 2010. I Put You There: User-Generated Content and Anticircumvention. Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, Vol. 12 (2010), 889--946.

[57]

Xiaoqing Wang, Brian S. Butler, and Yuqing Ren. 2012. The Impact of Membership Overlap on Growth: An Ecological Competition View of Online Groups. Organization Science, Vol. 24, 2 (2012), 414--431.

[58]

Donghee Yvette Wohn, Cliff Lampe, and Ann Arbor. 2018. Psychological Wellbeing as an Explanation of User Engagement in the Lifecycle of Online Community Participation. Proceedings of the ACM GROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work (2018), 184--195.

Digital Library

[59]

Diyi Yang, Robert Kraut, and John M. Levine. 2017. Commitment of Newcomers and Old-timers to Online Health Support Communities. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2017), 6363--6375.

[60]

Kodlee Yin, Cecilia Aragon, Sarah Evans, and Katie Davis. 2017. Where No One Has Gone Before: A Meta-Dataset of the World's Largest Fanfiction Repository. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 6106--6110.

Digital Library

[61]

Peng Zhang, Haiyi Zhu, Tun Lu, Hansu Gu, Wenjian Huang, and Ning Gu. 2017. Understanding Relationship Overlapping on Social Network Sites. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 1, CSCW (2017), 120:1--18.

Digital Library

[62]

Xuan Zhao, Cliff Lampe, and Nicole B. Ellison. 2016. The Social Media Ecology. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2016), 89--100.

[63]

Haiyi Zhu, Robert E. Kraut, and Aniket Kittur. 2014. The impact of membership overlap on the survival of online communities. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2014), 281--290.

Digital Library

[64]

Kevin Zhu, Kenneth L. Kraemer, Vijay Gurbaxani, and Sean Xin Xu. 2017. Migration to Open-Standard Interorganizational Systems: Network Effects, Switching Costs, and Path Dependency. MIS Quarterly, Vol. 30 (2017), 515--539.

Cited By

Huang XFu M(2024)Voluntary Participation Mediates the Relationship Between Multi-Membership in Online Communities and Life Satisfaction Among Chinese Populations: A Gendered PerspectiveBehavioral Sciences10.3390/bs1411097614:11(976)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14110976
Hallinan BReynolds CRothenstein O(2024)Copyright callouts and the promise of creator-driven platform governanceInternet Policy Review10.14763/2024.2.177013:2Online publication date: 26-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.14763/2024.2.1770
Are CTalbot CBriggs P(2024)Social media affordances of LGBTQIA+ expression and community formationConvergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies10.1177/13548565241296628Online publication date: 31-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241296628
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
    1. Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms
      1. Computer supported cooperative work

Recommendations

Online Fandom: Boldly Going Where Few CSCW Researchers Have Gone Before
CSCW '18 Companion: Companion of the 2018 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

Communities focused on creating and sharing fanworks have existed since before the internet, but have thrived in the presence of online platforms. From young people learning literacy skills through writing fanfiction about their favorite media to ...
Growing Their Own: Legitimate Peripheral Participation for Computational Learning in an Online Fandom Community
CSCW '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

Online communities dedicated to the creation of fanworks (e.g., fiction or art inspired by media such as books or television shows) often serve as communities of practice for learning communication, artistic, and technical skills. In studying one ...
Building a Pillowfort: Political Tensions in Platform Design and Policy
GROUP

Social media platforms make trade-offs in their design and policy decisions to attract users and stand out from other platforms. These decisions are influenced by a number of considerations, e.g. what kinds of content moderation to deploy or what kinds ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Volume 4, Issue CSCW1

CSCW

May 2020

1285 pages

EISSN:2573-0142

DOI:10.1145/3403424

Editors:
Cliff Lampe
University of Michigan
,
Jeff Nichols
Google
,
Karrie Karahalios
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
,
Geraldine Fitzpatrick
Vienna University of Technology
,
Uichin Lee
KAIST
,
Andres Monroy-Hernandez
Microsoft Research
,
Wolfgang Stuerzlinger
Simon Fraser University, Canada

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 May 2020

Published in PACMHCI Volume 4, Issue CSCW1

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

National Science Foundation

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

46
Total Citations
View Citations
1,471
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)349
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)53

Reflects downloads up to 06 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Huang XFu M(2024)Voluntary Participation Mediates the Relationship Between Multi-Membership in Online Communities and Life Satisfaction Among Chinese Populations: A Gendered PerspectiveBehavioral Sciences10.3390/bs1411097614:11(976)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14110976
Hallinan BReynolds CRothenstein O(2024)Copyright callouts and the promise of creator-driven platform governanceInternet Policy Review10.14763/2024.2.177013:2Online publication date: 26-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.14763/2024.2.1770
Are CTalbot CBriggs P(2024)Social media affordances of LGBTQIA+ expression and community formationConvergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies10.1177/13548565241296628Online publication date: 31-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241296628
Smith CKlassen SPrinster GTan CKeegan B(2024)Governance of the Black Experience on Reddit: r/BlackPeopleTwitter as a Case Study in Supporting Sense of Virtual Community for Black UsersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869208:CSCW2(1-32)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686920
Wang DEng JTurpitka MEpstein D(2024)Exploring Activity-Sharing Response Differences Between Broad-Purpose and Dedicated Online Social PlatformsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36868988:CSCW2(1-37)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686898
Bin Zia HHe JCastro ITyson GVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)Fediverse Migrations: A Study of User Account Portability on the Mastodon Social NetworkProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3689027(68-75)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3689027
Zhang PZhou QLu TGu HGu N(2024)DeLink: An Adversarial Framework for Defending against Cross-site User Identity LinkageACM Transactions on the Web10.1145/364382818:2(1-34)Online publication date: 5-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643828
Marsh ALerner A(2024)Privacy Norms of Transformative Fandom: A Case Study of an Activity-Defined CommunityProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373888:CSCW1(1-29)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637388
Prinster GSmith CTan CKeegan B(2024)Community Archetypes: An Empirical Framework for Guiding Research Methodologies to Reflect User Experiences of Sense of Virtual Community on RedditProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373108:CSCW1(1-33)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637310
Guo QYuan KHe CPeng ZMa X(2024)Exploring the Evolvement of Artwork Descriptions in Online Creative Community under the Surge of Generative AI: A Case Study of DeviantArtExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650851(1-7)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3650851
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents