And since I have that open in another tab I'll link you to their archiving and AO3 tags. Both filled to the brim with answers to a lot of your questions if you want to poke around for a bit. There should even be a really nice meta post on just why LJ and LJ clones really suck for archiving as I believe I read that one through metafandom.
Personally I love archives. I use like 5 or 6 of them, most single fandom ones. I can go on and on about why I think archives are awesome, serve a really important fandom purpose, and why the decline of archives over the past few years has made me really sad, but I won't. To be brief: Archives provide longevity (fic will still be there years from now), they aren't subject to sudden locking and failure to unlock fic (as happens), no broken links (never seen an active archive with broken links), and they hit a lot more people then just posting to your journal does.
From a writers perspective you really are hitting more people. Because not all of fandom is on LJ/DW/IJ, lots of people rely on archives for their fic reading. It's why FF.N is still widely popular even after everything they've done in recent years. AO3 isn't trying to be your primary fic posting location, they would just like to be one of your fic posting locations. You'll hit a lot more people, people on the site will bookmark your fic and people looking at those bookmarks by favorite authors will go and read your fic (near as I can tell this is how pretty much anything of mine is read on FF.N these days as almost no one comes in through my profile), and if you take advantage of the collections and tags features people looking for something really specific might just stumble upon your fic and read it.
From a readers perspective archives are great because you don't have to interact with the writer. Not beyond a comment or two and maybe a bookmark. There's very little social expectation which is great for people with various social anxieties. Fic is often a lot easier to find, especially wrt fandoms one isn't familiar with, as you can follow your favorite author's favorite stories. You can pick out a tag you wanna read all the fic for. You can do various silly searches.
Large multifandom archives are also frequently the place to go to find the highest concentration of fics for small fandoms and rare pairings.
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timeasmymeasure
Here via metafandom delicious
Date: 2010-03-18 04:11 am (UTC)Personally I love archives. I use like 5 or 6 of them, most single fandom ones. I can go on and on about why I think archives are awesome, serve a really important fandom purpose, and why the decline of archives over the past few years has made me really sad, but I won't. To be brief: Archives provide longevity (fic will still be there years from now), they aren't subject to sudden locking and failure to unlock fic (as happens), no broken links (never seen an active archive with broken links), and they hit a lot more people then just posting to your journal does.
From a writers perspective you really are hitting more people. Because not all of fandom is on LJ/DW/IJ, lots of people rely on archives for their fic reading. It's why FF.N is still widely popular even after everything they've done in recent years. AO3 isn't trying to be your primary fic posting location, they would just like to be one of your fic posting locations. You'll hit a lot more people, people on the site will bookmark your fic and people looking at those bookmarks by favorite authors will go and read your fic (near as I can tell this is how pretty much anything of mine is read on FF.N these days as almost no one comes in through my profile), and if you take advantage of the collections and tags features people looking for something really specific might just stumble upon your fic and read it.
From a readers perspective archives are great because you don't have to interact with the writer. Not beyond a comment or two and maybe a bookmark. There's very little social expectation which is great for people with various social anxieties. Fic is often a lot easier to find, especially wrt fandoms one isn't familiar with, as you can follow your favorite author's favorite stories. You can pick out a tag you wanna read all the fic for. You can do various silly searches.
Large multifandom archives are also frequently the place to go to find the highest concentration of fics for small fandoms and rare pairings.
Anyways, just some thoughts.