Discord and a semi related tangent

[olivermoss]

Discord is going to start blocking access to servers it has decided are primarily organized around NSFW topics. Some servers I am on are renaming the NSFW channel in case this obscures things a little. On Discord you can restrict channel access based on any role so it functions the same if you call it Citrusville. Whether this will help at all I don't know, but if you suddenly find you have a fruit themes role on a discord, this may be why.

Speaking of platforms and content restrictions... Facebook doesn't like certain adjectives combined with the word Christian, even when it's referring to a person's name



Not my post so I removed the names. The person screencapped their first and only hate speech violation to the group. This is probably fairly run of the mill for Facebook. I remember hearing lots of these stories years ago, but I mostly stay on sites where I wont get bonked or made invisible for saying 'Evil Christian'.

Also, when I posted my show pics to Tumblr with a link, Tumblr nuked my post. It was invisible. It couldn't even see searched for or seen on a direct link to my blog. So, I had to repost without a link to my website. But hey, images are watermarked. I keep underestimating how agrro tumblr is to posts with links these days. For a long time those Ao3-feed bots posting notifications of new fic was how a lot of fandom keep on top of new fic. For a lot of people, their notifications just dwindled away and disappeared like the fandom died.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

The FB algorithms are broken as fuck. I don't really use FB (follow a few groups, keep up with a handful of high school friends, but otherwise barely post or comment) but... that seems pretty standard. And stupid.

Ugh, tumblr's "crackdown" on links has been HORRIBLE for fandom. I genuinely don't know of anyplace else I could post links to fic I write... but I know that sharing a link means it won't get shown to that potential audience, either. *Sometimes* AO3 links show up in my tracked tags, so not ALL links get blocked all the time... but there doesn't seem to be any way to know which posts will get shown in the tags vs. which will only be searchable vs. which get soft-blocked entirely.
Lots of people post without a link, and then immediately reblog and add it to the reblog, in the hopes that the original post will be findable and the link accessible... but tbh, I'm not sure how often people actually click through to the notes to find that link.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, it's part of why I've been resistant to using Facebook at all. I don't like to be part of a silenced majority while the people the advertising-attuned algorithm likes have a good time and don't see the problem. My original FB account's engagement score got so bad I couldn't see my own posts.

I see people establishing twitter followings just to get eyes on their fic and I ... just .. cannot. I've been posting fanart links in a discord only to have people immediately repost the art to their twitter account for engagement so their fics get more hits. I don't know how effective it is, only that it happens.

I assume most people still search by new on the site considering that most fics get a views spike when new. Also, a lot of my fic not appearing in New on Ao3 is why I got no views on my fics for a while. So, not all is lost, but I do always feel like I am out of the loop. Like how I did al that exchange fic and didn't know to redate. My Ironstrange fics are in the bottom 1% kudos wise, below even fic without punctuation.

[mistressofmuses]

Same re: FB. I dislike so much about the site, and its algorithms, and what it prioritizes that I genuinely don't WANT to use it. Stolen content is, of course, a rampant problem that isn't ever addressed, plus the broken reporting...

Ugh, that sounds... awful. I can't imagine having the energy for that, whether it works or not. I'm not terribly shocked that people do that - I know it's been a semi-effective method of "social media marketing", where you repost memes or whatever gets engagement to gain followers, and then promote your own stuff periodically to try and get eyeballs and clicks on it, too. So reposting fanart (since so much social media is visual) to gain a following to advertise to seems like a likely course for people to take, but it sounds like one I couldn't give enough of a fuck to do, haha

I definitely think that's how most AO3 fic gets found - via newest for a fave fandom or ship. Maybe later sorted by kudos, or a rarer tag, or something else. But ugh, I'm sorry your stuff didn't show in the "new" sorting.
That's very frustrating. I know that kudos and comments and hits aren't a measure of a work's quality, but that doesn't make it less frustrating when good stuff is being overlooked.

