the passing down of fandom history

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

I've got a tiktok account where I post videos about how to use AO3. It helps people who are new to the site learn how to navigate and search/filter etc. and I also get to teach people who've been around for a while some new tricks they might not otherwise know. 

Yesterday, I someone asked about the Citrus Scale, so I posted about that. Which lead to posting about the FFN purges of 2002 and 2012. Which led to posting a brief and incomplete timeline of fandom purges. 

And somewhere in there, someone left a comment that said, "Wow. I hope AO3 never purges adult content."

And that's when I realized that so many people who are either new to fandom or new to AO3 have no idea how it came to exist or why it is the way it is. 

So I guess I'll add that to my list of things to make videos about? 

Brainstorm time: what do you wish your fellow fans knew about? What are cool tags or tropes or traditions or history that you think would be interesting to share? 

Comments

[or_midnight]

I would be interested to see a look at the way that AO3 has grown and evolved over the years, both in terms of features/functionality and in terms of it's role in fandom-at-large. I've been talking to someone recently about the very early days of AO3 and how it really differed quite a bit from the place it is now. A couple of examples:

1. it was a lot more exclusive at first just by necessity, and the people that put it together were heavy hitters in terms of, hmm, lets say professional-quality fic. I distinctly remember a phase where I knew if something was posted on AO3 it was basically guaranteed to be really, really good.

2. it functioned much more as an archive and not as a marketing tool for fic. You posted fic there because it wouldn't get purged, not because you wanted to reach the largest possible audience.

3. I think people didn't really start exclusively debuting fics there for a little while? I feel like a lot of the earliest stuff posted there was back-ups of older things that people wanted to make sure would last. (I could be wrong about this or this could just have been how it looked in whatever corner of fandom I was in at the time.)

4. were kudos and comments even original features? I honestly can't remember.

5. I also don't know if this is true or not, but I remember believing 100% that for a little while you couldn't delete a fic once you had posted it there. It was orphan or live with your mistakes forever. (I didn't get an account for a long time because of this!)

There are plenty of other ways it has evolved in terms of how people use it and what it can actually do, so I guess that's stuff that I would love to see more people learn about.

[kentucka]

I was curious too, so I looked it up: The Kudos feature was added in Dec 2010 :)

I think commenting and deleting were original features, not that I could say for sure.

and I definitely agree on 2 and 3... I remember people still crossposting on various LJ comms or forums with links to AO3 because there they didn't have to worry about the work (and all the comments) disappearing.

[elf]

Commenting was an original feature. Or an original planned feature, implemented very early. There's a handful of features that weren't around immediately because they were still coding them. (When AO3 opened, it didn't support br tags; you couldn't do line breaks that weren't paragraph breaks.) (I discovered that bug by posting a filksong.)

If deletion wasn't possible, that would've been another very very early "um we're not done coding the basics yet" thing. It was never "you can only orphan, not delete." However, orphaning instead of deleting was strongly encouraged, and it's possible some people didn't understand that deletion was still an option.

Re: Quality at AO3 - yeah, I saw that. The early posters were mostly very experienced long-term writers, and invite codes were rare because they limited them to what the servers could handle. So it got a rep for having "the good fic," and, sigh, now we have people who post ficlets at Tumblr and think they're "not worth" putting on AO3 because they have no plans for turning their 450-word missing scene into a novel.

So there's another thing I'd like people to know about AO3: ALL THE FIC IS WELCOME. There is no "must have this much quality to post" requirement. Drabbles are welcome. Out-of-context replies to Tumblr asks are welcome. "Incorrect quotes" are welcome.