Fandom caught in the crossfire

01 Apr, 2026

Or why social media makes you feel like shit from the perspective of a fandom type.

There are a lot of articles and videos on the effects of social media on poor mental health that I don't relate to because my experience has largely been through the fandom lens. I haven't been cyberbullied by mean middle schoolers, I don't see people from high school doing better than me, I don't follow influencers or care about buying more for the sake of image, I don't really come across political arguments. Looking at artists—often recommended as the antidote to social media headaches—usually made me feel worse about my own skill and worth as a creator.

I could tell something was off about how social media affected my mind but the ways others relayed it never aligned with my experience. It's only by stepping away that I was finally able to identify what was wrong.

The goal of social media

First, we have to recognize the business goal of every social media company: collecting user data and increasing retention for the sake of gaining ad revenue.

How does social media increase retention? Negativity increases engagement and subsequently causes people to scroll on social media more in hope of a dopamine hit.

This is typically discussed in the context of IRL politics or beauty—the majority of modern socmed users are normies, and these goals are targeted towards them. However, it still affects the fandom sphere, which is why I say that fandom is caught in the crossfire. Past platforms, such as DeviantArt and LiveJournal were not as optimized for this goal.

And unlike DeviantArt and LiveJournal, most modern social media are poorly designed for record keeping or archival. What they are great at is creating a casual social space to share thoughts and ideas with others, especially through a shared common interest. Naturally, this attracts the lonely, the mentally ill, the LGBT—people who struggle to find social interaction in real life, and the common audience of fandoms. I don't blame them because I am all three.

Active and passive negativity

Social media itself isn't the source of negativity. Actually, I hate it when people act like forums and LiveJournal were so much better, because if you spend five minutes looking into any fandom's history, you'll see that people have always been insane and drama mongering.

Instead, I split the effects of social media into 'active negative' and 'passive negative'.

Active negative is caused by human nature, so it's always been present. It's more hostile, but easier to avoid—if you just block people who stir up these controversies you won't be affected by them. Examples include:

• Active in-fighting over fictional pairings
• Merchandise scams
• Whatever msscribe was doing in 2002

Passive negative is caused by the design of the social media platform, so it's much harder to avoid without quitting the platform altogether. Examples include:

• Constant exposure to the platform, caused by the need to always be active online for the sake of the algorithm
• Lack of borders between different fan types, caused by algorithmic feeds and poor blocking mechanisms
• Quantifying self-worth, caused by the inability to hide numbers from yourself and others

The negative affects of social media on a fandom type

I didn't engage in fandom outside of my friends, so I was spared from all of the active negative effects of social media. No one GAF about me. However, the passive negative effects got me bad! These points are from the perspective of a fandom artist who used to post publicly, but I still think they can affect anyone's mental health.

Constant exposure for the algorithm

To summarize my previous post about the negative effects of constant exposure to Twitter in general, blocking/muting are useless and you have to be active 24/7.

More specifically, as an artist, you need to post regularly for the algorithm to take notice and reshare your art multiple times within the first day, exposing yourself again and again to how few people have seen your work each time. This would fuck me up so badly and make me feel anxious constantly.

Having to post all the time makes posting online feel like a job, even if you don't intend to make money off of it. You need to be active or your posts won't appear on the timeline at all, so you don't have time to explore what you really might be interested in art-wise.

Social media has had an obvious effect on the irrelevance of fanfic—it's not as easily shareable as fanart and people now have the attention span of 10 seconds. But the short-lived nature of socmed posts means that art is treated just like content to consume. You draw something that gets 1000 likes and it's absolutely irrelevant the next day, never to be found again. People no longer value their creations as 'artwork'—single pieces are rarely memorable when you output so much content.

Live service games, like THE iDOLM@STER, have really capitalized on this. There's a constant FOMO that if you don't post your artwork quickly enough, it'll soon become irrelevant and lose attention. What are we valuing here? Novelty or creation?

Sure, the drive to create relevant artwork can build an incredible sense of community—but these are corporations that use the addictive design of social media to build a dedicated fanbase for their product, which employ the same addictive FOMO mechanisms in the form of limited-edition gacha and constant blind-bag merchandise.

And in the end the platform benefits. Your anxiety to be online, whether you have to post constantly to be seen by the algorithm or check the TL all the time to never miss out on what's new—all it does is increase retention on the site for the sake of ad revenue.

Self-worth in numbers

I always used to think, "If Twitter just hid following/follower count in the same way Tumblr did, you could literally nix 50% of the mental health issues artists get from using it".

Yes, it is actually going to ruin your mental health if, everyday, you look at pictures by people drawing the same characters you love and getting quantifiable 'proof' that their artwork is more appealing than yours. It is the creative equivalent of feeling bad your selfie got less likes than someone else's at school.

Many people in fandom culture—remember, lonely, mentally ill, or queer—already have depression, OCD, anxiety, or autism, all of which can be particularly affected by numbers.

For myself, numbers were the only way to judge my worth as an artist, and, being so disconnected from my real life, my self-worth in turn. This is further connected to the current role of art in a capitalist society. People only value things that make money. If you can't make money as an artist, you aren't a real artist (or alternatively, artists don't make money, so there's no point in trying to be an artist).

Social media has created a situation where non-creators can follow artists regularly, skyrocketing the careers of regular people to heights never seen before. It's awesome! But it also makes the average person just posting for fun see this success and want it for themselves. Social media is great for artists who do well, but for artists who don't it feels bad—and the only difference between the two is how well you do, so you just feel compelled to keep posting even if there's no money in what you draw.