[olivermoss]

The frustrating thing is that when I tried to talk about getting no kudos or hits everyone reacted like I was being insane, like I deserved to be top of the charts or something. I was like 'no, logically something is happening here that I can't figure out'. I wasn't being entitled, I was trying to troubleshoot!

I still regularly get kudos on old work, though, and at such a steady rate it's got to be people working through the tag.

I've seen a lot of shenanigans to boost kudos counts. It's so annoying. I wish more people would search by bookmarks instead. No one can boost themselves just because they had access to a school computer lab.

I love Ao3, but the site design is really obtuse in a few ways. I should get over and it and just keep writing. It does bug me that it's hard to even talk site functionality and trouble shooting without people thinking you are trying to find One Neat Trick to becoming a BNF and rule over fandom.

[mistressofmuses]

Seriously! I suppose its human nature (or human nature under capitalism, or human nature when hits/likes/etc are considered social currency, or whatever) but it's a little frustrating that with any system... people try to game it and exploit it. The kudos-boosting "I randomize my IP address/rotate through computer lab computers/etc. and kudos my own stuff 500 times" people definitely come to mind.

And then when you DO have a legitimate question about something on the site, people assume you're trying to game it the same way. And sometimes it's like, no, I just want to talk about the possibility of making certain things easier to find, or explore why certain things don't ever seem to be seen.

I absolutely love AO3, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways it could be improved, without damaging the purpose or functionality of the site. (And yes, I do appreciate that they aren't forcing out site-breaking aesthetic updates every three months, but that doesn't mean NOTHING can ever be improved!)

Though frustratingly, any calls for change can also get you lumped in with the "AO3 should be burned to the ground because I don't like that all the clearly-marked content is allowed to exist!" people.

A stupid tweak that wouldn't necessarily help, but might: I'd love if registered authors could have a top 3 or top 5 "featured" list of their own works. Like their favorite things that they've written, which could be displayed as a tab on their works page. This way, if people click through to an author page they can see what the author themselves consider their best work (or however they want to use that). That might get more eyes on older work that's otherwise buried back in the works pages, or longer fic that's buried under a ton of oneshots, or fic the author wishes more people saw, etc.

I feel like maybe DeviantArt (which I haven't looked at in a good 15 years, probably) had an option to "feature" favorite pieces of your own work on your page, and that might be where I'm taking that idea from.

That wouldn't FIX issues of older fic basically working its way off the radar, but might be a way to get people to at least see the older works of writers who are still active.

But yes, can't people just suggest features or fixes or areas of concern WITHOUT it being assumed they're trying to claw their way up to Best BNF Ever status?

[olivermoss]

Literally all I care about is making my stuff findable by those who would want to find it. And I keep being really bad at that! But one of my Gigolas fics broke 1k kudos recently and that is a fandom that had a LOT of kudos inflation. It used be that outside of Sansuk, the next several pages were all a 'Gigolas crew' that showed each other 'love' by finding ways to kudos bomb each other. Several fic by someone who didn't understand English grammar was above mine. Several of the crew have since pulled their fics, but when the fandom was popular again due to The Hobbit, I was buried. And despite that it's still doing numbers.

I feel like I whine too much about all of this, but about half of what I've put on Ao3 got buried.

I wish it was possible to sort by 'logged in kudos'. There is no way to convince people to sort by bookmars even though it gives better results. But I think if there was a 'logged in kudos' button a lot of the users would intuitively understand that's better and cuts out 99.9% of the BS.

Yeah, I also wish it was easier to have reasonable conversations about this but I feel like a lot of writers see themselves in competition with each other. I mean there is a board game out there based on a sitewide canonical Ao3 tag and I still have no way to find out what the sidewide canonical tags even are! And I've gone drinking with tag wranglers. Like, if anyone should have the ins to find this out I should be able to but afaik the info isn't collected anywhere. There is no url extension to make them pop up, etc.

