#go read this on ao3

[bardofavon]

not to be controversial bc I know this is like…not in line with shifting opinions on fanfic comment culture but if there’s a glaring typo in my work I will NOT be offended by pointing it out. if ao3 fucks up the formatting…I will also not be offended by having this pointed out…

‘looking forward to the next update’ and ‘I hope you update soon!’ are different vibes than a demand, and should be read in good faith because a reader is finding their way to tell you how much they love it. I will not be mad at this.

‘I don’t usually like this ship but this fic made me feel something’ is also incredibly high praise. I’m not going to get mad at this.

even ‘I love this fic but I’m curious about why you made [x] choice’ is just another way a reader is engaging in and putting thought into your work.

I just feel like a lot of authors take any comment that’s not perfectly articulated glowing praise in the exact manner they’re hoping to receive it in bad faith.

fic engagement has been dropping across the board over the last several years, and yes it’s frustrating but it isn’t as though I can’t see how it happens. comment anxiety can be a real thing. the last thing anyone wants to do is offend an author they love, and that means sometimes people default to silence.

idk where I’m going with this I guess aside from saying unless a comment is outright attacking me I’m never going to get mad at it, and I think a lot of authors should feel the same way. ESPECIALLY TYPOS PLZ GOD POINT OUT MY TYPOS.

#ao3 #archive of our own #fanfiction #tbh even if I got a comment that said ‘I hate you I’m going to kill your family’ on chapter 75 it still means they read 75 chapters first…. #it just makes me sad to see so many writers shouting into the void #and also see ppl complain openly about the specific types of comments they receive #posting screenshots on Reddit like ‘should I be mad at this’ CALM DOWN #sigh

[flowercrowngods]

when ao3 is back up i want all of you to leave comments on the fics you were interrupted from reading, the fics you were looking to find, the fics you were thinking about re-reading, and the fics left open in your tabs for months now.

when ao3 is back up, i want you all to show some love to your favourite writers, favourite fics, or even just the 600 word one-shot that brought a smile to your face that tuesday three weeks ago.

when ao3 is back up i want you all to remember that comments and explicitly voiced appreciation are what keep writers going.

#when ao3 is back up i want you to realise that this lack of fics to read is also what will happen if they go uncommented and unappreciated #ao3 #and while ao3 is still down go to your tumblr writers and leave them some love too

[givemeureyes]

day 1 without ao3: i have gone through all 5 stages of grief multiple times and have invented a 6th. i will not disclose what the 6th stage of grief is.

#I AM GOING INSANE #what am i supposed to do?? #’you should work on your WIP’ NO I CANTTT #‘ read actual books on your real bookshelf’ NUH UH #ao3 #archive of our own #i’m tagging ships #malec #destiel #hannigram #jonmartin #tomgreg #kenstewy #imagine all the fics i could be reading rn

[ao3-crack]

(x)

#archive of our own #ao3 quotes #ao3 stuff #archive of our own quotes #fanfic #fanfic quotes #funny #ao3 #ao3 tags #basically I wrote this for myself #but you can read it too #me with all of my fics #seriously I write them for myself #then I go through my wips and wonder why no one has updated them in so long

[fonulyn]

since I've seen it talked about in several places recently:

if you are going to do a whump- or kink- or ANY-tober or other similar challenges please please please don't post them as one fic with 31 chapters unless it actually is one coherent fic. if they're 31 completely separate fics or ficlets then please just make a collection for them or just post them as separate fics. it doesn't matter if they're only 100 words or if you think they're too small or insignificant to post alone, they're not.

and why this?

because if you post all 31 of them in one fic the tagging is absolutely useless. if I look for things to read on ao3 I'm gonna look at the tags, and if the tags include something that's a dealbreaker for me, i won't even click on the fic. I might not even SEE the fic because I've filtered out the nope-tag! so I'm gonna lose out on reading 30 perfectly nice fics because of one fic that my nope-tag applied to.

ao3 is about archiving. it's about clear tagging and being informative. there is nothing informative about it if the tags in the fic apply to random chapters while others have nothing to do with it. it makes so much more sense to have each work as an individual fic with its own individual tags and warnings, so readers can make informed choices.

of course, you do you. I can't police what other people decide to do. but personally, I find it incredibly frustrating to weed through 31 chapters to find the ones I actually want to read. so I don't. I automatically scroll past all works posted like that. and I know some others do, too.

there is absolutely no shame in posting short things on ao3. there is no minimum word count. no one is going to look at you funny if you post a small ficlet on its own, I promise. it's just going to make some readers very happy when they can actually find the things they want to read.

so, please. at least consider the upsides of posting each work as their own fic.

signed, one very frustrated fandom grandma.

