Hi, I'm Casey Fiesler.
I am an assistant professor in the Department
of Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder.
You are watching this video as a trailer
for this amazing paper that is about Platform
Migration in Fandom.
This paper was a collaboration with Brianna Dym, who is a PhD
student in our department.
She also has another paper that is also
about fandom and social norms.
If you don't know what fan fiction is,
you should go check some out, and read about the continuing
adventures of Harry Potter, or Captain Kirk and Mr Spock's
romantic tryst.
I can wait while you're doing that if you want.
But here's the thing that you, CSCW, researcher care about.
Fandom is a technology-agnostic community
that has existed since long before the internet.
What was once physical zines with staples and stamps
is now Tumblr.
This research project was about mapping the migrations over
about a 20-year period for a single community.
Why do people leave platforms?
Why do people join platforms?
And what are the consequences when they do?
Also, fandom is an amazing community
to study because we really love navel gazing.
We had almost 2,000 survey participants in 24 hours.
You can read the paper if you really want the science methods
and limitations and that kind of thing
because I only have five minutes.
This chart essentially shows the rise and fall
of platforms that were popular with fandom over time.
It starts with Usenet in the '90s, where I hung out
a lot on alt.startrek.creative, and in particular some flash
points like LiveJournal and when there was
a mass exodus in the mid-2000s.
So one research question that we had was,
why do migrations happen?
Why do people leave?
Why do people join?
Many answers to these questions in the paper,
but for right now, here's my second favorite chart.
And let me give you one insight from this chart, which
is that policy matters.
If you're curious about the death of fandom LiveJournal,
it's because of a policy change.
And in fact, it caused a mass exodus.
And that event paired with a couple of other things
was also the direct reason why the fan fiction platform
Archive of Our Own was created.
If you have never heard me talk about Archive of Our Own,
then please grab me at a coffee break someday
when we're in person again.
And you should definitely read this particular paper.
But basically, it turns out that one thing that
can happen in platform migration is
that people get so frustrated that they just
build their own thing.
And Archive of Our Own became a great example
of how people can be pulled to a new platform
because it reflects their values.
We also saw some reasons for migration
around design decisions and, of course, community-based things
like, well, all my friends were there.
And we also wanted to know what the consequences of migration
are, particularly negative consequences.
And what we see is lost content, lost friends, difficulty
fitting in, difficulty using the new platform,
normative changes.
Some have real impact on the community
in terms of fragmenting it, people losing social support.
So as part of our paper, we make some suggestions
for supporting migration, in particular,
what a platform might do to encourage people to come there.
I think often when we build an online community,
we have this idea that our users are just showing up fresh,
but they might have bags packed from somewhere else
that they're bringing with them.
They are nomads, and you are going to give them a new home.
There are also direct barriers to migration.
Maybe you've asked yourself before,
why don't people just leave Facebook
after Cambridge Analytica and name other privacy scandal?
Sometimes it's not that easy.
And it has to do in part with opportunity costs,
as well as ways that people can be really entrenched
in a platform.
The example that we saw of this in our data
are a lot of people who really hate Tumblr,
but they're still there because they don't
think they have anywhere to go.
In order for migration to occur, there
has to be both a compelling reason
to leave and a viable alternative option.
If you want to think about this video
as a trailer for the paper, also think about it
as a trailer for a video essay that I have posted on YouTube.
Here is a link to a website that will include
a link to the paper and to that video essay,
and to basically all of the fandom research
that we do in my lab.
Because I know that you super want to read more now.
I miss you all.
I hope you enjoyed this talk, and I really
hope to see you all again someday.