I can handle the +1's if they're in the form of a site mechanic like liking a tumblr post or giving kudos on AO3, but LURK FIRST will never leave me. I'm weirded out every time I see something demanding that everyone jump in and participate in everything ASAP.
As long as you were willing to talk to people, you found out about things. The main barrier to entry was saying "oh, yeah, that sounds cool, I'd love an invite, thanks!"
And age and being in the right fandoms, I think. I was never invited to any invitation-only lists; I didn't even know such a thing had existed until recently. I think it's half that I wasn't participating enough in the right places and half that I was 13 when I found fandom originally and many of the reasons for keeping your list private are also good reasons to keep 13 year-olds off of it. I found anime fandoms and HP much friendlier since they were full of other teenagers also looking for porn and unwilling to jump through hoops to find it. Ha ha ha. (But, oh god, the WIPs!)
The big thing I remember about RPF before everything exploded with boy band slash was that Usenet used to have quite a lot of creepy celebrity snuff erotica, mostly about Gillian Anderson. It was on the same newsgroups with other creepy erotica. From memory, hanging and cannibalism were very popular, along with all the other sorts of things you'd typically find on Nifty today. (The big non-fic erotica-writing subcultures were starting up online around the same time fic writing was.) I think that may have turned a lot of people off of the idea.
I could swear my VHS copies of Highlander were closer to $200/season. They were really freakin' expensive! And, at least at the time I bought them, they came with all of this extra junk to justify the price. I had a huge stack of cruddy posters and t-shirts and an actually nice watcher emblem necklace (that I promptly lost, of course).
no subject
As long as you were willing to talk to people, you found out about things. The main barrier to entry was saying "oh, yeah, that sounds cool, I'd love an invite, thanks!"
And age and being in the right fandoms, I think. I was never invited to any invitation-only lists; I didn't even know such a thing had existed until recently. I think it's half that I wasn't participating enough in the right places and half that I was 13 when I found fandom originally and many of the reasons for keeping your list private are also good reasons to keep 13 year-olds off of it. I found anime fandoms and HP much friendlier since they were full of other teenagers also looking for porn and unwilling to jump through hoops to find it. Ha ha ha. (But, oh god, the WIPs!)
The big thing I remember about RPF before everything exploded with boy band slash was that Usenet used to have quite a lot of creepy celebrity snuff erotica, mostly about Gillian Anderson. It was on the same newsgroups with other creepy erotica. From memory, hanging and cannibalism were very popular, along with all the other sorts of things you'd typically find on Nifty today. (The big non-fic erotica-writing subcultures were starting up online around the same time fic writing was.) I think that may have turned a lot of people off of the idea.
I could swear my VHS copies of Highlander were closer to $200/season. They were really freakin' expensive! And, at least at the time I bought them, they came with all of this extra junk to justify the price. I had a huge stack of cruddy posters and t-shirts and an actually nice watcher emblem necklace (that I promptly lost, of course).