Archiving

[dani_the_girl]

I remember way back when I was young and green in the ways of web design, I wanted to re-do my website and learn from it at the same time, I started looking at web design blogs and they were all talking about the importance of creating table free designs. I had come in half way through and missed out on the establishing discussion so I was somewhat mystified and I ended up posting to my LJ saying "What is it about table-free design? Why is it good?" People linked me to a couple of posts and I got started from there and was converted pretty quickly.

I feel like I'm in a similar place when I ask the question "What is the point of fanfic archives?" If I've got a DW account with all my fic on it tagged under fic, do I need an AO3 account? What's the motivation behind building AO3. I feel like there are historical reasons for this stuff that I, so far, don't get. Anyone suggest where I can get started finding out? I am asking from a genuine desire to learn - I like the design and I've uploaded a couple of stories, but I'm not sure I have figured out the reasoning behind it yet.

Comments

[franzeska]

*wanders by*

I take it you've missed the years of people whining about why LJ is a poor platform for fic, boo hoo hoo where have all the great archives gone, etc.? :D

I think part of the attraction is very, very long chaptered stories. I don't much like reading hugely long DW/LJ/whatever posts, and while you can certainly tag and add chapter links, most archives have better built-in chaptering systems. (I think blogs are actually superior for drabbles, especially on those "The first ten people to write me prompts get drabbles of their choice" type posts.)

Archives are attractive if you get into an obscure fandom 10 years after everyone else has abandoned it. If all the fic is on some huge archive somewhere, you can just stumble across it. If it's in a journal or a mailing list, even one with good tags or a search function, it's often pretty hard to find stuff that's older than a year or two. And it feels a bit weird to be pestering someone who has clearly abandoned their journal or who clearly hasn't thought about that fandom in years. Of course, it's nice when archives have a good feedback system, but one of the things I like best about them is that there's much less of a sense that you are necessarily interacting personally with the writer, so there's less of a sense that you ought to be friends or have anything in common with the writer other than liking their story. There's much less of a sense that the space is their space with their rules.

I find that journals lend themselves well to time-specific things like fic written in reaction to last week's episode. They're great for in jokes and fandom activities that are about genuinely being part of the same small community. If what I want is to read epic fic with a plot, there's too much of an expectation that fic = social interaction. If it's novel length, it's not social interaction: it's a novel that I'm reading for my own entertainment. If I love it, I might write a long piece of feedback afterwards, but it might very well be more like fanmail than social interaction between peers, or it might generate an interesting conversation with the author, but that might be the only time I ever feel like talking to them. Many authors are crazy and wanky as hell but brilliant writers. Or their fic is all great, but something about the style of their personal posts just makes my eyes bleed. Or they're one of the many people who doesn't tag properly or use delicious. Or they change fandoms every two weeks. I might want to read any of these people's journals, but there isn't a natural connection between that and me wanting to read their fic. It might be one or the other or neither or both.

Archives are much less personal, but part of that is that you can find things on them without special inside knowledge and that they don't tend to be very time dependent. If RL is hell for six months, I can just ignore an archive and know it will be there when I get back. If finding fic requires keeping up with LJ communities, when I come back six months later, I'm screwed (even aside from the issue of what happens to my online friendships when I stop reading people's journals for that long). Sure, tagging helps some, but I find delicious ugly and hard to use, and most people don't actually tag that well because it can be kind of a time consuming nuisance.

***

Blah blah blah. Ok, that was from the reader's perspective. From a writer's perspective, I tend to prefer the formatting on archives (yes, even fanfiction.net back in the day). I like the chapter functions. Depending on how a fandom is structured, archives might not generate the most feedback the fastest, but I'd often be posting to an archive after discussion has died down on a list or my journal or a weekly mailing list chat anyway. Archives are a way of avoiding crappy ad hoc tagging systems in favor of ones that have a bit more longevity and wider adoption. They're also a way of sharing a fic with readers over the very long term. I still periodically get feedback from MediaMiner where I haven't posted since... 2001? 2002? I certainly get feedback on the Yuletide archive for old fic. The same really isn't true of LJ unless someone on a recs community specifically links to something old of mine.

***

So, uh, in non-TL;DR summary, archives are great if you're thinking in terms of:

1. A lack of gatekeepers. You don't have to know anyone personally to find things.
2. Extreme longevity. Think 5+, 10+, 15+ years, not 2+.
3. Chapter functions, search functions, and (sometimes) formatting.

I'm pretty sure there are a lot of old metafandom posts on this topic if you're curious and you want to go poking around. People were writing about it pretty continuously from when fanfiction.net started banning things to when the AO3 started to look imminent. (And before and after too, of course, but I sense that a lot of LJ/DW discussion of archives is coming from fans who used to use fanfiction.net and are hoping for an experience like that was back in the day only without any of the problems.)

[rodo]

Archives are attractive if you get into an obscure fandom 10 years after everyone else has abandoned it.

On archives, there aren't any dead links either (at least I never noticed them). Which is great if you're looking for stories that were written 5-10 years ago. When you try to use rec lists, you'll end up with a lot of dead links, because the author moved, deleted all their fic or the platform (like Geocities) vanished.

[dani_the_girl]

This is all interesting stuff - thanks! I'm definitely coming from a perspective of someone who hasn't really been in fandom to speak of for 2+ years yet so I'm still feeling my way around the implications of this type of stuff.

As a reader of fic (similar time frame), I've tended to get into fandoms via an author rather than the other way around so finding fic hasn't been so much of an issue, more a case of branching out from person a to person a's flist. Just recently is the first time I'm getting fannish about something I don't already know people who are fannish about (which is partly what's lead to me getting more curious about questions like these).

Anyway, thanks for stopping by and taking the time to write!

[princessofgeeks]

this in a nutshell is how LJ changed fandom. i have happily explored by branching off from various people's F lists and focused on people not communities or pairing lists. I rely mostly on rec lists.

But the archive thing -- exactly the other end of the stick from that.

fascinating discussion; thank you!