[ SECRET POST #7024 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #7024 ⌋

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


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[British comedian Jimmy Carr]



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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 24 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1003.
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

[fscom]

06. https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/64003d65e435.png

Transcript by OP

[fscom]

I think AO3 and Fanfiction.net have both harmed fandom and fanfic communities in the same way. By creating a central archive with its own culture, they've flattened the diversity which was prevalent in the era in which fanfic and fandom was hosted on individual websites and limited forums. I think both of them need to close for new accounts for a few years, so that people get used to building their own sites and develop their own voices once again instead of writing to the preexisting site audience.

Re: Transcript by OP

[(Anonymous)]

Ten/ten trolling.

[(Anonymous)]

Really giving ‘I was into fan-fiction before it was cool’ vibes lmao.

[(Anonymous)]

Lol. What diversity?

[(Anonymous)]

loving the "grass is always greener" image choice, secret-maker!

and also no. forbidding new accounts from any fanfic archive is not going to bring back webrings. sorry, brosis, that age has passed, it's not ever coming back. FFN was around when we were still posting our fic first on our private shrines, and that didn't change the quality. these days most of the kids are posting first on tumblr, twitter, etc and getting their urge to archive it from that audience. if you take issue with the quality, blame social media's overall influence on fandom, not AO3 existing.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah like why would someone make a new site when they can just make a tumblr. The NSFW rules doesn't really apply to the written word there

[(Anonymous)]

Was there *ever* a time fics were mainly distributed via forums or personal sites? because even when skimming fanlore, it seemed like specific fandoms (Tolkein, RPF, etc.) had their archives, with some generalized archives (ffn, mediaminer) at the same time. Multifandom sites have existed since the mid-90s at the latest. OP is yearning for a time that didn't exist.

[(Anonymous)]

I ran one, so yeah, but it really was the wild fuckin west out there. Personal sites, forums, sites built to move off forums (I saw so many start up when all the fanboys on theforce.net whined about fanfic on the forums), ff.n, then aff.n and then not because oh no porn, etc. There were a lot of options, forums were usually pretty unregulated while individual sites dedicated to one or a handful of overlapping fandoms were maintained at the whim of one would-be BNF who could be generous and accept all submissions or...the opposite. Basically, any iteration of a way to post a fic was all going on at the same time while FF.N was at its peak. Everything co-existed, but other anons are right that the wonky geocities/angelfire sites were getting lost all the time, it's frankly for the best we have a stable archive - and one that's preserving 90s fic from said sites!

[(Anonymous)]

Any plan relying on "people should just..." isn't going to work. Sorry.

[(Anonymous)]

This is so true.

[(Anonymous)]

Man, I should have had that on a big poster in my office when I was still in public policy.

[dani_phantasma]

I have a bit of fondness for the webring era but....no. Most people don't want to make a whole damn site just to post fanfiction. Regardless of it's weirdly invested haters Ao3 has been a net good for fandom. A place to post your own work, where you as the creator have the power to protect yourself (via Comment screening settings) and also allowance of tags to avoid things you don't wanna see.

Sorry not sorry that is my take.

[(Anonymous)]

But a lot of stuff on random little websites is going to be lost when the websites go down. And it's harder for people to find it. I can't see an advantage to that, I'm sorry

[(Anonymous)]

But there were individual sites and fan archives alongside ff.net for years.

Idk. I get missing the diversity of fan spaces but I don't really agree with your logic of why they went away.

Good secret though!

[(Anonymous)]

So... it sucks that people prefer search and filter buttons?

[starfleetbrat]

It wouldn't work because a lot of people just do not want to learn to make their sites these days.

Neocities and nekoweb exist and are awesome and there are lots of people there who DO want to learn and make sites (and there are some who post their fanfic to them too), but, there are also people who enter the community and say "I don't want to learn how to code to make a site, who has time for that/I'm too lazy/its too hard so I'm just going to use AI to generate one for me instead" which defeats the purpose imo. So in terms of fanfic, might as well just be posting to A03, FF.net or tumblr or something in that case

[(Anonymous)]

I agree AO3 did a bit, but the forum system helped FF.net less one note.

