What is the point of all this, anyway?

Do you remember when Coca-Cola introduced the new Coke in 1985? Coke was losing market share to Pepsi, so they decided to reformulate Coke to make it sweeter. They conducted extensive taste tests and discovered that people preferred the new Coke to the old Coke by a significant margin. So they introduced it. Four months later, the original formula was reintroduced. (Well, I say original, but really, they took the opportunity to switch the sweetening agent from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup, but I'll leave that for another time.) New Coke was a marketing disaster. Coke failed to appreciate how attached Coke fans were to the classic flavor. The cries of outrage, the hoarding of the old flavor, the boycotts of the new flavor, the ridicule in the press, the jokes on late night TV could not be ignored. Coca-Cola made a mistake, the consumers let them know it, and Coca-Cola capitulated. The reintroduction of Coke Classic was welcomed by millions, Coke's market share rebounded, and they've never been beaten in sales by Pepsi since.

There's one small part of this story that is often overlooked. Everyone thinks it's the outrage of the fans of the original flavor that forced Coca-Cola to relent. That's not entirely true. After all, even after Classic Coke was reintroduced, taste tests showed people still preferred the new formula in blind taste tests. The real story was the influence of the minority who wanted the original flavor. It became fashionable to hate the new Coke. The insults, the mocking, the outright hatred was so popular, people who actually liked the new Coke were ridiculed. They were intimidated so much they were afraid to admit they liked it.

Nearly all fandom is like this. The people who love to mock and ridicule failure always have a greater sway on the silent majority of fans than the ones who recognize and praise the successes. It doesn't matter if it's anime, opera, Star Trek, stamp collecting, motorcycles or whatever. Negative always carries more weight then positive.

A couple of weeks before we started this site, I resigned my moderator status at a popular anime site, a place that had been my home on the internet for a decade. I came to the realization that the biggest obstacle to me enjoying my hobby were the fans themselves. I didn't want to have to defend not hating the latest hate-object any more. I didn't want to play cat-herder for a herd of ungrateful cats. It wasn't the hobbyI couldn't deal with any more. It was the fans.

I created a word a few years ago: nerdoscente, a portmanteau of "nerd" and "cognoscenti", to describe someone who is an expert in their hobby, but still enough of a nerd to love it. That doesn't mean someone unwilling to be critical. Instead of focusing on the negative, they simply acknowledge it and move on, focussing on the great things of their hobby, the things that made them love it in the first place. Mustafa came up with the idea of hosting our own website, somewhere on the web where we could talk about and celebrate all the things in this life that we love. So we started Staxbros.com. We've only just begun, and we're still working out what we want to do with it. But to us, it's the place where we can be nerdoscente, giving love to the things we feel deserve love. If you've got the time, check our site out. See what you think. And in the mean time, enjoy what you enjoy.

Lincoln Stax

Mustafa Stax