TTFeb: Truly a ramble on AO3

china_shop prompted: Something about AO3?

Just to uh, calibrate expectations: this is an observational ramble, without a thesis.

From my time and experiences in fic fandom, AO3 represents a particularly unique phenomenon: a centralized repository that nearly everyone uses. You might think, oh, but FFN was just as dominant, but no! For at that time, a significant portion of anime fandom resided on private or communal websites; some of those websites may have encapsulated entire canons or ships, or we might count mediaminer, which served as an alternative FFN-like archive for anime fandom. And jpop and kpop fandom was so locked down that I don't think any of it really lived on FFN. Alternatively, you might argue from the other direction: significant portions of fic fandom live on Wattpad or scattered on threadfics on twitter or one offs on tumblr etc etc. True! But the gravity of fic fandom is towards AO3, in a way that no other archive managed /in my experience/.

This has significant upsides: for all the lack of an API, encoding troubles, tagging battles, a centralized interface is so much easier to navigate. You can just reskin everything permanently! You can easily navigate to all the works by an author without having to figure out where their masterlist is, or how they tagged their fics in their LJ. And it's significantly easier for authors to navigate too, having to figure out how to upload once and not fighting html unless they want to.

On the other hand... centralization shoves everyone together and makes it hard to establish norms and boundaries. Having no social media directly attached makes some problems easier (harassment is harder and it's easier to disengage), but some problems harder (really difficult to establish norms when there's no place everyone hangs out hmm). And I say boundaries because it's really clear that different circles of fandom have wildly different norms-- and now we've all been shoved together and those edges are sharp. How much easier would it be to avoid t/b wank if we just had separate websites / comms / mailing lists we hung out on? (Though that's also a tumblr-and-twitter caused problem, not unique to AO3.)

Also we come to the problem with centralization that it makes it hard for alternatives to spring up. If people still regularly posted their fic elsewhere, would those places be more vibrant from the extra foot traffic? Yeah, I know there are AO3 clones running around etc, but would fandom be more flexible from the choices offered? Maybe not, fandom is so big now that it seems that there ought to be enough people who'd try out a new platform and bud off if it offered something better. But are people still interested in trying new ways to post fic? People are dissatisfied with any given social media platform, so move from tumblr to twitter to discord, but every complaint about AO3 and suggestion to 'make something new' tends to be very... AO3 like in structure. Add tags! Add warnings! Change how fandoms are grouped! Get rid of tags!

(OK I am still partial to June's suggestion of getting rid of all stats like things to make AO3 a more pure repository of fic.)

Still, with fandom scattered on social media, it's nice to have one place where people can mingle, such as it is. It used to be (...still is, apparently) that to get on jpop LJ comms, you'd have to submit an essay. With people increasingly turning to more closed social media (private discords, locked twitters) (just in my observation, obviously), AO3 remaining public is nice to serve as a connectivity point between all these different fandom circles, even if it sometimes feels like, once again, you have to submit an essay to join.

Back to masterlist <- Also, there's still space if people want to give prompts!