#ao3 #fanfic #fandom #I'm not trying to dictate what others do #so if you still wanna keep posting #completely unrelated works as chapters of one thing #then go for it #i'm not your mom #but please at least consider the alternative #and how much easier it'll be for people to #both find it and to make informed choices #of what they want to read

[morally-earl-grey]

#SHES BACK UP #THANK YOU AO3 VOLUNTEERS #I LOVE YOU #badge of honor #we did it boys #ao3 #archive of our own #never scare me like that again #I’m gonna go read my Wolfstar heavy angst #sleeping was so hard last night #fanfiction #fanfic #ao3 ddos

[5ummit]

AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

It hasn’t crossed my tumblr dash but it sure is circulating on twitter with 3.5M views, 10K likes, 17K retweets and counting. Normally this would be great! I love data and charts and comparisons!

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

I first noticed something fishy when I realized that Steve/Bucky – the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count – wasn’t on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvel’s popularity has fallen in recent years, but not that much. Especially considering some of the other ships that made it on the list. You mean to tell me a femslash HP ship (Mary MacDonald/Lily Potter) in which one half of the pairing was so minor I had to look up her name because she was only mentioned once in a single flashback scene beat fandom juggernaut Stucky? I call bullshit.

Now obviously jumping to conclusions based on gut instinct alone is horrible practice... but it is a good place to start. So let’s look at the actual numbers and discover why this entire dataset sits on a throne of lies.

Here are the results of filtering the Steve/Bucky tag for all works created between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2023:

Not only would that place Steve/Bucky at #23 on this list, if the other counts are correct (hint: they're not), it’s also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Let’s check out the author’s FAQ to see if there’s some important factor we’re missing.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in the FAQ is that the data is being scraped from publicly available works. That means anything privated and only accessible to logged-in users isn’t counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because we’re not actually counting all of the published fics, but the bots needed to do data collection on this scale can't easily scrape privated fics so I kinda get it. We’ll roll with this for now and see if it at least makes the numbers make more sense:

Nope. Logging out only reduced the total by a couple hundred. Even if one were to choose the most restrictive possible definition of "new works" and filter out all crossovers and incomplete fics, Steve/Bucky would still have a yearly total of 2,305. Yet the list claims their total is somewhere below 1,500? What the fuck is going on here?

Let’s look at another ship for comparison. This time one that’s very recent and popular enough to make it on the list so we have an actual reference value for comparison: Nick/Charlie (Heartstopper). According to the list, this ship sits at #34 this year with a total of 2630 new works. But what’s AO3 say?

Off by a hundred or so but the values are much closer at least!

If we dig further into the FAQ though we discover Sin #2 (and the most egregious): the counting method. The yearly fic counts are NOT determined by filtering for a certain time period, they’re determined by simply taking a snapshot of the total number of fics in a ship tag at the end of the year and subtracting the previous end-of-year total. For example, if you check a ship tag on Jan 1, 2023 and it has 10,000 fics and check it again on Jan 1, 2024 and it now has 12,000 fics, the difference (2,000) would be the number of "new works" on this chart.

At first glance this subtraction method might seem like a perfectly valid way to count fics, and it’s certainly the easiest way, but it can and did have major consequences to the point of making the entire dataset functionally meaningless. Why? If any older works are deleted or privated, every single one of those will be subtracted from the current year fic count. And to make the problem even worse, beginning at the end of last year there was a big scare about AI scraping fics from AO3, which caused hundreds, if not thousands, of users to lock down their fics or delete them.

The magnitude of this fuck up may not be immediately obvious so let’s look at an example to see how this works in practice.