[(Anonymous)]

FWIW, I agree with you. I'd rather the difficulty.

[(Anonymous)]

I get where you're coming from, but:
1. Using central archives and having a personal site or "limited forums" aren't mutually exclusive. Doing both is good. Hosting fics on fansites won't last forever, but hosting on a site that regularly has people funding server costs will stay around long enough for people to archive.

2. Central archives aren't the fault of communities and forums dying, that's modern internet and social media. I think Strikethrough, Twitter, and Tumblr's porn ban killed fandom more than AO3, tbh.

3. Personal sites still exist! Check out Neocities! Check out Nekoweb! There are tons of free and paid hosts out there! But building a website and learning HTML has a higher learning curve, some people want to interact with one another instead of pouring hours into a website few people will see.

Where are these forums to communicate in and webrings to join? I can't find any for my few fandoms. Every time I've tried to start a grassroots community off social media, nobody I know joins in. I made a website, I have a Dreamwidth account, I have my own personal email. They're barely used for connection because there's so few people.

And frankly, as someone with health issues and spends most of my time working, I don't have *time* to pour energy into running an obscure forum or Dreamwidth community no one would join. That's the last thing I do when I come home from an 8 hour shift from work, usually in pain to boot. It's not a crime if I want to just upload my work to a place people will actually see it and have leisure time.

4. Speaking as an indie webmaster... Funny how you say FFN/AO3 users end up "writing to the preexisting site audience" when I fell into doing that myself when maintaining a site. I developed an audience after a few years and I both feel like I need to pander or avoid them now. I've known webmasters who deleted or moved domains due to their audience. I'm really tired of people waxing nostalgia about these alleged good old days. I personally do recommend as many people look into learning HTML and having a website as possible, but making a website has done fuck all to fix The State Of Things.

[(Anonymous)]

What is the preexisting site audience in this case, though? There's nothing unifying the users of AO3 other than that they're all people who enjoy fanfiction. They come from countless different fandoms, and different niches within those fandoms, each with their own sets of norms and preferred tropes, and generally aren't reading works outside of those fandoms and niches that they enjoy. The "site audience" is going to vary wildly depending on which corner you travel to.

If the argument is that an individual fandom is going to have a preexisting audience, well...that problem still happened back in the day! Even if you were hosting your own site, there was still an impulse to write what you already knew people wanted, because that's how you'd get people to visit the site. And in the case of fandom communities developing their own sites, well, each of those communities developed its own preexisting audience, which would influence the writing of the people there. It's not something that can really be avoided.

[(Anonymous)]

This. One of my fandoms is really, really into fixit fic. Another loves its angst and whump. Yet another one is all about various and sundry AUs. If I wrote a fixit fic for fandom 1, I would be drowning in comments, but if I wrote it for fandom 2, it would probably go largely ignored just because the two fandoms like different things.

[(Anonymous)]

Have you ever been to the Reddit AO3? Becuase they are the WORST about “fandom culture” which is all “treat me like my ideas are gospel”.

The Reddit AO3 would make you hate AO3

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, there was definitely more diversity in fic sites before AO3. Unfortunately, a lot of that diversity was really shit. And homophobic. And racist. And sometimes just anti-particular-pairings. I remember many sites that had only canon pairings, or canon plus one or two other "as good as canon" pairings that the site mod/s happened to like. Or canon pairings but now that there's a canon queer pairing, NOT THAT ONE. Or "intellislash only". Or those fucking Harry Potter sorting sites.

Would it still be like that now? Probably not as much, since the antis have never managed to actually make their own archive which follows their special rules, but I think AO3 is a fantastic place and there's nothing stopping you or anyone else making an "Archive of your own" so to speak.

[(Anonymous)]

Are there writers on these sites who are writing to the preferences of widest audiences available to them there? Sure. But I think there are plenty of writers who are just writing what they want to write. Are writers influenced by the mainstream audiences' likes and dislikes? Sure, though how much and how it affects their writing is probably very varied. But that wouldn't stop if there were more individual sites unless the writers stopped interacting with fandom.