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Snowflake Challenge #13
Once again, I haven't been participating regularly in this, but I was thinking today about something that fits the topic anyway so I decided might as well:
Challenge #13: In your own space, share a favorite memory about fandom: the first time you got into fandom, the last time a fanwork touched your heart, wild times with fellow fans (whether on-line or off-line), a lovely comment you’ve received or have left for someone.
I was looking at my AO3 profile today, and I saw this, which reminded me of how old my AO3 account is:
I joined on: 2011-03-12
My user ID is: 14188
My account is over 10 years old -- nearly 11 now -- and I have a 5-digit user ID. It's a bit striking because of course most of the people Istalk interact with on AO3 typically have made their account within the last 2-4 years, maybe, and most people have 6- or 7-digit IDs. That's just a reflection of how much AO3 has grown over time.
This reminded me of the story of exactly how I joined AO3. I remember during the time when AO3 was new, I still only used FF.net. Well... more accurately, I only had an FF.net account, but I had stopped using it for a while. You see, at the time, I was personally in a bit of a transition period in terms of my fannish activity: First, I was kind of in a fannish lull that lasted from around 2010 to 2018, probably a result of moving and starting new jobs and having to rebuild my social circle from scratch, which involved a pretty significant shake-up to my hobbies and how I spent and managed my free time. So while I had an account on FF.net, I wasn't actually writing much fanfiction. Second, I was also in a transition period in terms of where I tended to post my fannish works. Starting from 2005 or so, I had moved from interacting with people on forums, deviantArt, and FF.net and posting various types of fanworks to those sites, to doing ALL of that on LiveJournal (plus also essentially keeping a personal diary there -- a real one-stop shop). Whether it was making posts (or crossposts) in communities or writing commentfic in prompt memes, none of my fic ever left the closed garden of LJ. That period of activity lasted until about 2012 or so. So the few fanworks I produced from like 2005 (when my move to LJ started) to like 2018 (when my lull ended), largely ended up posted in LJ communities and nowhere else.
During this LJ period, friends I had made in various communities started talking about joining AO3. This was around 2010/2011, when I was still involved in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
westerosorting and interacting with a lot of writers.
I don't know if this is still the case, but back at the time, AO3 had this reputation of being the fanfiction site where the good writers go. Of course, that wasn't explicitly part of its schtick, but a lot of early adopters were professional-level writers; it was invite-only which made it EXCLUSIVE!; and it was hard to miss that the average quality of the writing on AO3 was way, way higher than on the good ol' Pit of Voles (and even today, I think this is still the case, although I'm not sure why, exactly -- my guess is a combination of FF.net's younger age of users, more ornery work posting interface, and different site culture). There was a similar phenomenon on LJ with elite icon communities that required applications or were invite-only, so AO3 felt familiar/analogous.
So even though I was curious about friends joining AO3, I was always like "Oh, but my writing isn't good. /o\" and was super intimidated so I didn't join. That is, until I participated in![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ff_exchange. The mods of DOINK!/ff_exchange were (I think?) early adopters of AO3. Even though the sign-up and matching process were run outside of AO3, ALL works had to be uploaded to AO3, even art, which meant I needed an AO3 account as a minimum requirement of participating. Because I really wanted to participate in the exchange, I gave in and put my email in the queue for an AO3 account and created an account.
I did end up posting art, and I think that the weirdly high number of hits that work has is in some part due to the fact that, back in those old days of AO3, it was very odd for people to try to post art to AO3. I mean, I wouldn't have even thought to try it if I weren't being specifically instructed to do it as part of this exchange. While it's still pretty rare to post art on AO3 (thanks to zero support for image hosting, yay!), it's at least common enough that most people will eventually run across AO3 works that contain art only and learn how to recognize them by sight. At the time, though, if you were browsing AO3 and saw a work containing 0 words, you might be like "WTF? Is that a glitch?! How did the author manage to post a zero-word fic?!" and click on it. So I think a lot of the hits on that work come from that! (And then once you get hits, it's easy to get more hits because sometimes people sort works by hit count to find popular works within a fandom.)
Aside from rounds of FF Exchange, I didn't really use my AO3 account until 2018, when I (1) finished grad school, and (2) got obsessed with a new fandom (Bravely Default). The combination of those two things kickstarted me back into older ways of being fannish, and because LJ had kind of collapsed by that point and there weren't really any active communities themed around fandoms to share your stuff with like-minded people anymore, I suddenly found myself with a bunch of fanworks I wrote apropos of nothing and which I needed to share somewhere... And voila! AO3 seemed like the best option.
