Counting Carrds: Investigating Personal Disclosure and Boundary Management in Transformative Fandom

The privacy practices of transformative fandom are of interest to HCI researchers both for the community’s high proportion of queer members and for the community’s sophisticated privacy norms and behaviors. We investigated fans’ use of single-serving websites on Carrd.co (“Carrds”) as personal profiles linked from Twitter accounts. We scraped Twitter to gather 5252 Carrds from fans in a variety of fandoms, which we analyzed using a combination of keyword searches and hand-coding. Fans’ Carrds frequently disclose queer identity, and articulate a complex system of community values and boundary management. Inspired by how these findings aren’t well-explained by individual theories of privacy, we articulate first steps towards a theory of collective privacy based in a communal process of values construction, trust building, and personal disclosure that we believe helps us to understand the sophisticated nature of fans’ observed behaviors.