My AO3 Crossposting Experience
Apr. 15th, 2013 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopLJ, as much as I love it, is kind of dead these days, and was never a particularly great fanfiction archive to begin with, and as for fanfic.net - well, they killed any hope of being taken seriously as a major fic archive the day they banned anything beyond a PG rating. AO3's pretty much where it's at for a lot of fandoms these days, and most of a year and many hours of furious dithering later, I finally finished the mammoth task of getting all my fic uploaded over there.
A few more thoughts on how I've been finding the whole AO3 experience:
Kudos
It has come to my attention that there is a small but vocal minority out there who resent the very existence of AO3 kudos, apparently because they see it as a way of encouraging people to hit the 'like' button instead of leaving a real comment. In light of this, let me take this opportunity to state for the record that IMHO, kudos are awesome. As an insecure fanfic author who has never been one to get pages of feedback, and who still gets that tiny moment of pleasure whenever an email shows up in her inbox letting her know that someone out there on the internet liked one of her fic enough to hit a button to let her know, getting kudos is awesome. As a mild introvert who frequently winds up too nervous to figure out how to word a short comment on a fic she enjoyed, being able to give kudos is awesome. And as a reader who very much appreciates the kudos tally as an admittedly-flawed-but-better-than-nothing indicator of how many other readers out there want it to be known they enjoyed this fic, being able to see who else has given kudos is awesome too. To my mind, kudos are quite simply a wonderful thing.
Posting interface
Oh my god but the 'edit draft' form is a legendary piece of shit. AO3 clearly does not want us editing our drafts. Any draft older than a week gets deleted without so much as an email warning. (And why is that, exactly? Is the AO3 worried by the idea of people writing fic directly into the draft entry box? Are they horrified by the thought their servers might become clogged up by people saving half-finished works that other people can't read yet? Even ff.net lets you save drafts for a good 90 days!) Edits to a draft cannot be saved without going through the 'preview' form, but frequently do not even appear in the preview until you have hit 'preview' once, then 'save without posting', then 'preview' again. As of the latest code push, edits to the last chapter of Good Intentions refused to save at all, no matter what combination of previews I tried. In order to get that chapter up, I had to delete the draft chapter altogether and create a new one with the correct changes. If any of these problems are minor caching bugs I could sort out by changing my browser settings, then hell if there's any obvious FAQ pages to help me figure it out.
Tagging
As nice as it is to finally have a massive multi-fandom archive that lets you search for fic by pairing, the tagging system on AO3 makes me a sad, sad computer science graduate, and has been making me sad ever since I first read the announcement that their system was going to run on the principle of "tag however the hell you want, and our team of trained tag wranglers will psychically divine what the hell you meant and sort out the equivalencies behind the scenes!" and damn-near dislocated my jaw on the spot. No presets, no guidelines, just a mad free-for-all with some poor sucker left running the back end, stuck trying to figure out whether someone who's tagged a CLAMP fic with 'donuts' meant the actual confectionary, the obscure pairing name for 'Doumeki/Watanuki', or some other new meme altogether. Having now used the final product, I can only report that the end result is every bit as difficult as I ever feared.
In all fairness to the AO3 team, they're not completely off base about everything – allowing synonyms for most tags was a good call. Enforcing hard-and-fast rules for even something so basic as character names would be doomed to end in tears, especially once the debates start over whether we should be using full names or common nicknames, real names or superhero names, original Japanese names or dub names, over which romanisation is 'correct', over characters whose names might not even have been revealed outside some little known expansion volume – it's a perfect recipe for the silliest kind of drama. So giving the fans the freedom to name that character Fai/Fye/Fay as they please and synching up the tags from the back end actually makes quite a lot of sense. So far, so good.
The problem with the whole scheme is that it depends on someone doing an awful lot of work behind the scenes that the end user never knows about, forcing both user and wrangler to make a lot of loose assumptions about what the other end is up to without any easy way of finding out if they're right. Am I generalising a little much here? Let's go with an example from my personal experience to demonstrate what I'm talking about.
