Second that as the central argument. i've already found a couple of vids that I didn't download for one reason or another (often vidders I like but not in my fandom), and i think if more people go, we'll have that option even more. Right now, most people over there are names I know, whose vids i'd probably download anyway. but what about the vidders where you'd never waste your time and bandwidth, yet here you can do it quickly and check it out?

i agree that the outness debate and imeem connect on some level, but I also think it's not a simple dichotomy but rather a spectrum of options. As far as I'm concerned (as a non-vidder and thus being nowhere in the position y'all are), I'm one of those people who talks about female fan cultures at conferences and noone comes. And everyone talks about the boys. And, yes, that hurts for myself, but also for my sense of the community. Vids are out there, but they are decontextualized, on youtube by vidders who may not have the context themselves, praised by people who have no idea that they're part of a large and proud tradition.

And that's ultimately the reason I think it may be useful to talk about it more openly...and that may not necessarily mean that everyone posts publically playing a game of chicken, but it might mean showing vids and explaining their contextual meaning to people who think they're the only ones doing cool stuff and what we do is what ends up on youtube... [which is not to say that all vids on youtube are bad--far from it, but Sturgeon's law and all :-)]