thoughts on anonymity

[krait]

Someone just created a kinkmeme for a small fandom I've long been a fan of, though never written in.

Why, you may ask, is that sentence not followed by an exclamation point?

The creator(s) have made the meme mandatorily anon-only.

This has happened with at least one other kinkmeme for a small(ish) fandom I'm part of, and I found that it somehow puts me off. I've thought about it several times, and I can't exactly pin down why I dislike it, aside from It's probably a combination of laziness and lack of shame. I may have come to better conclusions in the past, but right now I am sleep deprived and under-caffeinated, so I cannot recall them or re-think them out. (Insert cat macro here: "I thunk yu guyz sum meta, but I forgetted it"?)

I'm 100% for people having the right to be anonymous on the internet, and that includes kinkmemes! But being told that I have to be anonymous results in serious levels of Do Not Want.

Am I the only person in the universe who has this reaction to mandatory-anon policies? Is there someone out there who has the ability to prod my grey matter and figure out why this irks me?


Thoughts, anyone?

Comments

[pantswarrior]

There are two angles to this, as far as I'm concerned. Because I have no shame either, and am willing to own up to anything I say. However, I have seen, on non-anonymous kink memes, a BNF come in and basically have everything they say fawned over. "Oh, you think my prompt is good? Yay, I can't believe I'm lucky enough to get my prompt filled by YOU!" "This is excellent fic! But since it's you, I'm not surprised!" And so on, and they have friendly chatter back and forth for days. Meanwhile some fan who's new to the fandom gets basically no reaction at all.

(For that matter, I have been a BNF in some small fandoms, and always had to wonder if praise my fics got was just due to the fact it was mine. A completely anonymous kink meme meant that praise was received on the merit of the fic, not the name attached to it, and that did wonders for my self-confidence.)

On the other hand, a hard-nosed policy on anonymity can be a royal pain, too. One fandom, people were routinely bashed as attention whores if they provided, when asked, links to other things they'd written, or used a sockpuppet account to remain anonymous while getting around the annoyance of posting truly anonymously. In the case of at least one artist, whose style was recognizable enough that people always knew when it was her filling a prompt, someone was so jealous and bitter of her art's popularity that they outed her real name. Which drove her from the fandom.

So I think the best way to handle it, really, is to be anonymous on the meme IF AT ALL POSSIBLE, to avoid cliques and BNFs and favoritism. But when it's not really plausible to be anonymous, or if people want to know where they can read/see more by a particular filler, it's stupid for people to continue to demand anonymity (especially for those who fill prompts) one hundred percent of the time. If someone forgets to log out or wants to link to their ff.net account or whatever, no vilifying, darnit.

[krait]

Yes, the BNF issue was actually mentioned outright in the "why we have this policy" paragraph. I suppose, because of the fandom, that I just don't see it as much of an issue; for that matter I was a little surprised that someone(s) felt there was enough of an active fandom to merit a kinkmeme!

I may also be affected by the fact that the only kinkmemes I have been extensively involved in (except the smallish one where I actually wrote something) have been for very large, relatively new fandoms; so maybe they just overpowered the sort of cliqueishness stuff by sheer numbers? Because I really don't remember running into that sort of spite and fawning, in them... Maybe that leads me to downplay the potential for meme-destroying wank.

best way to handle it, really, to be anonymous on the meme IF AT ALL POSSIBLE

I dunno -- that still falls into Do Not Want territory for me. *shrugs* Although it does at least touch on some of what irked me most about the meme rules, which (as far as I could puzzle out) did explicitly forbid linking to previously written works where the author was identified, but -- upon rereading -- it looks like you are allowed to drop a link to a kinkmeme-written work that was subsequently posted elsewhere for archiving, so that makes me a bit happier...