Let Slip the Dogs of War, one of my first Cable & Deadpool fics, stars Deadpool (Wade Wilson), Cable (Nathan Summers), and War (Nathan Summers again, but an alternate universe version of the same who appears in a handful of Cable & Deadpool chapters). Since that makes two different Nathan Summerses in the same story and for all important purposes they're two very different characters, I'm going to need a tag for each of them. Calling one 'Cable' and one 'War' doesn't work, because 'War' is a code name that's been used by several different Marvel universe characters over the years, some of whom have shown up in other Cable or Deadpool titles. The obvious solution was to use the "[code name] | [real name]" format I'd seen around the archive, popular with series like Tiger and Bunny (anime about superheros) or Phoenix Wright (where characters were renamed for the English adaptation, but some fans prefer the Japanese). So I tagged my fic as containing "Deadpool | Wade Wilson, Cable | Nathan Summers, War | Nathan Summers", and considered the job done.
Or not, because when I checked back, my new "Cable | Nathan Summers" tag brought me to a page declaring "this tag has not yet been marked as common, and cannot be filtered on". Ah. Looks like I'm the first person to use that naming format in this fandom. Oh well, fair enough, it's a small fandom. According to the AO3 guidelines, it'll get wrangled soon enough.
Having checked that same tag today, several months down the track, I am disappointed to report that nope, no wrangling has taken place.
The AO3 FAQs are unable to tell me why. Surely it can't have been this many months since any tags got wrangled. Have my tags been missed somehow? Is there a massive queue of unwrangled tags, with mine sitting in the middle somewhere? Is there simply no-one wrangling tags for the Cable & Deadpool fandom right now? This is an obvious problem that any halfway decent web-developer ought to have anticipated. At the very least, there ought to be a FAQ question covering it. I should not have to email the administrators to find an answer.
Nor is this is the only issue. Hoping to figure out for myself what tags the rest of the fandom were using, I went to the search form and entered 'War' under character. The search form returned me results for every fic using the 'war' as any tag, character related or otherwise – so a fic tagged as containing 'Nuclear warfare' would show up among the results. Talk about sloppy coding. I did eventually track down one tag referring to War-the-character by checking what had been synched up under 'Nathan Summers', where I found the synonyms included War (Cable and Deadpool). Clicking on this tag, however, returns me every fic tagged with any variant on "Nathan Summers", and is hence useless in helping me figure out if this very specific variant on the character has ever appeared in fic there. Unsurprisingly at this point, even entering "War (Cable and Deadpool)" into the search form under 'character' continued returning me that irrelevant "Nuclear Warfare" hit. This is the sort of behaviour that, in technical terms, we like to call a fail.
I eventually figured out what was going on not by taking my chances with the official support form, but by dropping a question on an anon-meme where I'd seen tag wranglers pop up to discuss the job in the past. There, I discovered that fandoms are usually assigned to specific wranglers, so the odds were there just wasn't anyone assigned to Cable & Deadpool right now. When one of them went to check, however, we found out there is supposed to be a wrangler assigned - and if there is someone assigned, other wranglers aren't supposed to drop in and mess with tags themselves, even if whoever it is has been AWOL for some time now, so so much for getting help there. I'm back to going through the official support form, which looks to be set up to send all tag-related questions to the same place, nevermind minor matters like efficiency.
The whole mess becomes only more insidious when you realise that for a great many users, writing for popular characters in large fandoms likely to have the most active wranglers, such issues are unlikely to come up. It's the minority spread across the smaller fandoms who get stuck dealing with the vast majority of the archive's issues, and who are going to have the most trouble getting their voices heard. The AO3's system actively discourages any sort of communication between tag wranglers and users whatsoever, which is exactly the kind of scheme which only works under the assumption that nothing is ever going to go wrong - tags will always be wrangled promptly, and all fandoms will have an active wrangler. And if you believe that will ever be the case, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you at a very competitive price.
How about another example? If you check out AO3's freeform tag cloud, showing the most commonly used top-level tags in the archive, you'll notice that the third-most-common tag in the archive (below "Alternate universe", slightly below "Angst" and just barely above "Sexual content") are those in the "Relationship" category – ie, anything other than gen.
This is instantly confusing, because the AO3 was quite sensibly set up to treat relationships (be they m/m, f/f, m/f, multiples of the above, unclassifiable by gender, or genfic with no relationships at all) as a top-level category in it's own class, and anyone with any experience with the fanfic community ought to understand why. Why, then, are relationship tags showing up under the freeform tags? Has the cloud been deliberately organised to include them? As it turns out, no – a little investigation will soon prove that the total number of fics under the 'relationship' tag is only just over 50,000, whereas the total number of fic on the archive under the top-level M/F category alone is over 140,000. The hell?