Say we have two ships. Ship A is more than a decade old with a large fanbase. Ship B is only a couple years old but gaining traction. On Jan 1, 2023, Ship A had a catalog of 50,000 fics and ship B had 5,000. Both ships have 3,000 new works published in 2023. However, 4% of the older works in each fandom were either privated or deleted during that same time (this percentage is was just chosen to make the math easy but it’s close to reality).

Ship A: 50,000 x 4% = 2,000 removed works Ship B: 5,000 x 4% = 200 removed works

Ship A: 3,000 - 2,000 = 1,000 "new" works Ship B: 3,000 - 200 = 2,800 "new" works

This gives Ship A a net gain of 1,000 and Ship B a net gain of 2,800 despite both fandoms producing the exact same number of new works that year. And neither one of these reported counts are the actual new works count (3,000). THIS explains the drastic difference in ranking between a ship like Steve/Bucky and Nick/Charlie.

How is this a useful measure of anything? You can't draw any conclusions about the current size and popularity of a fandom based on this data.

With this system, not only is the reported "new works" count incorrect, the older, larger fandom will always be punished and it’s count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesn’t even take into account that people are going to be way more likely to delete an old fic they're no longer proud of in a fandom they no longer care about than a fic that was just written, so the deletion percentage for the older fandom should theoretically be even larger in comparison.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the author of this "study" KNEW the data was tainted and chose to present it as meaningful anyway. You will only find this if you click through to the FAQ and read about the author’s methodology, something 99.99% of people will NOT do (and even those who do may not understand the true significance of this problem):

The author may try to argue their post states that the tags "which had the greatest gain in total public fanworks” are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewer’s part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column “New Works” which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled “Net Gain in Works” or something similar.

Even if it were correctly titled though, the general public would not understand the difference, would interpret the numbers as new works anyway (because net gain is functionally meaningless as we've just discovered), and would base conclusions on their incorrect assumptions. There’s no getting around that… other than doing the counts correctly in the first place. This would be a much larger task but I strongly believe you shouldn’t take on a project like this if you can’t do it right.

To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesn’t mean the data is GOOD or VALUABLE.

#ao3 #ao3 stats #psa #my words #fandom #I doubt anyone is even going to read this but I needed to get it out of my system and at least try to stop this from spreading #if you know me #you know I get Big Mad about misinformation #don't take anything at face value #do your own research

[endlesslycoffee]

barely but we did it

#ao3 #i have a new perspective on life now #im going to love more #to enjoy more #to say how much things mean to me more #i love yall #we did it fellas #back to reading now #byler #cause thats the fics i was searching for

[writeouswriter]

People sorting ao3 solely by stats and only clicking on fics with a certain amount of kudos or comments, you will not survive the winter, nor the summer, nor at all, *brings out knife,* run

#ao3 #fanfiction #because if everyone thinks like that then so many fics that might be great get buried and fall into the void #someone has to read it with no hits or kudos #not to mention sometimes people just have wildly different tastes so you don't know unless you look at it yourself #i put a bunch of exclusion filters and then go by summary and tags and open all the ones that sound interesting to me #if they're bad well easy enough to move on #but lotta good ones hidden in there with not a comment in sight and i must change that #knife tw #? #tw knife mention

[magicaltimelady44]

so like. if anyone else, like me, still has the occasional fanfic they follow on fanfiction.net, and hasn't been getting the update emails for the longest time and was wondering if ti meant the site is on its last legs

no

no they've done something stupid as fuck

you have to opt back in to getting the emails/notifications of new chapters every six months, because they automatically assume you don't want to know when the fics you followed for the updates have updated

#for fucks saaaaaaake #now i have to go back thorugh all the fics i follow to see if they've updated in the last like year #ffn why are you doing this #this is the shit that drives ppl to ao3 #and for the record i don't like ao3 purely because somehow ffn still has the better accessible reading options on its base site #without requiring you to log in and find [or code your own] site skin. it's just on the base site. #dark/light mode and increasing text size on a fanfic archive should not be a logged-in members-only coding-required thing

[frownyalfred]

I cannot emphasize this enough: sometimes the draft sucks because you keep looking at it. It doesn’t actually suck. You just need to post it and stop beating yourself up.

