coaltide | Coal All The Way

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2019

Coal All The Way

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I miss the days when there were recs all over the place in communities and on journals. Seems like you have to go 10 different places (recs tags on AO3, tumblr if you can even find them, FFA if a fic is sufficiently wanky to attract attention, discord channels) to see any excitement/talk about YT. Posting stories and treats feels more like shouting into the void than it used to, plus it seems like overall reading/commenting has dropped off. Even here it got quiet. Thoughts coalies?

Discord is very active for recs/discussion and there are rec posts on

yuletide.

I think there is less anon discussion for sure. But memes have become really bitter/jealous so the positive, want to hype goodfic coalies don’t engage with fic recs/talk in those spaces anymore. The trolls won that battle.

+1

I’ve been on Coal since the beginning, and while it was always a place to escape the Cult of Nice, it wasn’t full of people actively trying to start wank about ridiculous shit like it is now. There was more of a feeling of genuine community, I think. These days I rarely participate here, I just lurk, because I feel like a lot of the fun parts of Coal (3T1L, letter reviewing, writing sprints, secret codes in letters to show you were a coalie) are just gone or are drowned out by tedious and repetitive wank. It’s a shame!

Come to my friending meme when I put it up, coalie, cause I feel ya

I will! And thank you, btw, for all the awesome things you do <3

I'm really bummed by how few 3T1L threads there were this year.

I feel like anon exchange discussion falls victim to the inevitable cycle that happened with MST/sporking comms and basically anything that relies on venting and wank reporting: it works well early on when everybody's got a backlog of genuine grievances to bitch about, but once that's all been picked to death and you get a year or two where there's very little new that's genuinely worth the group outrage, everybody turns to trying to generate artificial wank out of innocuous things or dredges up older stuff so frequently or long afterwards that it just starts feeling grudgewanky. Some years there just honestly ain't that much wank to be had, but the memes still gotta keep pouncing on whatever wank potential they can find or create, so it drives away more positive discussion as people see things that seem harmless get seized on and decide they don't want to risk bringing things they like to meme attention.

ayrt

The thing about coal (namely this 2.0 reboot) is that it doesn’t have to be about wank. The game where people rating their treating order, talk about what good letters and good commenters they like, etc are all positive. Most of what people come here for is positive based. There are some people that want wank (or feel that there’s no point in positive anon spaces because it is all things you can say in namespace) and so they do two things: make threads like bad letters or which fics suck, which is negative but at least contained, and then they will butt into positive threads and give their unwanted opinion (“you may like x for being a long commenter but I actually hate long comments and thing x does this for performative attention”, “why would anyone want to write for someone with a letter that is 10x the minimum”, “i thought this fic sucked and why write x bottom? what a waste”) that adds nothing to the conversation beyond undermining the OPs opinion, and that sort of thing/entitlement (“we’re in a hatecomm anyway and if you didnt want random opinions then why post?”) to be nasty is what makes coal undesirable for happy discussion. A wanky thread or two is fine, but if you can’t even have a positive one then you stop trying to share positive content.

+1

I'm inclined to not rec anything on anon memes because I don't want to expose fics I like (and their authors) to people responding that it was overrated or didn't conform to their exact preferences or whatever. I wish there were a way to rec things without people jumping on them that also didn't require an account in namespace.

(As an aside, I once got a comment from a non-logged-in user that started off with something like "I saw a rec on FFA and thought it must have been exaggerating how good the fic was, but it actually delivered" and I was slightly annoyed by it. Saying that on FFA is one thing, but what's the point of saying it in a comment?)

Discord is mostly the exchange clique recommending each other's stories.

Do you think they have a side channel where they say what they wrote during the anon period so the other ones know what to rec?

/genuine question bc I don’t get how this conspiracy theory works

If they are I would like to file a complaint because I wasn't invited.

+1

I think I have surely done enough exchanges to be in the exchange clique, but it turned out I'd never even heard of the vast majority of the authors I recced.

Often it's because they also beta for each other.

There's actually been a pretty good turn out of YT recs on the yuletide comm this year, compared to the last few.

No comment on quality, I am (obvs) just scanning them to see if my story and/or gift are on them, of course.

Less of a reflection than an FYI, but there's an unofficial Yuletide Tumblr that reblogs recs posts:

https://unofficialyuletide.tumblr.com/

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Coal All The Way

Yuletiding reflections?

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