You could also argue that most of the good fan content has been co opted into the game itself. The best material has been brought into the current version of the game, as well as the best fans as direct contributors rather then independent ones.
This. This is important because the same time that web fandom seems to have declined, fandom's impact on the game itself skyrocketed.
There are a lot of factors. The reason for the decline can be attributed to a number of factors (FASA closing being far and away the biggest according to everyone I've talked to about the sudden drop off in support around 2000-2001). Some of the most popular sites also had server and other technical issues around the same time for various reasons, and that drove people away. FanPro making a home at DS helped it, but Shadowland never recovered from its high of having over 10,000 users after the Great Crash. It didn't help that around the time that happened Dave Hyatt—who had become a freelancer writing RA:S and Brainscan—no longer had any interest in running what was until the end the most technically sophisticated SR website ever because he had to go do stupid shit like invent Firefox, Safari, and Dashboard for OS X. If Grifter was who I recall him to be (AKA Corwin), then he's a piece of shit who was run off, and good riddance.
Technically, no one has homepages that they can make into fan sites—which is what the web was when it began. SR has had one of the largest and most organized online fandoms since before there was a World Wide Web. But now it's blogs and social media. Internet usage is going
down except for Facebook. Shadowrun has over 12,000 fans on there. CGL and Jason have twitter feeds. But let's not pretend that the pieces of shit spreading the bullshit rumors of CGL's/SR's doom for the last two years hasn't hurt the game itself. It has. Fans can be bastards, too.
But the main point is important. All of the freelancers that followed the creators were fans. Peter Taylor showed that a committed effort by fans can really affect things. He went from a dude on DS to Line Developer in six-seven years and had an indelible impact on the line beyond the original EuroSB/Shadows of Europe project.
The product has changed as well. I always held that there were plenty of people who came before Bobbie Derie and plenty who would come after. Now, I'm not so sure. Who needs an archivist when you can search every products made in the last decade simultaneously?
Access to information has changed, too. Unless you want to go all-out and create new stuff (Novel for SR at times, I know), in which case it is irrelevant, you don't need the NAGEE writeups of Pueblo and Vegas; Blackjack's pieces on Philly; or the Shadows of Winnipeg, MSP, or Cleveland. This is actually related to the last tumblr post I made:
Micro + Macro Setting Info, and Expansion, Generally. In 22 years, especially in the last decade, Shadowrun has finally covered
most of the world. It's less of a mystery, and less of a blank slate to do whatever you want with. Ten years ago, there was still mystery: The only location books were for North America (including Aztlan), Hawaii, London, and Germany. FanPro gave us Australia, Shadows of Europe, and Shadows of Asia. The SR4 locations books gave us chapters or briefs on South America, Africa, Europe, most parts of Asia. We have two decades worth of storyline and major characters. No one feels a compelling interest to make their own NPC lists because ... FASA, FanPro, and CGL all got around to doing it themselves.
No one puts character sheets up anymore because since 1994 there were places where you could pit your PCs vs. those of someone living 10,000 miles away. The official forums even have a PBP area. So the info's out there, but only if you're looking for it. It's not the entirety of some dude's page that comes up when you hit Random on the Shadowrun Web Ring.
And, yes, people come and go. Different fans have different compelling reasons to provide information. My first writing collaborator stopped writing about SR specfor when he went to become a Navy SEAL. The second one was into designing weapons, and there is so much
stuff in SR now what's the point? When FASA basically appropriated Peter Milhollands' Firearms Creation Guide (that Raygun modified and ran with. But the original FCG was Spud's) we had a vigorous discussion, especially in light of him studying IP law in law school at the time. What ultimately happened was instead he became a freelancer, and then he disappeared off the face of the Earth. A lot of PBEM/PBP players are writing what is in fact collaborative fiction. Well, guess what. The guy who won all of tisoz's fiction contests is a freelancer now. We don't play/write together anymore for fun much—it's our job now. He plays other games for fun. I am (finally) learning Battletech and Hero.
But mainly, it's the fact that the Shadowrun community has grown closer through message boards like this and DS. I can say, "Go back and look at BKK or Blackjack. They're not as good as you remember." And they aren't. What they had were site authors who constantly updated their pages. Let's not pretend that most SR sites weren't just basic HTML that someone put up once when they got a free public_html folder as part of their college account and then never touched it again. Those guys are exceptional because they were so uncommon. They had
pages, and
folders, and
images. They updated the pages, and they provided a fairly decent amount of content compared to 95% of SR pages on the WWW. But even the "good" ones died when they weren't maintained. That some of them were hosted beginning around ten years ago by the de facto official message board/site didn't do anyone any favors—the authors, DS, or FanPro for giving them some imprimatur of official sanction. Same as the timeline explorer never getting fixed or updated (Again, a decade ago). Same with the wiki now.
The games evolves. The fanbase evolves. Fact is that the "Good" sites got good word of mouth because that's really how you found them. You pop into r.g.f.c or ShadowRN and ask "Hey, what's a good site?" Now you hit Google. You visit the FB fan page. You visit the official website and the official forums. If you want to put a free site together, you're pretty much limited to a blog format: tumblr, wordpress, blogspot, or livejournal for the fossils. Geocities is GONE. Qwest and Comcast don't give you a free homepage when you sign up now (to my knowledge). If you want to host a website, you have to
host a website. Even Mac.com charges you a fee. I can't even get around to buying a domain name for my close friends to host a full-blown site. But what is a full-blown SR site going to be or look like anymore? Every creative content producer I know has insisted that they need to maintain a broad spectrum presence. You need a regular website (which is often a mirror of your tumblr), a tumblr, a twitter stream, a FB fan page, and so on. There is so much media that there isn't time for much content. No one cares if you dump a half-meg of setting info on the message board anymore. You do that in a ShadowRN e-mail in 1994 and you're in deep shit.
I think the idea of a Good Old Days is just that: an idea. Nostalgia is a motherfucker. I can't stand it. Nothing is going to bring back Shadowland. Even if it did, it wouldn't be the same because I am not the person I was five, ten, fifteen years ago (I hope). A new gamer now doesn't necessarily want the experience I want. I wanted to game without having to deal with, ugh, other gamers IRL. Now I do. But if someone has a cool idea and content, they're probably going to publish it here and/or DS. That way you get instant feedback and someone else eats all the costs and BS of hosting the data.