It seems the 'relationship' the freeform tag is actually made up of all the fics which someone has tagged with 'slash' or 'het' or whatever, even when those fics are also (as they usually seem to be) correctly categorised under M/M, or M/F etc. Whether these are fics imported from other archives that did use tags like 'slash', whether people are tagging them that way by habit, or whether there's some sort of real misunderstanding over whether those tags are needed I can only speculate, but if a major subset of all freeform tags stored in the archive are by definition functionally redundant, that's a worry. A new user who starts out on the AO3 front page, clicks 'browse by tags' and goes looking through the very obvious relationship tag might never realise they're seeing only a fraction of the fic they're looking for, and will likely end up very confused about what all this relationship-genre-category stuff is about. It creates confusion, and it slows down searches, and neither of those things are going to be healthy for the long term success of a project like this. More to the point, it's a classic illustration of the fundamental confusion over how AO3 tags work that I've seen a lot of other voices express in some of those anon-meme threads.
Above all, this is frustrating because it's so, so easy for me to imagine ways it could all be done better. As others have pointed out before me, the core problem with the AO3 tag wrangling system is that it's a non-scaling solution. As long as wranglers have to review every accidental typo entered in a character tag, then the work needed to keep the archive running will increase exponentially as the archive keeps getting bigger. The system could save a massive amount of time and frustration on everyone's part by letting the users themselves do a bit more. The key is transparency. Give the users more information about how the tagging system works, and let them play a role in indicating how tags should be synched up, and you'll reduce confusion and frustration at the user end and save the wranglers work.
Here's how it would work.
Firstly, right now, there's nothing to let a user know they've entered a tag the system doesn't recognise unless they make the effort of go through all their own tags manually. To fix this, you'd add an extra form so that when you post a fic, you'd get a screen something like this.
Very simple – it outlines which tags you've entered have been recognised, and shows you how. It's an easy way to alert them to any minor typos and give them a chance to fix them themselves, or replace an unrecognised tag with an existing synonym and save having to wait for a wrangler to sort it out. In small fandoms which may not have an active wrangler, this is exactly the sort of information the users badly need. A similar page could let users review all tags on their existing fic, double-check whether any older tags had been wrangled yet, and send reminders to the right people if they hadn't been.
More importantly, you'd let the user themselves suggest how new tags might be sorted or merged, (hopefully) leaving the tag wrangler to do no more than hit 'confirm'. For most obvious cases you shouldn't even need a wrangler familiar with that fandom to be involved, or even a human being at all - an automated routine based on a little simple boolean logic could do the job for them. You'd also let users put their random freeform blather under 'ignore', and save the wranglers having to deal with them at all. These kinds of changes can make a massive difference to performance and maintenance tasks, and any halfway-decent CompSci course dedicates hours to going through how you calculate efficiency when designing systems like this (seriously, I could support this point with equations and diagrams if anyone wanted to see them).
Secondly, users should be able to see whether their fandom has an assigned wrangler just by looking at the works in that fandom. (Cynically, you might also want to include the date when any tags were wrangled last, so it's easier to tell if the assigned wrangler has gone AWOL.) If it's obvious there's no wrangler assigned, people are much more likely to volunteer for the job, or at least think twice about assuming their new tags will be wrangled quickly.
If you want to get really user-friendly and actually give users a place to discuss whether tags are synched up where they should be, and hopefully even talk to their wranglers, it's been pointed out a dozen times over around the web that the archive could really use some official forums. Right now, there's nothing but the FAQ pages and a few links to twitter accounts and the like to give a new user any guidance, or let users discuss things among themselves - nothing fandom-specific whatsoever.
I could go on at this point, but if I got into the logistic problems faced by that poor fan out there who really wants to find fic actually about a canonical ship which appears in the background of a gazillion different slash/gen/het about other characters fic (but which has all been tagged with that pairing because why not) I'd be here all day.
All this stuff would be so much less frustrating if these all these bugs in the system weren't exactly the issues I'd known were going to crop up just as soon as I heard about the tag wrangling scheme. But they are, and at times like this there's no satisfaction in being able to say 'saw that coming' worth a damn.
A few more thoughts on how I've been finding the whole AO3 experience:
Kudos
It has come to my attention that there is a small but vocal minority out there who resent the very existence of AO3 kudos, apparently because they see it as a way of encouraging people to hit the 'like' button instead of leaving a real comment. In light of this, let me take this opportunity to state for the record that IMHO, kudos are awesome. As an insecure fanfic author who has never been one to get pages of feedback, and who still gets that tiny moment of pleasure whenever an email shows up in her inbox letting her know that someone out there on the internet liked one of her fic enough to hit a button to let her know, getting kudos is awesome. As a mild introvert who frequently winds up too nervous to figure out how to word a short comment on a fic she enjoyed, being able to give kudos is awesome. And as a reader who very much appreciates the kudos tally as an admittedly-flawed-but-better-than-nothing indicator of how many other readers out there want it to be known they enjoyed this fic, being able to see who else has given kudos is awesome too. To my mind, kudos are quite simply a wonderful thing.
