I feel like with the new ~fandom drama~ or whatever going around, I should re-introduce my favorite theory of fandom, which I call the 1% Theory.
Basically, the 1% Theory dictates that in every fandom, on average, 1% of the fans will be a pure, unsalvageable tire fire. We’re talking the people who do physical harm over their fandom, who start riots, cannot be talked down. The sort of things public news stories are made of. We’re not talking necessarily bad fans here- we’re talking people who take this thing so seriously they are willing to start a goddamn fist fight over nothing. The worst of the worst.
The reason I bring this up is because the 1% Theory ties into an important visual of fandom knowledge- that bigger fandoms are always perceived as “worse”, and at a certain point, a fandom always gets big enough to “go bad”. Let me explain.
Say you have a small fandom, like 500 people- the 1% Theory says that out of those 500, only 5 of them will be absolute nutjobs. This is incredibly manageable- it’s five people. The fandom and world at large can easily shut them out, block them, ignore their ramblings. The fandom is a “nice place”.
Now say you have a medium sized fandom- say 100,000 people. Suddenly, the 1% Theory ups your level of calamity to a whopping 1000 people. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to manage. It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to “manage” because no one owns fan spaces. People start to get nervous. There’s still so much good, but oof, 1000 people.
Now say you have a truly massive fandom- I use Homestuck here because I know the figures. At it’s peak, Homestuck had approximately FIVE MILLION active fans around the globe.
By the 1% Theory, that’s 50,000 people. Fifty THOUSAND starting riots, blackmailing creators, contributing to the worst of the worst of things.
There’s a couple of important points to take away here, in my opinion.
1) The 1% will always be the loudest, because people are always looking for new drama to follow.
2) Ultimately, it is 1%. It is only 1%. I can’t promise the other 99% are perfect, loving angels, but the “terrible fandom” is still only 1% complete utter garbage.
3) No fandom should ever be judged by their 1%. Big fandoms always look worse, small fandoms always look better. It’s not a good metric.
So remember, if you’re ever feeling disheartened by your fandom’s activity- it’s just 1%, people. Do your part not to be a part of it.
this is great!
This is a thing we’ve talked about on the podcast a couple times. In any size group, there’s always going to be a percentage of assholes. It’s just a numbers game.
This is like the inverse of my ‘minimum cool person’ community theory.
It says that in any community or group, there has to be a minimum number of ‘cool people’ as a percentage of the crew to make it self-sustaining and a proper community. They have to be active content creators, generally liked (not just tolerated, liked), connected to one another and participating in whatever is ‘public’ to the community.
It’s somewhere around 5-10% of the community, and you have to round up. So if the community is only 100 people, there have to be at least 10 people constantly creating content in a way that is visible to and engaged with by the majority of the community, or you get the ‘empty tag’ syndrome – there are 100 people but the content isn’t regular enough to feel like a real community. If there are only 15 people in the community, you need 2 or 3 people regularly active, and they may not be active because they don’t see a community. Catch 22, heh.
Conversely, when you have millions of fans – like for something like Star Trek – getting to that 5-10% threshold would take at least 50000 people to be in proper contact with one another. The fandom is way too large to be a single, cohesive community.
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