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

[viklikesfic]

Looks like you've got plenty of answers anyway, but I'll add my own two cents. I was also kind of sceptical, since I have all my fic on DW and LJ and tagged extensively on delicious. The conclusion I've come to is that AO3 is a good thing mostly for the readers because it's a (hopefully) stable site that's easy to navigate, it'll keep stuff around, and it at least has the potential to be one central repository for all the fanfiction. The tagging system is pretty excellent because though people can tag fic on individual DWs and LJs, there's no one place to say "give me everything with this tag." It's also nice because you can say "show me all the Spock/Uhura fic rated NC-17" or whatever. For writers, I think there can be something of a benefit in that it might bring you a bigger audience through this tagging system. Personally, I'm a prolific author but I don't have a huge fanbase, so AO3 is good in that people stumble upon things through tags. It also has a hit counter so I can see how many read a story, not just who commented. And I find the automatic word counts kind of neat.

[dani_the_girl]

Yeah, this basically sounds very like the conclusions I'm coming to, after reading all these comments :)