Posting interface
Oh my god but the 'edit draft' form is a legendary piece of shit. AO3 clearly does not want us editing our drafts. Any draft older than a week gets deleted without so much as an email warning. (And why is that, exactly? Is the AO3 worried by the idea of people writing fic directly into the draft entry box? Are they horrified by the thought their servers might become clogged up by people saving half-finished works that other people can't read yet? Even ff.net lets you save drafts for a good 90 days!) Edits to a draft cannot be saved without going through the 'preview' form, but frequently do not even appear in the preview until you have hit 'preview' once, then 'save without posting', then 'preview' again. As of the latest code push, edits to the last chapter of Good Intentions refused to save at all, no matter what combination of previews I tried. In order to get that chapter up, I had to delete the draft chapter altogether and create a new one with the correct changes. If any of these problems are minor caching bugs I could sort out by changing my browser settings, then hell if there's any obvious FAQ pages to help me figure it out.
Tagging
As nice as it is to finally have a massive multi-fandom archive that lets you search for fic by pairing, the tagging system on AO3 makes me a sad, sad computer science graduate, and has been making me sad ever since I first read the announcement that their system was going to run on the principle of "tag however the hell you want, and our team of trained tag wranglers will psychically divine what the hell you meant and sort out the equivalencies behind the scenes!" and damn-near dislocated my jaw on the spot. No presets, no guidelines, just a mad free-for-all with some poor sucker left running the back end, stuck trying to figure out whether someone who's tagged a CLAMP fic with 'donuts' meant the actual confectionary, the obscure pairing name for 'Doumeki/Watanuki', or some other new meme altogether. Having now used the final product, I can only report that the end result is every bit as difficult as I ever feared.
In all fairness to the AO3 team, they're not completely off base about everything – allowing synonyms for most tags was a good call. Enforcing hard-and-fast rules for even something so basic as character names would be doomed to end in tears, especially once the debates start over whether we should be using full names or common nicknames, real names or superhero names, original Japanese names or dub names, over which romanisation is 'correct', over characters whose names might not even have been revealed outside some little known expansion volume – it's a perfect recipe for the silliest kind of drama. So giving the fans the freedom to name that character Fai/Fye/Fay as they please and synching up the tags from the back end actually makes quite a lot of sense. So far, so good.
The problem with the whole scheme is that it depends on someone doing an awful lot of work behind the scenes that the end user never knows about, forcing both user and wrangler to make a lot of loose assumptions about what the other end is up to without any easy way of finding out if they're right. Am I generalising a little much here? Let's go with an example from my personal experience to demonstrate what I'm talking about.
Let Slip the Dogs of War, one of my first Cable & Deadpool fics, stars Deadpool (Wade Wilson), Cable (Nathan Summers), and War (Nathan Summers again, but an alternate universe version of the same who appears in a handful of Cable & Deadpool chapters). Since that makes two different Nathan Summerses in the same story and for all important purposes they're two very different characters, I'm going to need a tag for each of them. Calling one 'Cable' and one 'War' doesn't work, because 'War' is a code name that's been used by several different Marvel universe characters over the years, some of whom have shown up in other Cable or Deadpool titles. The obvious solution was to use the "[code name] | [real name]" format I'd seen around the archive, popular with series like Tiger and Bunny (anime about superheros) or Phoenix Wright (where characters were renamed for the English adaptation, but some fans prefer the Japanese). So I tagged my fic as containing "Deadpool | Wade Wilson, Cable | Nathan Summers, War | Nathan Summers", and considered the job done.
Or not, because when I checked back, my new "Cable | Nathan Summers" tag brought me to a page declaring "this tag has not yet been marked as common, and cannot be filtered on". Ah. Looks like I'm the first person to use that naming format in this fandom. Oh well, fair enough, it's a small fandom. According to the AO3 guidelines, it'll get wrangled soon enough.
Having checked that same tag today, several months down the track, I am disappointed to report that nope, no wrangling has taken place.
