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

[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.