I think it's still possible for artists to reach these heights without numbers and algorithms. Tumblr is the best example—it hides following/follower count by default and previously only had a chronological timeline. I never had mental health issues from posting on there because I knew that the 'amount of people who liked me as an artist' was never exposed so quantifiably to others and the tagging system meant my fanart could eventually be found.

But I also never felt like I needed to post on Tumblr as much as I did on Twitter either, because of what Twitter asks of you for your posts to be visible. Twitter has no incentive to remove numbers. It's not an active issue that can be called out like cyberbullying, but just a passive way to make you feel bad, increasing your anxiety, retention, ad revenue potential.

Drive to singlefandom

The design of social media means there's a big push towards being 'singlefandom', or the idea that you primarily focus on one fandom or multiple related fandoms.

One factor that drives this is the lack of a meaningful tagging system. Twitter penalizes posts with too many tags, so no one uses them and Instagram's tags don't display shit. If you want your posts to be seen by the right community, your audience needs to already care about the topic, and that means you're incentivized to keep drawing the same old fandomshit. Tumblr is, again, the only exception.

Poor tagging also means poor muting, and so people only want to follow accounts that specialize in a topic that interests them, rather than following an artist that posts 90% series A and 10% series B.

The disposability of Twitter posts, in particular, means that there's no permanence of posting. It's weird to actively search out and reply to strangers text posts, especially if they're older than a day, so you're unlikely to connect with anyone who has a niche interest that your mutuals aren't into. Yes, the rapidfire posting style of Twitter is its appeal, but that probably isn't even good for us to begin with.

So what's the issue with the drive to singlefandom? It discourages you from exploring and discussing different interests because they may not be what your followers expect. If you're an artist, you feel like there's little point in posting fanart of series you aren't planning to be dedicated towards, because there's no way to reach the audience that would care without the algorithm seriously considering your account to fit that fandom's niche.

This would bother me even when I finally escaped my self-worth complex. I didn't care if my art wasn't liked, but it was frustrating that it couldn't even reach the eyes of people who might care about it!¹

More crucially, the drive to singlefandom locks you into being a 'consumer' instead of creating original artwork. You've already spent so much time on this series, might as well keep going! Personal development falls victim to the sunk cost fallacy.

Drama milked for retention

I still pop into Twitter once every two months to check on my friends. Each time I'm greeted with the most stupid peanutbrained yaoi discourse on the for you page—and this has only expanded to the following page now that it's auto-sorted by popular tweets.

Negativity naturally increases engagement by way of more comments and quotes, but god does it get tiring. It's true you can hide these tweets and block the user but it won't stop your friends from doing so and so your timeline will be a barrage of top/bottom drama that gives you brain damage.

The limitations of social media decreasing media literacy and the inability to provide proper context in a post of 280 characters have also bred so many misunderstandings and people hating each other over dumb crap. Not to mention the fact that many social media have non-linear forms of discussion. With Twitter QRTs and Tumblr's reblogs, you literally might not see the full conversation sometimes.

Yes, fandom drama has always existed but I think the culture was more disconnected in the 2000s. You'd have your own page or website that wasn't easily shareable in the sense of retweeting or reblogging and forums or groups for shared interest. No wonder you're anxious of existing in the current landscape when it's so easy to dogpile on any user who wants to post publicly.

There is now also a much smaller gap between different fan types. Mainstream fandom culture shifting mindsets is only natural when everyone's on the same damn website. People get exposed to things they don't want to see without warning time and time again, they grow bitter about it and emboldened by their friends and this happens on both sides until there is an ultimate black-and-white view of everything.

Don't you think this could be prevented if blocking and muting actually worked? If there were proper tagging systems that prevented the need for account- or interaction-based algorithms? If platforms defaulted you to your following list instead of algorithmic feeds that showed what they thought you might be interested in?

I don't care to get enraged by fictional crap even if I dislike it. All it does is ruin my mental health and make me spend more time on the platform in search of dopamine, increasing ad revenue again.

What can we do

I don't think things were perfect before. There's always been infighting and feeling bad about numbers or lack of popularity on DeviantArt, LiveJournal, fuckass Harry Potter fanfiction forums—but the mechanisms of social media have exacerbated these issues immensely.

First, you need to recognize this: social media platforms want you to stay on their site as much as possible, whether you're a complete normie who DGAF about fictional characters or a yumejoshi in love with your favorite anime boy. The tactics socmeds use to get the first audience to stay is the same they use to get you as well.

It's hard because I have met my closest friends through conventional socmed like Twitter and Tumblr—it's the only reason I have readers on this blog at all. But it is possible to meet people and make friends through Discord and other 'group'-based online forums as well.² You can go back to having your own personal site or blog or Dreamwidth account, posting your stuff in a non-shareable space while leaving discussion and community-building to group spaces.

If you can meet people in real life, even better. But again, I understand that so many of us are in fandom to begin with because we're in situations where we can't.

If you're a fanartist, you need to post for fun and not worry about numbers. If you really want to make money through socmed, you need to steel yourself and recognize that you'll probably have to treat it like a job. Don't put yourself through the mental toll if you're just drawing something like iDOLM@STER fanart for the sake of social capital. You still have worth as an artist even if you aren't making money or getting likes from it.

Block people you dislike, mute topics you don't want to see.

Do what you can to decrease your reliance on social media for dopamine and social interaction. Hanging out with friends for 2 hours on a weekend is worth much more than being on twitter 24/7.

Please recognize just how much poor fandom experience is caused by the design of social media and capitalism and the individualism that comes from it. Once you understand that, everything feels stupid.

#2026 #art #internet #rant