The AO3 FAQs are unable to tell me why. Surely it can't have been this many months since any tags got wrangled. Have my tags been missed somehow? Is there a massive queue of unwrangled tags, with mine sitting in the middle somewhere? Is there simply no-one wrangling tags for the Cable & Deadpool fandom right now? This is an obvious problem that any halfway decent web-developer ought to have anticipated. At the very least, there ought to be a FAQ question covering it. I should not have to email the administrators to find an answer.
Nor is this is the only issue. Hoping to figure out for myself what tags the rest of the fandom were using, I went to the search form and entered 'War' under character. The search form returned me results for every fic using the 'war' as any tag, character related or otherwise – so a fic tagged as containing 'Nuclear warfare' would show up among the results. Talk about sloppy coding. I did eventually track down one tag referring to War-the-character by checking what had been synched up under 'Nathan Summers', where I found the synonyms included War (Cable and Deadpool). Clicking on this tag, however, returns me every fic tagged with any variant on "Nathan Summers", and is hence useless in helping me figure out if this very specific variant on the character has ever appeared in fic there. Unsurprisingly at this point, even entering "War (Cable and Deadpool)" into the search form under 'character' continued returning me that irrelevant "Nuclear Warfare" hit. This is the sort of behaviour that, in technical terms, we like to call a fail.
I eventually figured out what was going on not by taking my chances with the official support form, but by dropping a question on an anon-meme where I'd seen tag wranglers pop up to discuss the job in the past. There, I discovered that fandoms are usually assigned to specific wranglers, so the odds were there just wasn't anyone assigned to Cable & Deadpool right now. When one of them went to check, however, we found out there is supposed to be a wrangler assigned - and if there is someone assigned, other wranglers aren't supposed to drop in and mess with tags themselves, even if whoever it is has been AWOL for some time now, so so much for getting help there. I'm back to going through the official support form, which looks to be set up to send all tag-related questions to the same place, nevermind minor matters like efficiency.
The whole mess becomes only more insidious when you realise that for a great many users, writing for popular characters in large fandoms likely to have the most active wranglers, such issues are unlikely to come up. It's the minority spread across the smaller fandoms who get stuck dealing with the vast majority of the archive's issues, and who are going to have the most trouble getting their voices heard. The AO3's system actively discourages any sort of communication between tag wranglers and users whatsoever, which is exactly the kind of scheme which only works under the assumption that nothing is ever going to go wrong - tags will always be wrangled promptly, and all fandoms will have an active wrangler. And if you believe that will ever be the case, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you at a very competitive price.
How about another example? If you check out AO3's freeform tag cloud, showing the most commonly used top-level tags in the archive, you'll notice that the third-most-common tag in the archive (below "Alternate universe", slightly below "Angst" and just barely above "Sexual content") are those in the "Relationship" category – ie, anything other than gen.
This is instantly confusing, because the AO3 was quite sensibly set up to treat relationships (be they m/m, f/f, m/f, multiples of the above, unclassifiable by gender, or genfic with no relationships at all) as a top-level category in it's own class, and anyone with any experience with the fanfic community ought to understand why. Why, then, are relationship tags showing up under the freeform tags? Has the cloud been deliberately organised to include them? As it turns out, no – a little investigation will soon prove that the total number of fics under the 'relationship' tag is only just over 50,000, whereas the total number of fic on the archive under the top-level M/F category alone is over 140,000. The hell?
It seems the 'relationship' the freeform tag is actually made up of all the fics which someone has tagged with 'slash' or 'het' or whatever, even when those fics are also (as they usually seem to be) correctly categorised under M/M, or M/F etc. Whether these are fics imported from other archives that did use tags like 'slash', whether people are tagging them that way by habit, or whether there's some sort of real misunderstanding over whether those tags are needed I can only speculate, but if a major subset of all freeform tags stored in the archive are by definition functionally redundant, that's a worry. A new user who starts out on the AO3 front page, clicks 'browse by tags' and goes looking through the very obvious relationship tag might never realise they're seeing only a fraction of the fic they're looking for, and will likely end up very confused about what all this relationship-genre-category stuff is about. It creates confusion, and it slows down searches, and neither of those things are going to be healthy for the long term success of a project like this. More to the point, it's a classic illustration of the fundamental confusion over how AO3 tags work that I've seen a lot of other voices express in some of those anon-meme threads.