I actually always intended to crosspost everything I wrote to FF.net too, but after finishing my first Bravely Default fic, I signed into my FF.net account for the first time in like 10 years, tried to post a work, and was horrified by the posting interface. I don't remember what exactly the issue was, but what I remember was realizing that years on LJ and then DW had completely spoiled me, because trying to upload a completed, perfectly typeset plaintext/HTML piece in the FF.net interface was a hassle that it never was on LJ/DW, and wasn't on AO3 either (like, I think FF.net stripped out a lot of whitespace and HTML, making my fic nigh-unreadable?). (In general, DW-style HTML typesetting is still one of the nicest interfaces for composing things on the internet, especially if it involves long paragraphs of text with the occasional bold/italics/symbol/horizontal rule/etc., which fic and also most of my informal blogging does.) AO3 has some issues, especially with p's and br's and trying to add whitespace or trying to paste rich text from Google Docs, but overall, it's much closer to the high bar of DW typesetting than FF.net was.
(Also, I cannot get over how FF.net disables highlighting text, which was an "improvement" that had been implemented sometime after I stopped being active there. As someone who regularly highlights text as I read as a visual aid to help me stay on the right line, FF.net doesn't even make it easy for me to read fics, let alone post them.)
I guess some people post whole fic to Tumblr, but Tumblr also doesn't work well with my workflow of typesetting fic in plaintext with HTML tags -- it allows you to either edit extremely unwieldy full HTML or use the rich text/WYSIWYG editor, but has no in-between editor that allows plaintext with occasional HTML markup. I suppose this wouldn't be a problem if I typeset in rich text (e.g. in Word or Google Docs) and C&Ped in, but I don't. IN ANY CASE, AO3 provides a much better reading experience than Tumblr and has much better tagging/search/filtering functionality that makes your fic easy to stably find later (archive), so putting in the effort to post a full fic to Tumblr when it's already posted on AO3 doesn't make sense. I can get the advantage of Tumblr's content advertising functions by posting a link to AO3 and still get AO3's typesetting and organizational/tagging/archival advantages.
(I'm realizing as I type up this piece that basically what I am saying is that I have a bit of an old-fashioned way of writing fic up that still goes through "plaintext with some HTML tags thrown in as needed to do formatting" as a step. Most sites have moved on from plaintext editors to WYSIWYG editors as the primary way of composing content. I am an old codger, though, and resist this change, and choose sites that accommodate my outdated modes of working.)
The ironic thing is that in the 7+ years since I had first considered joining AO3, I'd mostly managed to get over my "but I'm not a good writer /o\" insecurities holding me back from posting there. The site had changed and was larger and more vibrant -- there were whole sections filled with fic other people had written that hadn't even existed when I had first created my account (like Bravely Default as a fandom is younger than my AO3 account! wild!). And I was older and more confident -- I'd spent so much time writing fic as gifts for strangers and posting them in public prompt memes, I didn't feel so shy sharing my work more broadly anymore. Getting confidence in my writing was a very slow process, and two memorable parts on that journey were (1) having someone inwesterosorting say they always thought my writing was notably good, and (2) practicing writing in the very safe sandbox of anonymous comment fic, and getting honest feedback from strangers without "social pressure to be nice" aspects to it.
...But having confidence was a relatively minor aspect here. Mainly, AO3 didn't make me want to tear my hair out, and also it was a site where the people interested in your fic could actually find it, so... yay! So ever since 2018, AO3 has unquestionably been my fanfic hosting site of choice -- there aren't even any other contenders. (There are actually still quite a few shorter fics I wrote during that "missing time" LJ period from 2005-2018 that I haven't archived to AO3 yet... but I probably should.)
Anyway, I'm very curious about what people's impressions of AO3 are (were) from the outside. Does AO3 still have that intimidating "but only the GOOD writers post there!" vibe, or has it changed (/did that only exist in my head?!). I have osmosed from the Discourse that AO3 has the rep among outsiders of being "that sinful, smut-filled website chock-full of rape, incest, and pedophilia," but I'm not sure if its rep still involves being intimidated by the quality of writing. (Oh man, that reminds me (while I'm here being nostalgic) of going to archives like asstr.org (NSFW - the Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository) for sinful stories of smut!) Anyway, when did you join AO3? What impression of AO3 did you have at the time, and why did you join? What was your experience with AO3 like, and how would you compare it to posting fic elsewhere?
