Back in the day in fandom, say 10 years ago, fans were forced to stay together out of necessity. If you wanted access to information, there were very few places to get it. Information was just very centralized. People who entered that at the right time succeeded. Some of those centralized resources are still around. Think FanFiction.Net.
But then along came services like egroups, onelist, GeoCities and Tripod. Suddenly, fandom information was really decentralized. Fans could create small websites for extremely niche audience. If you were an author, that might just be your own stories. By posting them to your own private mailing list, by posting them to your own little website, you could have a lot more control. Power in fandom decentralized. And it became easier to have a much more specific fandom identity and not lack for new content.
But that model appears to have gone out the window with the advent of Web 2.0.
This post was submitted by fanhistory.