Above all, this is frustrating because it's so, so easy for me to imagine ways it could all be done better. As others have pointed out before me, the core problem with the AO3 tag wrangling system is that it's a non-scaling solution. As long as wranglers have to review every accidental typo entered in a character tag, then the work needed to keep the archive running will increase exponentially as the archive keeps getting bigger. The system could save a massive amount of time and frustration on everyone's part by letting the users themselves do a bit more. The key is transparency. Give the users more information about how the tagging system works, and let them play a role in indicating how tags should be synched up, and you'll reduce confusion and frustration at the user end and save the wranglers work.
Here's how it would work.
Firstly, right now, there's nothing to let a user know they've entered a tag the system doesn't recognise unless they make the effort of go through all their own tags manually. To fix this, you'd add an extra form so that when you post a fic, you'd get a screen something like this.
Very simple – it outlines which tags you've entered have been recognised, and shows you how. It's an easy way to alert them to any minor typos and give them a chance to fix them themselves, or replace an unrecognised tag with an existing synonym and save having to wait for a wrangler to sort it out. In small fandoms which may not have an active wrangler, this is exactly the sort of information the users badly need. A similar page could let users review all tags on their existing fic, double-check whether any older tags had been wrangled yet, and send reminders to the right people if they hadn't been.
More importantly, you'd let the user themselves suggest how new tags might be sorted or merged, (hopefully) leaving the tag wrangler to do no more than hit 'confirm'. For most obvious cases you shouldn't even need a wrangler familiar with that fandom to be involved, or even a human being at all - an automated routine based on a little simple boolean logic could do the job for them. You'd also let users put their random freeform blather under 'ignore', and save the wranglers having to deal with them at all. These kinds of changes can make a massive difference to performance and maintenance tasks, and any halfway-decent CompSci course dedicates hours to going through how you calculate efficiency when designing systems like this (seriously, I could support this point with equations and diagrams if anyone wanted to see them).
Secondly, users should be able to see whether their fandom has an assigned wrangler just by looking at the works in that fandom. (Cynically, you might also want to include the date when any tags were wrangled last, so it's easier to tell if the assigned wrangler has gone AWOL.) If it's obvious there's no wrangler assigned, people are much more likely to volunteer for the job, or at least think twice about assuming their new tags will be wrangled quickly.
If you want to get really user-friendly and actually give users a place to discuss whether tags are synched up where they should be, and hopefully even talk to their wranglers, it's been pointed out a dozen times over around the web that the archive could really use some official forums. Right now, there's nothing but the FAQ pages and a few links to twitter accounts and the like to give a new user any guidance, or let users discuss things among themselves - nothing fandom-specific whatsoever.
I could go on at this point, but if I got into the logistic problems faced by that poor fan out there who really wants to find fic actually about a canonical ship which appears in the background of a gazillion different slash/gen/het about other characters fic (but which has all been tagged with that pairing because why not) I'd be here all day.
All this stuff would be so much less frustrating if these all these bugs in the system weren't exactly the issues I'd known were going to crop up just as soon as I heard about the tag wrangling scheme. But they are, and at times like this there's no satisfaction in being able to say 'saw that coming' worth a damn.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-04-15 10:20 pm (UTC)The reason is the same reason I refused to move to Tumblr even after LiveJournal became a ghost town. Simply put, I'm unable to connect with people without the use of words.
I have plenty of friends in real life, but none of them shares my love for Fandom. Any Fandom. I'm the one and only geek in the group, and I've always been. I get incredibly envious when I read comments by people on the internet who say that they play videogames with friends on the sofa, or watch anime together, or talk about fanfiction and artbook and conventions. I never got to do any of that with my RL friends...
So, the Internet provided me with something I longed for: the chance to talk about my favourite hobbies with like-minded people. I can't even begin to express how happy that made me, being able to share the things I loved with people who loved them as much as I did. It really meant a lot to me.
When people sent me a review, it made me so ludicrously happy! I offered people my words in the form of fanfiction, and people gave me their words in the form of review. Even just a "I liked it" line made me very, very happy.
Kudos/notes/likes, IMO, are to reviews what a sticky note is to a nice chat with friends. To me, they carry absolutely no emotional involvement whatsoever, they are cold and dry. And the thought that one of the people who sent me kudos might have sent me a review instead if kudos hadn't been allowed frustrated me to no end, so that getting kudos put me in a bad mood instead of cheering me up.
THAT SAID. I want to make it clear that that's my very personal opinion. I understand why people like kudos, I simply have a different approach.
Also, I think that a lot of people who hate kudos as wanky as heck. They post their stories on a site with the kudos system, then they complain when they get kudos! It's like going to a strip club and then complain that there are naked people in it.
