Askbox

[razielim]

One thing I always feel DW is missing is an askbox. And I remembered earlier today that there theoretically is a way that I've heard about to get "anons" and "asks" by pinning a post with approval-only comments. Which had me excited, thoroughly, right up until I realized I wouldn't really know what to really DO with that if I set it up. DW isn't very fannish in the grand scheme of things.

(I'm alive!)

Comments

[elf]

DW is not designed to invite interaction from random strangers. It's possible, but the feature set isn't arranged to encourage it. It's meant to encourage friend-of-friend-of-friend communication.

You can see your readlist. You can see other people's public readlists at [username].dreamwidth.org/read. (You can't see the locked stuff on other people's readlists.) This includes communities, so that's a good way to find other people interested in a topic.

But there's really no way to announce things site-wide to the general public, so there's no "ask me anything" feature.

[razielim]

You know, it's funny, because I guess that's the general impression of it is that it's very impersonal, but I've never considered tumblr's askbox to be primarily for stranger-interaction. I think that was really only the case for mega large NON-fandom blogs.

Even anonymous askers who don't identify themselves (ex: "I'm the anon who sends you niche Batman info") still generally mark themselves through tone as being within my circle or otherwise familiar with me. And I only ever send anons to friends or friends-of-friends.

Especially before the porn ban, the greatest thing about the anon ask system is that it allowed more freedom of sexual fannish activity for users who didn't necessarily want the fully impersonal experience of a kinkmeme, but still wanted to keep a degree of separation between their online persona and their kinky ideas. This allowed people to participate in fandom who otherwise wouldn't have felt comfortable to do so by filling in that grey area between double-blind anonymity and full pseudonymous accountability.

But even for non-sexual content, it was also just fun to sort of fun to walk into a friend's space wearing a mask (or top of the usual mask), you know? It's just another form of shenanigans. Which, I guess, might be the really difference here - I'm not sure shenanigans for their own sake are really part of DW culture.