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Aooo
Huh. So, for stories that are several days old across fandom, slightly better hits then when I joined, but still basically within ten to twenty at best, and maxing out around fifty. And comments are still few and generally one. So the better stories on Aooo are getting comparable-to-worse-attention as Dammerung, a story posted in an extremely low-traffic area of the site by an author whose readers aren't interested in the fandom. There was a big boost during the Yuletide thing, but now it seems to have tapered off.
(I'm sure part of the problem is that people are uploading a lot of prewritten work, but that should have slowed down a while ago.)
And I still don't want to review...or comment, as it is, because when I do go looking through comments they're all - I am not kidding, go look, all - the LJ sort of "I loved this." and "(Line) I really liked this bit!" and I'm not wading into a potential shitstorm until I have time to spare.
Tags system is still annoying me. I think I'd just be ignoring it if it didn't seem like the primary way people look for stories, so if one of the tags my story has doesn't catch their eye, it'll likely never even be seen. They've fixed the problem of only being able to designate a male or female OC, but they also removed the ensemble tag from my stories. When I first used it, it didn't exist. Then it was removed from my story, so I figured they only wanted individual characters. Then when I went to upload a different one later, and found that the tag does exist, so apparently Butterfly Wings didn't qualify under whatever criteria they used. Okay, I thought, maybe they want to use "ensemble" to mean everyone gets equal screentime, but then, how am I supposed to know what the appropriate tag term is for "the cast shows up" and why couldn't they have just changed it to that instead of making me guess? So I stuck "the full canon cast" on there in irritation, because at least that's clear about what I mean, and now that redirects to ensemble. I don't know. Meanwhile bad tags like her maid (named here) are still on far more trafficked stories than Butterfly Wings, which I originally thought meant they couldn't delete tags but I guess not. The tags move in mysterious ways.
Then there's the collections section, which seems to be an attempt at a better C2, mainly in that authors can add their own stories. Except (at least right now) only the author can add their own stories. It's already looking messy, and in some ways it looks worse than the C2s, because at least when people on FFN used a C2 for something like collecting all their own stories of a subcategory, they were doing it on a site that didn't have the ability to collect some of your own works, like say as a series. Similarly, collecting all second person stories is kind of weird given the site uses tags for that. (There's also one for the deathfic. When that's one of the top-level warnings you can filter stories by as well as a tag.) Mostly, these are all unmoderated too, so it's not "a subset of the stories you could find via tag, which have been selected for quality". A lot have confusing explanations for what sort of story qualifies, and then there are the ones that are completely baffling.
There's currently a hundred of these, with no way of sorting through them. There don't seem to be any rules against using the collections however you feel like, so I'm not sure if anything even can be done about it.
But I made my own anyway: Foefic, for fic when you're not a fan, because the best way to see how something works is as always to jump in. So in the event anyone scrolls all the way to the bottom of the collections page, they'll run into it. Also, I like that it's directly contradictory to the fandom subgroup that believes we should respect creator intent.
(People were talking about writing and what inspires them. And really, what motivates me is contradiction. That's probably why I've stuck with fanfic so long, it's something that, by nature, is explicitly a reaction to something else.)
(I'm sure part of the problem is that people are uploading a lot of prewritten work, but that should have slowed down a while ago.)
And I still don't want to review...or comment, as it is, because when I do go looking through comments they're all - I am not kidding, go look, all - the LJ sort of "I loved this." and "(Line) I really liked this bit!" and I'm not wading into a potential shitstorm until I have time to spare.
Tags system is still annoying me. I think I'd just be ignoring it if it didn't seem like the primary way people look for stories, so if one of the tags my story has doesn't catch their eye, it'll likely never even be seen. They've fixed the problem of only being able to designate a male or female OC, but they also removed the ensemble tag from my stories. When I first used it, it didn't exist. Then it was removed from my story, so I figured they only wanted individual characters. Then when I went to upload a different one later, and found that the tag does exist, so apparently Butterfly Wings didn't qualify under whatever criteria they used. Okay, I thought, maybe they want to use "ensemble" to mean everyone gets equal screentime, but then, how am I supposed to know what the appropriate tag term is for "the cast shows up" and why couldn't they have just changed it to that instead of making me guess? So I stuck "the full canon cast" on there in irritation, because at least that's clear about what I mean, and now that redirects to ensemble. I don't know. Meanwhile bad tags like her maid (named here) are still on far more trafficked stories than Butterfly Wings, which I originally thought meant they couldn't delete tags but I guess not. The tags move in mysterious ways.