If you hate kudos, simply don't post your stories on sites that allow kudos. It's what I did, simple and clean.
Anyway, about your fics, are you ever going to write more Gulty Gear? Or have you abandoned that Fandom for good?
no subject
Date: 2013-04-20 07:53 am (UTC)As for Guilty Gear fic, doesn't look very likely, does it? The fandom's pretty close to dead, and I'm way past my peak enthusiasm for it. (Though I would have admit I was tempted there for a moment when the kudos started coming in on my older GG fic after they went up on AO3. ;)
no subject
Date: 2013-04-20 01:58 pm (UTC)I see. Drat, it really seems like Overture doomed the whole Fandom >_>
Well, for what is worth, I sincerely believe that you were the best writer in the GG Fandom. I enjoyed your stories immensely, so thank you for writing them :)
no subject
Date: 2013-04-16 03:38 am (UTC)No Kudos could make you feel like receiving a comment (be it a long review or a sucky "liked it. Thanks"), because you feel someone had liked your fic enough to "waste" a minute to let you know. I lighten up when I get in my inbox a mail that I got a new comment for an old fanfic posted four years ago; I would never have my mood lightened up so much for a "you received a Kudos" mail (if there was such a mail, I don't have a AO3 account yet).
I get it it's something personal, that some authors prefer the nothing over a simple "Nice" "Good job" and such, but...
Kudos wouldn't be "bad" if people weren't ungrateful and lazy. I mean, as mostly a reader, I'm very thankful that there is people who write fanfiction, get them betaed and then takes the time to post them (and we all know sometimes posting it's a time-consuming bitch, see LJ editor). We all know that we write fanfictions for us, so (unless we're attention-whores) we wouldn't need to post them. Yet, there's people who publish, offering us hours of entertaining, and I feel it's my duty to reciprocate by leaving a comment, to say something, even if I don't have the words or can't come up with a decent review. It takes so little to thank the author, so I cannot appreciate a button that frees you from this "duty".
[I feel the same way over DeviantArt and the way you can put a thumb straight into favorites without the need to open the actual art page so people don't bother to read your notes and leave a comment, so I'm not against specifically AO3].
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Date: 2013-04-19 09:34 am (UTC)As you point out yourself, there are other writers out there who've made it clear they think any comment less than a short essay on their fic's various merits isn't worth their time. There are writers out there who consider a comment as innocuous as 'I'd love to see more of this' as horrible and demanding. The last thing I want is for anyone reading my fic to end up caught in guilty indecision over whether a short comment will be well received, then leave feeling worse about leaving nothing at all. A kudos is a clear message that someone wants you to know they liked your fic - that's *why* AO3 set up specialised email alerts for them, which phrase them pretty much exactly that way. The idea that anyone owes you something more than that disgusts me. Comments are awesome, but no-one owes me jack.
And I'm pretty sure I've gone and come across a whole lot angrier in this comment than I'd usually try to be on the Internet, but by god this is a subject that hits a nerve with me. (My issues, let me show you them. -_- Ugh) I recognise that kudos aren't everyone's thing - there's definitely a case to be made that AO3 should give people the option to disable kudos on their own fic - but I do not get the hate. Since I joined AO3 I know thanks to the kudos system that all these people have read and liked my fic, and the idea that there are opinions like this trying to make them feel GUILTY for doing something that made me happy, when most of them wouldn't have commented at all otherwise, I just... why would you do that to people?
*deep breath*
I've also gotten a lot of nice comments from AO3, so it's not like they've killed that off or anything. In fact, a lot of people leave both, which makes me feel awesome. It's all good.
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Date: 2013-04-20 06:26 am (UTC)So yeah, I was speaking for myself. And frankly I feel as if you just said me that I'm a snobbish bitch (which I'm sure you didn't mean at all at - it's just me reading it) just for personally feeling that, as reader, I have (again, I) the duty to give something back to the person who takes the time to work hard on a fic.
Second: I may be extremist on my position of commenting vs "like" buttons but we cannot pretend to not see that Facebook has raised a new generation of users who pretend to live with a "like" button just because they're lazy either. I'm not, you aren't either, but this doesn't mean this doesn't exist. It happens on every site, you get this flock of people asking for "like" buttons and not because - as you may feel (for personal experience, I get) - they feel somehow intimidated; no, they're lazy and most of the time they admit it so no surprise here.
