I had heard about the great migration of fandom from Delicious to Pinboard a few years ago, when the former did something stupid while the latter was clever enough to welcome it with open arms, but to have Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski explain the lengths to which fandom went during this is something else entirely:
Having worked at large tech companies, where getting a spec written requires shedding tears of blood in a room full of people whose only goal seems to be to thwart you, and waiting weeks for them to finish, I could not believe what I was seeing.
It was like a mirror world to YouTube comments, where several dozen anonymous people had come together in love and harmony to write a complex, logically coherent document, based on a single tweet.
All I could think was–who ARE these people?
But it shouldn’t come as a surprise. One of the defining characteristics of fandom is after all is altruistic cooperation, a tradition that goes back some ninety years at this point. You see the same levels of cooperation happening at every convention after all, from people who give up months to years of their lives to organise it, to those who spent a couple of hours or more helping out during it. That attitude has translated remarkably well to online life.
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