[ SECRET POST #5518 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5518 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 42 secrets from Secret Submission Post #790.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Man, but I miss geocities. It was much better than AO3 for finding fics. Plus AO3 is the worlds biggest, least helpful, slushpile. I have never managed to find a fic on that on my own, the only times I've managed to find a fic worth reading on AO3 is when someone else has already waded through the slush and linked to it directly.

I'd actually prefer if everyone went back to maintaining their own site, with webrings and referral forums and mailing list services.

[(Anonymous)]

I think that just means you are bad at finding fic...

[(Anonymous)]

That's right, it is the children who are wrong.

[(Anonymous)]

In this instance, that Simpsons quote is actually correct.

[(Anonymous)]

This truth though.

[(Anonymous)]

Genuine question with no intent to be snide, how did one manage to find anything on geocities? Stumbling into something to my liking on one of countless standalone websites with no way to search or filter anything always felt like a very rare miracle to me.

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT, but webrings and messageboard recs, mostly.

[(Anonymous)]

Be in the in-group.

[(Anonymous)]

Yahoo email groups.

You could get your fic in email form and then if you were lucky they'd have a geocities or have posted it on ff.net. Some of the OLD authors would go into a website together so you'd have an entire site of fic dedicated to the one pairing to browse.

[(Anonymous)]

Geocities had neighborhoods of similar content. If you found a fic by a link, then you could explore around that neighborhood and often find other related fics. Also, HTML code at the time had a very easy-to-use index page where you could find all of the other pages that person had in case they didn't have a list.

IIRC, the search on Geocites was super easy to use too.

[(Anonymous)]

Geocities search feature was easy to use. So is AO3’s, so I don’t know what that anon’s deal is. But yeah, Geocities was great, and was much more user friendly than some of the other fandom related sites.

I’m talking to you AngelFire.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh man I miss my Geocities site. I spent SO MUCH TIME designing that hideous piece of crap. (I say this affectionately. Looking back on it, it really WAS hideous.) But it really made me feel like I was part of a community, because building your webrings and mailing lists and learning how to navigate the internet when it was still pretty new was-- it was an experience.

[(Anonymous)]

You can also just do a Google site search instead: "character" "fandom" site:archiveofourown.org

The AO3 search is very complex for a reason and seriously allows you to narrow your search as you go, but it also relies on authors to tag appropriately.

[(Anonymous)]

Whenever people complain about not being able to find fic, I always wonder "Why are so sure the fic even exists?" There isn't an endless font of good fic for every fandom/pairing/character. Maybe you got lucky with whatever you were looking for on Geocities being really popular but with FFN/AO3 you happen to be looking for stuff that just isn't as popular. I mean, I had no trouble finding Mulder/Scully fic back in the day, but that was because there was a shit-ton of it.

If you can't find the fic, you don't know there is actually fic to be found.

[(Anonymous)]

So your complaint isn't that you can't find fic, but rather that you can't find fic that YOU like. Those are two very different complaints.

[meadowphoenix]

Are you sure your problem isn't that people aren't doing the labor of curating fic for you? Because it sounds like that's your problem. And I hate to say it but tumblr helps.

[(Anonymous)]

AO3 is the worlds biggest, least helpful, slushpile.

I can remember when it was recommended as the place to find quality fic, and ff.net was derided as a pit of voles! How times change.

[(Anonymous)]

AO3 is still considered as the place to find quality fic, there’s just a vocal minority of being who have a bug up their butt about it for different reasons lately, a lot of those reasons dumb. So no “the times” haven’t changed, no need to get poetic.

And ff.net is a pit of voles, but I still love it! I will always cherish my memories of it. I even like AdultFanfiction.net a little.

[(Anonymous)]

AO3 has a rabid fanbase who never see a single thing wrong with the site, and get irrationally angry if you suggest otherwise. Dealing with them is just plain exhausting. And, yes, the site does have issues with its search functionality. You need to commit to learning the AO3 system before it becomes easy, if you just wander in off the street and want to just search then all it does is provide a shit tonne of crossovers, drabbles, and mega tagged material. If nothing else it needs a separate section for crossovers and a dropdown menu to exclude/include pairings.

[(Anonymous)]

There's an include and exclude tag function as well as some extensions you can add to your browser...

[(Anonymous)]

You seem almost determined to make it harder on yourself than it needs to be. I had the exact opposite experience when I first came to AO3, I thought it was very user friendly. So you talking so definitively, like there’s sooo much objective problems that rabid AO3 stans ~ just ignore as part of some stan agenda is a bit silly. If it’s frustrating for you, that’s understandable. But that doesn’t always make things valid criticism.

It’s not for everyone, and that’s fine. My experience of finding it easy isn’t everyone’s, but your experience of finding it hard isn’t either.

Maybe some AO3 fans can be irrational, but AO3 haters are just as much so. Not to mention they’re just as exhausting, with all the same subjective complaints, or that one anon’s bs about AO3 being some satanic cult trying to destroy the concept of copyright out of spite for authors or something.

[(Anonymous)]

You can exclude pairings (and I think crossovers) with the search function? And I did the internet equivalent of wandering in off the street the first time I used Ao3 and had no trouble searching for stuff. Honestly it was easier than using my local library's online catalogue.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah IDK what this anon is on about, you've always been able to include/exclude pairings in the search.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it comes down to what fandom you're looking for and what people happen to be writing for that fandom and how well the tag it. Sometimes you find a lot of crap because somehow that just became the fandom culture for that particular fandom. I've been able to just search by fandom or pairing and *not* find shitty crossovers because I got lucky and happened to be in a fandom where that just wasn't the done thing. Also, you can always look at other stuff a good author has written, look at people's bookmarks, and look at recommendations posted elsewhere. No one has taken away recs and word-of-mouth.