Look at Deviantart, look at Tumbrl. Tumblr, especially, is built to NOT promote exchanges (like
"Like buttons" discourage people (the lazy ones) from this kind of constructive comments, which I believe are the salt of the whole fandom - any fandom, any site where some kind of art is uploaded.
The fact that there are some who "like it" and comment, that there is people who feel intimidated and don't know if what they're willing to comment will be received well, doesn't erase the fact that there's still this pool of lazy users around. I have something against lurkers? So yes. Sorry if this somehow irks you.
Third: about the writers who don't want less comments. I speak about artist here, for experience over Deviant Art: they make it quite clear if they don't want a "like it thanks" comment so I simply know that they like more a "favorite", and I'll respect their will by not hitting the comment button unless I can come up with a critique.
The same happens when they outright beg you to say something and not just fave and run. I respect their will here as well. The ones who are against "like it"/"kudos" aren't all attention-whores who want only praises, most (myself included) would like some constructive comments; a "the story was good" may not be constructive but, to my (my) point of view, definitely more than "kudos".
"Kudos" (because we're talking about "kudos", even if I used mostly the "like it" example so far) may mean "liked it", "Loved it", "freaking awesome!!1!"; it's not the "star rating" like on K/S Archive, this is why it's cold and potentially useless for me. Not that I don't feel a little bad when having to "rate" a fic but this way I can show how levels of "like" I reached for that particular fic.
The idea that anyone owes you something more than that disgusts me.
You again put in my digits something I haven't said. I've underlined that I was speaking as a reader and, this sentence may be why I felt as if you called me bitch for believing in the "duty" thing.
Nobody owes me anything because I'm a reader. I write a fic a year if I'm luck so I don't expect anything, especially because in fandom there are much better writers who deserve attention. Again, I speak as reader and I (I) feel like I owe the writer something. You don't? It's fine, we don't have to see matters the same, but I never said that "anyone owes me" so no need to be disgusted.
[follows]
no subject
Date: 2013-04-20 06:28 am (UTC)As you see, I got some issues myself (not to say yours are stupid, just to be clear here!!) and that's why you hit a naked nerve with me as well.
Hope this clears the matter: I don't really want to fight with you, especially over "petty" things when our world is already shitty and in a dire situation as it is (my country certainly is). :)
no subject
Date: 2013-04-20 08:30 am (UTC)[kudos] makes it too easy for someone and clears their "conscience"
Kudos wouldn't be "bad" if people weren't ungrateful and lazy.
so I cannot appreciate a button that frees you from this "duty".
No, the author is happy if you bother to write even a "nice". The buttons are so cold and impersonal that it hurts.
I realise that you want to make this 'just your opinion', but that's some pretty judgemental stuff to throw around. Your use of 'you' and 'the author' and 'the buttons are cold and impersonal' all send the message you are referring to other people and other authors. It's perfectly fair to feel bummed to be getting a bunch of kudos but no comments, but that hasn't been my experience with the site at all, and how is that any worse than 500 hits and no comments? A 'kudos' button doesn't free anyone from anything, imagined or otherwise. It's just another option for thanking the author. Even if these are just your opinions, then I don't see why you had to go out of your way to throw them at someone who clearly likes the same thing you hate, unless you're trying to show me how I'm wrong.
You are still calling people who may have real anxiety issues - which do genuinely make it difficult for us to decide how to word something as simple as a short comment - 'lazy' and framing it as 'what's wrong with the facebook generation' as if it's a real social issue. This way of looking at the issue helps no-one.
I'm going to have to be blunt here: This is far, far too close for comfort to the same mode of thinking (You're just lazy, how dare you not be more grateful about the good things in your life, how dare you take the easy way out, etc) that made me hate myself in the worst part of my depression, and made me put off seeking help for years. Saying 'oh, that's just my opinion, I didn't mean you, I meant all those other ungrateful, lazy people' doesn't soften the blow when your brain is already primed to find new reasons to hate you. That is what I mean when I say it hits a nerve.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-21 08:11 am (UTC)Just repling this and then stop.
Just repling this and then stop.
<i"Even if these are just your opinions, then I don't see why you had to go out of your way to throw them at someone who clearly likes the same thing you hate"</i>
You asked and clearly showed you didn't get why there's hate for kudos. I felt I could give the point of view of someone who hates them. That's it. My bad, because apparently I should've skipped the page and we both have been happier.
Sorry. This is a lesson for me in the future. Now I see why many decide to not write anything if they have a different opinion of the matter. Especially when you already feel a unworthy shit yourself.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-16 09:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-19 08:56 am (UTC)