#fic #fanfic #fanfiction #writing #writing things #ao3 #archive of our own #I promise bestie #it’s the same energy as #‘do my friends all hate me or do I just need to go to sleep’ #seriously all the cool moments and scenes you write will never be as cool to you since you’ve read them 109 times #but the readers will be seeing them for the first time!

[verynonyideas]

#I was actually about to update one of my fanfics when a Destiel Meme notified me of the outage. 🙃 #archive of our own #ao3 #ao3 outage #fanfiction problems #fanfiction writer problems #fanfiction reader problems #this mostly calls myself out #if I didn’t post then I was gunna read…now I gotta go to bed like a responsible adult #and yes…I spent way too much time on this instead of just going to bed #okay I spent an hour on it but still #supernatural memes giving me the news again #destiel news #news via Destiel meme

[lokorum]

so....................i've read unraveled the other day.................... and then ive re-read it.........and now im in the middle of re-reading it again????

honestly cant promise that im not gonna keep coming back to it until someone would steal my phone and then i'll just log in from the pc lets be real here (¬‿¬ ) but!!! what i wanted to say is that its just such a good fic?? so well written? it has all the right words in just the right order and i can and will argue till late night that it healed part of myself that i had no idea existed. these descriptions of hugs??? gonna stay with me untill the very end  (*_ _)人  

and drawing something is the least i can do to show just how much your work means, @2btheanswertothequestion  (/▿＼ )

"unraveled" became my spiderverse canon since the moment ive finished chapter one and it will stay this way!!! thank you so so much for all the long hours and all the hard work you clearly had put into it!! you're amazing!! ♡

#hobie brown #punkflower #miles x hobie #hobie spiderverse #spider punk #spiderverse fanart #spiderverse #across the spiderverse #atsv fanart #atsv #gosh i wish i knew english better just to get a liiiiittle bit closer to a proper description of how cool this fic is #and how happy and cozy it made me feel #im not leaving comments on ao3 bc well i cant write shit #but i hope its okay and not creepy that i made fanart??? #i could keep nervouslybuzzing here #or i could go #FINISH READING IT FOR THE THIRD TIME LFDKJGLKDFJG

[lucabyte]

I don't know how everyone isn't also always constantly thinking about how burial rites seem to be potentially one of the few things Siffrin instinctively remembers about their culture. But rest assured. I am in fact always thinking about it.

Textless version where they're just hanging out. It's fine!

#love how i said id slow down on fanart. and then didnt. anyway. the bg is supposed to be a ocean shore but its vague intentionally. #ALSO SORRY FOR DRAWING EVERYONE FACING AWAY FROM THE CAMERA ALL THE TIME? WHY DO I KEEP DOING THAT IN MY ISAT STUFF. HELLO? HELLO??? WHY??? #in stars and time #isat fanart #isat #isat spoilers #isat siffrin #isat loop #siffrin #sifloop #lucabyteart #hi again sifloop tag. read this as you will. go nuts. i know you people are here for the crumbs. #if you want other thoughts re: what they do/do not remember on instinct. i wonder what their culture's bonding ceremony equiv is. #since they dont seem to have any answers to that. perhaps since not directly asked during that conversation. hm. feels like a cute fic idea #not that ill be executing on that. #ill be damned if i bare my ass on ao3. i can barely write about my ocs without feeling like im naked on stage. i salute your kind's bravery #also sorry if the dialogue here is hard to parse what order its in. its a zigzag of some kind im not fighting my absolutely ass typesetting #samdontlook

[nelkey]

Hey guys! Since ao3 is down and we're all craving fics, would anybody want to join a shared drive folder and upload their downloaded ao3 fics to it with folders divided by fandoms/ships/gen etc for anyone to read?

But please, anyone who uses it has to go give kudos and thank the writers in the comments after the attacks are over, we can get through this!

#ao3 #ao3 ddos attacks #since ao3 is back now is the time to go support writers on there #please don't read from the drive folder anymore so writers get the support they deserve

[dinlvkes]

so...

... ao3 is down again

#ao3 #ao3 is down #again #FUCK #AHHHH #AND JUST AS I WAS GOING TO READ THE NEW UPDATE OF MY FAV FIC WHICH I'VE BEEN SAVING ALL DAY