a fitting end to the week
Jul. 25th, 2008 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deird_lj
...and on this historic day in history, Fanlib collapsed in ruins, and we all pointed and laughed.
I'm glad they existed - because if Live Journal hadn't exploded in their direction last year, I never would have discovered that the Pit Of Voles wasn't the only thing on offer.
But at the same time, I am glad (oh-so-glad) to see them go, and will happily join in with the dancing on graves and singing "ding dong the witch is dead!"
Woo!
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From Laney
Date: 2008-07-25 10:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-25 12:24 pm (UTC)an explanation
Date: 2008-07-25 10:08 pm (UTC)Okay, here goes...
Firstly, the "Pit Of Voles" is a common nickname for fanfiction.net (common enough that typing "pit of voles" into wikipedia redirects you). It's a site with some of the most abysmal fanfic known to mankind. Sometimes people go there, and look at story summaries, just to get a good laugh.
On to Fanlib.
Some bright spark looked at all the millions of people who use The Pit, and thought "Hmm. If I could get all of them onto my site instead, I could make a fortune..." and concluded that the best way to do this would be to offer people free t-shirts.
Actually, that's a bit simplistic. What they were actually offering was:
-free t-shirts
-occassional free ipods
-story competitions
-contact with the "pros"!
In exchange for which,
-they would own ALL rights to anything you posted there
-you'd have to post on a site that wasn't actually very well set up
They were pretty sure that would be enough incentive.
The thing was, Fanlib thought that your stereotypical fanficcer was:
-male
-in his teens
-desperate for "free stuff"
-desperate for "contact with the pros"
Whereas the stereotypical fanficcer is actually:
-female
-in her thirties or older
-college educated
-interested in the community of fanficcers (not pros)
-trying desperately to stay under the radar, to not get mentioned to copyright owners (like studios), and to prove that money was not being made - so that no-one will have any reason to start chucking Cease-And-Desists around
Anyway, Fanlib started opening its doors back in March 07, by spamming fanficcers with form letters (saying "We're impressed by your writing and impact in the fan fiction community and we value your opinion." and asking them to join the site).
Those that received letters went over, checked out the site, and weren't really impressed. And a couple of them made Live Journal posts mentioning their non-impressedness.
an explanation (part 2)
Date: 2008-07-25 10:09 pm (UTC)Because the CEO of Fanlib, thinking he was dealing with uneducated teens after free t-shirts, came over to Live Journal and made the exact same comment on all the posts:
"hey everyone, I'm Chris one of the founders of FanLib> it's really late and i have been working on the site all day. I'm exhausted but i just realized what was going on here and all of the commentsts are making me sick. we're a small company with 10 emplyees who work 16 hours a day to try and make a great website. we're real people! with feelings and everything! we have been working on this and dreaming about it for a long time and you are just here to shit on it without giving us a chance. i care deeply about what you think but this is crazy. we're good people here and you make us sound like we're an evil corporation or the govt. sending your kids to war or something. we really are all about celebrating fanfiction and fanfiction readers and writers. im sorry this is so short and please excuse the fact that i am cutting and pasting this across a bunch of ljs but i gotta get some sleep."
No-one was impressed by this display. Especially given that, until that point, people had actually been very polite about the whole thing.
But they didn't appreciate being patronised, or told that they should embrace everything offered to them just because "we're real people!", so the gloves came off, and people started writing long essays on the topic, and going through Fanlib's TOS with a fine tooth-comb.
And the TOS sucked.
Basically, Fanlib was planning to use people's fanfic to make money, promote it publically (in front of studios), and then, if anyone sued, the TOS said that it was the fans' responsibility to defend themselves and to defend Fanlib.
an explanation (part 3)
Date: 2008-07-25 10:09 pm (UTC)There were posts being made all over Live Journal, and all over everywhere else, Fanlib people were trolling the posts and trying to discredit people by pointing out that they'd written stories that featured weird stuff (like Draco Malfoy and Ron Weasley falling in love) that "wasn't exactly mainstream" and therefore they couldn't be trusted, fanficcers responded by writing fanfic about the characters in Fanlib's ad campaign, and by writing more essays, Fanlib dealt with this by alternately ignoring people or patronising them, anti-Fanlib communities were being set up, and pretty soon there were a few thousand posts doing the rounds, and the whole debacle actually made so much noise that I heard about it too.
...which is how I discovered that fanfic writers actually could be intelligent people (but fanfic still sucked - I wasn't going to read the stuff).
So yeah, Fanlib have spent a year getting resoundingly mocked by Live Journallers, and constantly getting mentioned in articles (not on Live Journal - on other news sites) as an example of how not to deal with your customers.
...and now they've announced that they're shutting down. In just over a week. So we're all pretty happy.
For more information on this topic, check out this article by Henry Jenkins , or this summary by Icarus
Re: an explanation (part 3)
Date: 2008-07-26 11:18 am (UTC)