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

Here via metafandom delicious

[amaresu]

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.

Anyways, just some thoughts.

Re: Here via metafandom delicious

[dani_the_girl]

Thanks for stopping by! I guess, being a newbie, I haven't had much experience of fandom outside LJ/DW yet, having mostly been in pretty large fandoms to begin with. I guess this is my chance to venture further afield :)