Group Think

Gotta admit I've got an ambivalent attitude toward the proliferation of Yahoo! Groups on the web. Seems like barely a week goes by without a new one trumpeting its existence (they're nearly as rabbity as blogs!) Oh look, here's another collection of amateur fat graphics! Hey, there's another intermingling of real and fake feedees! Here's a group devoted to an artist who'll never show any new free stuff again on the Internet 'coz he's aligned himself with Expandemonium!

Yeah, Wilson's being cranky. But for all that they provide cheap-&-easy space to FAs eager to offer their own vision of beauteousness to the world, there's a clunkiness to the group format that I personally find off-putting. The monotonous front page looks ugly, and the Files and Photo folder template is a strain to rummage through over time. I know that putting together your own website is a lot more time intensive and requires a small amount of studying, but if done right, it can be so much visitor friendly. And is there anything more frustrating than seeing a new message that promises a newly uploaded file – only to discover that it's spam for some frigging dating service?

I know: Yahoo! (and MSNBC) Groups are a freebie service and a convenience – and a lotta young FAs probably would still be in hiding if they didn't have this outlet for their fantasies. And there are some groups that I genuinely enjoy seeing updated: Koudelka's Fatter Than Reality and US Cartoon Comic Book Heroines Get Fat groups immediately come to mind, but I also like the idea that older artists like Bigggie and Jay Tee have tribute sites managed by an FA fan of theirs. Yet the html aesthete in me still wishes that we had more full-blown open fat appreciation pages on the web than we do "members only" clubs. There's something intrinsically hermetic about the whole Group scene that goes against my personal grain. . .