Challenge #13: In your own space, share a favorite memory about fandom: the first time you got into fandom, the last time a fanwork touched your heart, wild times with fellow fans (whether on-line or off-line), a lovely comment you’ve received or have left for someone.
I was looking at my AO3 profile today, and I saw this, which reminded me of how old my AO3 account is:
I joined on: 2011-03-12
My user ID is: 14188
My account is over 10 years old -- nearly 11 now -- and I have a 5-digit user ID. It's a bit striking because of course most of the people I
This reminded me of the story of exactly how I joined AO3. I remember during the time when AO3 was new, I still only used FF.net. Well... more accurately, I only had an FF.net account, but I had stopped using it for a while. You see, at the time, I was personally in a bit of a transition period in terms of my fannish activity: First, I was kind of in a fannish lull that lasted from around 2010 to 2018, probably a result of moving and starting new jobs and having to rebuild my social circle from scratch, which involved a pretty significant shake-up to my hobbies and how I spent and managed my free time. So while I had an account on FF.net, I wasn't actually writing much fanfiction. Second, I was also in a transition period in terms of where I tended to post my fannish works. Starting from 2005 or so, I had moved from interacting with people on forums, deviantArt, and FF.net and posting various types of fanworks to those sites, to doing ALL of that on LiveJournal (plus also essentially keeping a personal diary there -- a real one-stop shop). Whether it was making posts (or crossposts) in communities or writing commentfic in prompt memes, none of my fic ever left the closed garden of LJ. That period of activity lasted until about 2012 or so. So the few fanworks I produced from like 2005 (when my move to LJ started) to like 2018 (when my lull ended), largely ended up posted in LJ communities and nowhere else.
During this LJ period, friends I had made in various communities started talking about joining AO3. This was around 2010/2011, when I was still involved in
westerosorting and interacting with a lot of writers.I don't know if this is still the case, but back at the time, AO3 had this reputation of being the fanfiction site where the good writers go. Of course, that wasn't explicitly part of its schtick, but a lot of early adopters were professional-level writers; it was invite-only which made it EXCLUSIVE!; and it was hard to miss that the average quality of the writing on AO3 was way, way higher than on the good ol' Pit of Voles (and even today, I think this is still the case, although I'm not sure why, exactly -- my guess is a combination of FF.net's younger age of users, more ornery work posting interface, and different site culture). There was a similar phenomenon on LJ with elite icon communities that required applications or were invite-only, so AO3 felt familiar/analogous.
So even though I was curious about friends joining AO3, I was always like "Oh, but my writing isn't good. /o\" and was super intimidated so I didn't join. That is, until I participated in
ff_exchange. The mods of DOINK!/ff_exchange were (I think?) early adopters of AO3. Even though the sign-up and matching process were run outside of AO3, ALL works had to be uploaded to AO3, even art, which meant I needed an AO3 account as a minimum requirement of participating. Because I really wanted to participate in the exchange, I gave in and put my email in the queue for an AO3 account and created an account.I did end up posting art, and I think that the weirdly high number of hits that work has is in some part due to the fact that, back in those old days of AO3, it was very odd for people to try to post art to AO3. I mean, I wouldn't have even thought to try it if I weren't being specifically instructed to do it as part of this exchange. While it's still pretty rare to post art on AO3 (thanks to zero support for image hosting, yay!), it's at least common enough that most people will eventually run across AO3 works that contain art only and learn how to recognize them by sight. At the time, though, if you were browsing AO3 and saw a work containing 0 words, you might be like "WTF? Is that a glitch?! How did the author manage to post a zero-word fic?!" and click on it. So I think a lot of the hits on that work come from that! (And then once you get hits, it's easy to get more hits because sometimes people sort works by hit count to find popular works within a fandom.)
Aside from rounds of FF Exchange, I didn't really use my AO3 account until 2018, when I (1) finished grad school, and (2) got obsessed with a new fandom (Bravely Default). The combination of those two things kickstarted me back into older ways of being fannish, and because LJ had kind of collapsed by that point and there weren't really any active communities themed around fandoms to share your stuff with like-minded people anymore, I suddenly found myself with a bunch of fanworks I wrote apropos of nothing and which I needed to share somewhere... And voila! AO3 seemed like the best option.
