Fandom is a Pot-Luck Dinner

Long time readers will have seen this before, but I was prompted by something I read on Making Light about so-called "Puppy" authors who perceive themselves to being no longer invited to SF conventions because of their disruptive behavior with this year's Hugo Awards, and the apparent statements of, "But that will hurt your conventions' attendance!" from those people. The short answer to such statements is "why should we care?" Here's the longer version, based on what I posted to ML.

( Fandom is not a For-Profit Business )

One of the cultural disconnects of "winning the culture war," as Moshe Feder once put it, and of SF/F becoming so much a part of popular culture, is that you have a lot of people attempting to apply the commercial model to a fundamentally non-commercial venture. When you point out to these people that "This isn't our business; it's our hobby, and we're not in it to make a profit," they look at you blankly, because they can't conceive of anyone ever doing that much work unless they were Getting Paid.