Fancurating

Fancurating is the practice by which fans organize, categorize, and evaluate media content according to audience preferences rather than professional critique. The term blends "fan" and "curation" and is used in online fan communities to describe activities such as creating ranked lists, tagging items with genres or themes, assembling collaborative playlists, and compiling recommendations. The term has no single universal definition and usage varies between communities. The process is typically crowd-sourced: participants contribute ratings, annotations, and links, and platforms may aggregate these inputs to generate dashboards, lists, or suggested streams. Fancurating can occur on fan wikis, dedicated apps, social media threads, streaming playlists, and newsletters, and it often aims to surface popular or underappreciated works within a particular fandom or across genres.

Practices commonly involve tagging items by attributes (e.g., compatibility with a ship, tone, era), voting to rank items, and curating collections that others can explore. Moderation or community guidelines may be used to filter spoilers or ambiguous content. Fancurating supports discovery, community building, and a sense of collective taste-making; it can also aid archival efforts by preserving fan-made lists and metadata.

Critiques note that fancurating can reflect popularity bias, be susceptible to coordinated manipulation, and underrepresent marginalized works or voices. As a form of participatory culture, it complements professional criticism by offering democratized, user-driven perspectives, though it may diverge from conventional evaluative standards.