I actually always intended to crosspost everything I wrote to FF.net too, but after finishing my first Bravely Default fic, I signed into my FF.net account for the first time in like 10 years, tried to post a work, and was horrified by the posting interface. I don't remember what exactly the issue was, but what I remember was realizing that years on LJ and then DW had completely spoiled me, because trying to upload a completed, perfectly typeset plaintext/HTML piece in the FF.net interface was a hassle that it never was on LJ/DW, and wasn't on AO3 either (like, I think FF.net stripped out a lot of whitespace and HTML, making my fic nigh-unreadable?). (In general, DW-style HTML typesetting is still one of the nicest interfaces for composing things on the internet, especially if it involves long paragraphs of text with the occasional bold/italics/symbol/horizontal rule/etc., which fic and also most of my informal blogging does.) AO3 has some issues, especially with p's and br's and trying to add whitespace or trying to paste rich text from Google Docs, but overall, it's much closer to the high bar of DW typesetting than FF.net was.
(Also, I cannot get over how FF.net disables highlighting text, which was an "improvement" that had been implemented sometime after I stopped being active there. As someone who regularly highlights text as I read as a visual aid to help me stay on the right line, FF.net doesn't even make it easy for me to read fics, let alone post them.)
I guess some people post whole fic to Tumblr, but Tumblr also doesn't work well with my workflow of typesetting fic in plaintext with HTML tags -- it allows you to either edit extremely unwieldy full HTML or use the rich text/WYSIWYG editor, but has no in-between editor that allows plaintext with occasional HTML markup. I suppose this wouldn't be a problem if I typeset in rich text (e.g. in Word or Google Docs) and C&Ped in, but I don't. IN ANY CASE, AO3 provides a much better reading experience than Tumblr and has much better tagging/search/filtering functionality that makes your fic easy to stably find later (archive), so putting in the effort to post a full fic to Tumblr when it's already posted on AO3 doesn't make sense. I can get the advantage of Tumblr's content advertising functions by posting a link to AO3 and still get AO3's typesetting and organizational/tagging/archival advantages.
(I'm realizing as I type up this piece that basically what I am saying is that I have a bit of an old-fashioned way of writing fic up that still goes through "plaintext with some HTML tags thrown in as needed to do formatting" as a step. Most sites have moved on from plaintext editors to WYSIWYG editors as the primary way of composing content. I am an old codger, though, and resist this change, and choose sites that accommodate my outdated modes of working.)
The ironic thing is that in the 7+ years since I had first considered joining AO3, I'd mostly managed to get over my "but I'm not a good writer /o\" insecurities holding me back from posting there. The site had changed and was larger and more vibrant -- there were whole sections filled with fic other people had written that hadn't even existed when I had first created my account (like Bravely Default as a fandom is younger than my AO3 account! wild!). And I was older and more confident -- I'd spent so much time writing fic as gifts for strangers and posting them in public prompt memes, I didn't feel so shy sharing my work more broadly anymore. Getting confidence in my writing was a very slow process, and two memorable parts on that journey were (1) having someone in
westerosorting say they always thought my writing was notably good, and (2) practicing writing in the very safe sandbox of anonymous comment fic, and getting honest feedback from strangers without "social pressure to be nice" aspects to it....But having confidence was a relatively minor aspect here. Mainly, AO3 didn't make me want to tear my hair out, and also it was a site where the people interested in your fic could actually find it, so... yay! So ever since 2018, AO3 has unquestionably been my fanfic hosting site of choice -- there aren't even any other contenders. (There are actually still quite a few shorter fics I wrote during that "missing time" LJ period from 2005-2018 that I haven't archived to AO3 yet... but I probably should.)
Anyway, I'm very curious about what people's impressions of AO3 are (were) from the outside. Does AO3 still have that intimidating "but only the GOOD writers post there!" vibe, or has it changed (/did that only exist in my head?!). I have osmosed from the Discourse that AO3 has the rep among outsiders of being "that sinful, smut-filled website chock-full of rape, incest, and pedophilia," but I'm not sure if its rep still involves being intimidated by the quality of writing. (Oh man, that reminds me (while I'm here being nostalgic) of going to archives like asstr.org (NSFW - the Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository) for sinful stories of smut!) Anyway, when did you join AO3? What impression of AO3 did you have at the time, and why did you join? What was your experience with AO3 like, and how would you compare it to posting fic elsewhere?
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And I do think you should share your Final Fantasy fanworks there! I'm a bit of a... collector/completionist or something? -- I always think it's a shame when there's fic that people might be interested in, but it's all hidden on locked or defunct communities that are hard to search for. Even if it feels a bit intimidating to put your work out there, I guarantee there'll be someone who stumbles across it possibly years later who will be really thankful you posted it on AO3 where they could find it!