Then there's the collections section, which seems to be an attempt at a better C2, mainly in that authors can add their own stories. Except (at least right now) only the author can add their own stories. It's already looking messy, and in some ways it looks worse than the C2s, because at least when people on FFN used a C2 for something like collecting all their own stories of a subcategory, they were doing it on a site that didn't have the ability to collect some of your own works, like say as a series. Similarly, collecting all second person stories is kind of weird given the site uses tags for that. (There's also one for the deathfic. When that's one of the top-level warnings you can filter stories by as well as a tag.) Mostly, these are all unmoderated too, so it's not "a subset of the stories you could find via tag, which have been selected for quality". A lot have confusing explanations for what sort of story qualifies, and then there are the ones that are completely baffling.
There's currently a hundred of these, with no way of sorting through them. There don't seem to be any rules against using the collections however you feel like, so I'm not sure if anything even can be done about it.
But I made my own anyway: Foefic, for fic when you're not a fan, because the best way to see how something works is as always to jump in. So in the event anyone scrolls all the way to the bottom of the collections page, they'll run into it. Also, I like that it's directly contradictory to the fandom subgroup that believes we should respect creator intent.
(People were talking about writing and what inspires them. And really, what motivates me is contradiction. That's probably why I've stuck with fanfic so long, it's something that, by nature, is explicitly a reaction to something else.)
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Then I realized that in most parts of the internet it would quickly be filled with uninspired "here, let me show you how much I hate this fandom by killing off all of the characters in gruesome ways" stories, and my enthusiasm was dampened.
We'll see how it plays out here.
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One of the things they do have going for them is a more mature userbase, and the site also seems to still be in a honeymoon period. (When you go to make a collection, the first paragraph includes the line Mostly users won't add items to a collection inappropriately, so you don't need to add the overhead of approving stories and members unless you really need it.)
On the other hand there's a much stronger "respect the author!" vibe in areas, which could lead to its own issues. But probably nothing at all will come of it, because no one's really paying attention.
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Anyway, you'd be surprised where things break down. I was reminded of it when I read someone talking about how they don't write characters as gay because the creator has stated they're not gay (http://karenmiller.livejournal.com/250136.html). There have been a couple similar posts in recent memory.
I think some of it is that older fanficcers start to look at it from the perspective of the author getting fanfic written based on their stories, and instead of saying "Well, fair's fair," go OMG MY BABIES. (And I guess some could be legitimately respecting creators for creating something they enjoyed - anything that has to do with hero worship is pretty hard for me to grasp.)
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Plus, there's been a lot of derision toward people who did stuff like decide to rewrite Harry Potter so Sirius never died, or 'suggest they know the characters better than the author'.
I think it's probably not a thing with any clear overall consensus, but more a lot of little things with established answers, so that the way something is phrased has a lot to do with how it's received.
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My friends, on the other hand, have been known to sit around and speculate about "If we were on the Truman Show, what sort of bad OOC slash fic would people be writing about us? Quick, someone say something suggestive to someone other than your most popular love interest to set off a flame war!"
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And even if you didn't want to read it, it's not like you have to, and how is the hypothetical possibility that someone, somewhere, might be writing a noncanon ship or whatever ruining things for you?
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I'm not talking officially, but I'm a tag wrangler for the AO3, and no one should've been able to touch your tags. The most we (or rather, the admins) can do is let someone know if they have tagged a fic with something in the fandom field that is not a fandom and cannot be made synonymous with one (for different issues) that their fic won't be findable through the fandom unless they change it. But if the person wants to keep it, then they keep it. And the same with whatever you want to put in any of the other fields (barring violations of the ToS, I guess). Your ensemble tag, even if not canonical or a potential synonym of a canonical (and thus not included in the filters), should've stuck around unless you deleted it. This is very weird--potentially, a bug.
If you have the time and don't mind--would you tell me more about it so I can report it?
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