I would love the ability to have 'featured' fics on my profile page. My most recent fic is Phasmophbobia and had like 44 hits. No one is going to scroll past some of the random stuff I toss up there. I would 100% feature my Jooster holiday fic, both because it's good and because it sets the right expectation for what to find in my writing. It's not my best or most popular, but it's the most 'typical of me' thing I've written.

[mistressofmuses]

Yes! Making stuff findable by the people who would enjoy it is definitely the best thing. Not trying to game the system, or artificially inflate numbers... just make it so people can find it when they want it!
I *do* think AO3 is better for that than a lot of alternatives - the search system is reasonably reliable (as opposed to tumblr or the like), and the ability to easily search through any tags (not just pairing or character or genre) is great!
That doesn't mean there couldn't be improvements! Also, I'm terrible at tagging, lol.

1k kudos is an impressive milestone! (I'm hyped that I have a fic with a whole 1k *hits*, lol.) But I imagine LotR was definitely victim to a lot of kudos inflation or other attempts to game the system. I remember there being MANY shenanigans in that fandom in general.
And ugh, BNF rings (though BNF may be stretching it) that kind of take over a fandom are so frustrating to deal with. There was a "writeblr family" for original fic that was like that for a while on tumblr that absolutely took over tags and fancied-up promo-for-promo stuff that got super spammy. (And ended with Big Discord Drama, and now no one wants to talk about it, lol.)
Certainly not harshing on genuine friend groups that like and read and rec each others' stuff, but it's pretty clear when it's that vs. the "crew" type thing.

I'm glad that some of your older stuff is still getting hits and kudos, and I appreciate that older fics are findable... but that doesn't make it less frustrating when some stuff is buried.
And it's EXTRA frustrating when you know there's stuff (whether yours or someone else's) that's clearly MILES better in quality, and yet it's unknown compared to stuff that's... not that great. (And I know there's no non-shitty-sounding way to say that! I strongly do NOT advocate for any kind of gatekeeping, and I want people to be able to post without fear that a typo or poor grammar or writing in a non-native language is going to get them ridiculed. So that's more of a private gripe, and not a demand for anything. It's just frustrating!)

Having an option to sort by logged-in kudos would be a great feature, and one that seems like it would be easy to implement, since that data is already tracked. Just having the choice to sort by all kudos or just logged-in kudos would be nice, and would make it way easier to avoid some of the artificial number inflation. There could still be *some*, but far less!

I wish people didn't feel they had to compete with other writers (or artists or cosplayers or whatever). It leads to so much toxicity and a lot of the worst of fandom. :/ None of this has to be a zero-sum game.

I don't think there is a list of site-wide canonical tags. I know that if you start to type in the tag field for a fic, it'll come up with suggestions that are already canonical tags, but that doesn't really help for trying to find a coherent list of them.

Yeah, being able to choose a handful of "featured works" for yourself would be a nice (and again, I'd hope easy) change. Maybe they could even have a creator comments section, like the comments section available for bookmarks, so you could say *why* you chose it.
You could put that info in your profile, but I feel like no one uses AO3 profiles, lol. I'd love to be able to point people toward the one 69k word fic I wrote, which is buried under two pages of oneshots. Or to point out a couple of those fic-a-day oneshots that genuinely turned out really well imo, as compared to some that didn't quite work.

[olivermoss]

I love Ao3. It's amazing that it even exists. They did good future proofing in the design, but couldn't cover everything.

I should tag more. I really should.

As much as I complain I am likely more in the loop than most. At least I have the perspective to know when things are wrong. At least know. I was thinking my fic was terrible and I want too dumb to realize how for a while.

I feel like a lot of the competitive writers really mis-understand stuff. In some situations being (reasonably) competitive makes sense. But in some other ... markets I'll just use sales terminology and call it markets ... a rising tide lifts all boats. Especially in niche fandoms, being cooperative is better all around, even for kudos farming. But some people just manage to use fandom for their own ego tripping that I think a lot of people have chips on their shoulders. I know I do, but hopefully I don't take it out on people. I just throw endless pity parties lol