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seekingferretAn observation on this year's Yuletide wank: Yuletide is really badly designed to be an anonymous gift exchange.
Think about how you would go about setting up, say, an office Secret Santa exchange. You'd put a ten dollar limit on gifts, you'd make sure everyone got the same number of gifts, if it involved people who don't each other that well you'd mandate letters that clearly spell out what gifts a person wants and doesn't want to get. If you don't do these things, you're guaranteeing yourself drama. But Yuletide doesn't. (Other fanfic exchanges do. Purimgifts has a cap on story length and doesn't encourage treats.)
Features of Yuletide:
-Short time frame makes it tricky for many people to tailor their story to the recipient
-Insistence on optional details are optional makes it clear to their writers they don't have to try to fulfill their recipient's requests
-Treats and extra stories are often explicitly encouraged, setting up numerous potential situations of jealousy and rivalry between gifters
-There's no cap on story length, meaning one person could receive a 20,000 word story and another could receive one that seems padded at 1,000 words.
On the other hand, Yuletide is set up well as a rare fandom challenge. AO3 makes tagging for rare fandoms easy. Optional details are optional frees up writers to explore anything they want to. Encouraging treats brings in even more stories in these tiny, rare fandoms.
This is what Yuletide is optimized for- maximizing the number of stories written in rare fandoms. Yuletide is not optimized for the most drama-free exchange of anonymous gifts. This seems obvious to me. To me the gift I expect on Yuletide morning is a new story in a fandom that doesn't get much fic. That is gift enough, and expecting anything more out of Yuletide is expecting a system to do something it's not geared toward doing. That would be bad engineering. Or wanking.
I'm not trying to say that Purimgifts is superior to Yuletide. I'm trying to say that they're designed differently and they have different goals and people need to stop misunderstanding the goals of Yuletide. And I think it's awesome that Yuletide exists because it means that great fic like the things I highlighted in my last post exist. It's awesome that Yuletide is around because the stories it produces give pleasure to more than just one person. I still get kudoses on the story I wrote for Yuletide '09, and the hitcount on that story keeps climbing, and that's what makes me happy, because the point is to produce stories in rare fandoms, so that those stories exist to be read. The gift part of Yuletide is just a bonus, and as I've argued above, a somewhat tacked on one at that.
Think about how you would go about setting up, say, an office Secret Santa exchange. You'd put a ten dollar limit on gifts, you'd make sure everyone got the same number of gifts, if it involved people who don't each other that well you'd mandate letters that clearly spell out what gifts a person wants and doesn't want to get. If you don't do these things, you're guaranteeing yourself drama. But Yuletide doesn't. (Other fanfic exchanges do. Purimgifts has a cap on story length and doesn't encourage treats.)
Features of Yuletide:
-Short time frame makes it tricky for many people to tailor their story to the recipient
-Insistence on optional details are optional makes it clear to their writers they don't have to try to fulfill their recipient's requests
-Treats and extra stories are often explicitly encouraged, setting up numerous potential situations of jealousy and rivalry between gifters
-There's no cap on story length, meaning one person could receive a 20,000 word story and another could receive one that seems padded at 1,000 words.
On the other hand, Yuletide is set up well as a rare fandom challenge. AO3 makes tagging for rare fandoms easy. Optional details are optional frees up writers to explore anything they want to. Encouraging treats brings in even more stories in these tiny, rare fandoms.
This is what Yuletide is optimized for- maximizing the number of stories written in rare fandoms. Yuletide is not optimized for the most drama-free exchange of anonymous gifts. This seems obvious to me. To me the gift I expect on Yuletide morning is a new story in a fandom that doesn't get much fic. That is gift enough, and expecting anything more out of Yuletide is expecting a system to do something it's not geared toward doing. That would be bad engineering. Or wanking.
I'm not trying to say that Purimgifts is superior to Yuletide. I'm trying to say that they're designed differently and they have different goals and people need to stop misunderstanding the goals of Yuletide. And I think it's awesome that Yuletide exists because it means that great fic like the things I highlighted in my last post exist. It's awesome that Yuletide is around because the stories it produces give pleasure to more than just one person. I still get kudoses on the story I wrote for Yuletide '09, and the hitcount on that story keeps climbing, and that's what makes me happy, because the point is to produce stories in rare fandoms, so that those stories exist to be read. The gift part of Yuletide is just a bonus, and as I've argued above, a somewhat tacked on one at that.