In Every Fandom, ‘Anti-Fans’ Dominate the Algorithm
Log into any online social space and you’ll immediately notice something unsettling: Posts that dunk on people or particular subjects almost always dominate the conversation. And it’s not just trendy — it’s profitable.
In fandom spaces specifically, these posts are often from so-called “anti-fans” — people who deliberately oppose certain trends, ideas, or topics. Over time, anti-fandom has come to overwhelm almost every fandom, and there may be nothing we can do about it now.
I will use the two fandoms I associate myself with and am most familiar with culturally — Star Wars and Taylor Swift — as examples throughout my argument. The overarching points, however, span across fandoms of many kinds. These are just the ones I know best and feel most qualified to comment on specifically to demonstrate the anti-fandom phenomenon (and how we could reverse it, if we actually wanted to).
The Anatomy of Anti-Fandom
There are two types of anti-fans: Those residing outside of a particular fandom (“external”) who dedicate time and space to voicing their disdain for a person or subject, and those within a fandom (“internal”) who dedicate time and space to voicing their disdain for a group of people or niche subject within that fandom.
If a “fan” of a celebrity or franchise is an enthusiast or admirer, then an anti-fan is, by definition, an adversary or enemy. Can we call someone a Star Wars fan, for example, if their entire online persona centers on all the things they hate about Star Wars? Even if there are parts of Star Wars they claim to like, their anti-fandom tends to overpower their enthusiasm. Said enthusiasm is not enough to sustain their fandom, bringing in to question how much they actually care about being a fan.
It’s important not to confuse an anti-fan with a critic. Criticism is usually a fair and often essential segment of fandom. Fans of Taylor Swift (“Swifties”) are not anti-fans for questioning the carbon emissions generated by her private jet; they are warranted in their criticism of a celebrity they like, a person they admire but simultaneously want to see better behavior from. Critical fans only become anti-fans when their enthusiasm evaporates and is replaced almost entirely with “hate.”
External anti-fans — people who reside outside the Swiftie circle and simply do not like Taylor Swift — often raise criticisms of Swift and her music but don’t otherwise participate in the fandom culture.
There is nothing wrong with not liking Taylor Swift. Those who feed the algorithm in the most destructive ways are, usually, the fans and internal anti-fans who regularly engage with the fandom at large.
Why Fans Are Responsible for Anti-Fandom
It would be easy to solely blame anti-fans for teaching the algorithm to favor their content over everyone else’s. After all, they’re the ones who label some of Swift’s eras as immature bubblegum pop and tear apart Rian Johnson’s Star Wars movie because it’s too “woke” … right?
Fans are just as responsible for introducing toxic levels of negativity into the conversation — because every time an anti-fan shares their opinion (which they are entitled to do), fans respond.
It does not help that we continue to amplify anti-fans whether we’re intentional about it or not. Every time you quote-tweet a “bad take,” link to a controversial video, or name someone starting a fire for attention, you continue to train the algorithm to boost more bad takes and controversial videos just like the one you called attention to.
We’ve done this for so long — and still do it daily— that it has become the only “content” that goes viral. Not just because of the content itself, but also because of the people giving it views it does not deserve.
There will always be anti-fans — for every topic someone likes, there are those who despise it; culture thrives in discourse, and disagreement has the potential to inspire the formation of new groups of people with a common mission or interest. It is human nature to divide.
But the more fans and anti-fans toss the same arguments back and forth, the more we’re encouraged to reinforce the behavior even in our own smaller circles.
As Long As Anti-Fandom Yields Rewards, It’s Here to Stay
Anti-fandom will always have the support necessary to sustain itself — it is its own subset of a larger group, and even if every fan immediately disregarded every anti-fan, anti-fandom wouldn’t soon dissolve entirely. But it could eventually fall out of favor with the algorithm gods.
Perhaps internal anti-fandom would become less appealing even to anti-fans if the majority of fans ignored it. But that will never happen. Fans continue to react to anti-fans for the same reason anti-fans maintain their presence in the first place — because the practice is algorithmically pleasing. Anti-fans post, fans react, and all the while the algorithm is fed the same message over and over: Negativity is highly clickable. It makes everyone a winner. Until it doesn’t.
The cycle will never break. In this specific era of the digital age, almost everything we do online is for the sake of creating content — for the sake of some kind of gain (a social boost, money, a future professional opportunity). No matter how much we hate anti-fandom and don’t want it to continue, we will not stop encouraging its existence. The biggest thing fans and anti-fans have in common is that we are all slaves to capitalism and often will do what we have to do to remain afloat.
“Positive” posts might get engagement, but 90% of the time they do not lead to long-term gains. Being nice doesn’t guarantee you a paycheck. Many of the people who do make money online as part of their fandom either offer a product or service or become a fandom subset entity — someone within a specific fandom who has fans of their own, many of whom opt to financially support those entities.
It’s very rare to see one of these entities who isn’t an anti-fan profiting off their hatred. There are exceptions, but there are few.
Anti-fans have embedded themselves into the culture and have trained both the algorithm and fellow anti-fans to support their existence. It may be too late to undo the damage that has already been done.
Unless fans find a way to truly profit off fandom — something that’s nearly impossible to do for the majority of content creators — the algorithm will never side with us.
If we have in fact lost, it is, at least in part, our fault.
