[thread]
fuckin' this, folks. and I mean you KNOW I am here for fanfic, now and always, but that is NOT what this nomination is about! do you know how advanced an archival system ao3 is? the ways its indexing and DB structure improve discoverability for MILLIONS of readers?
I know librarians who'd kill for that kind of tech! and this is glued together from cloudsourced specs while training their OWN coders on the way. and - this is not wordpress, people, they OWN THE SERVERS. they fund and pay wages for sysadmining! there's rackspace!
no, okay, look, listen, look: this is my job. I do it for a living. it is the only way I could go to cons, could take time to write. I only, only, ONLY ever took a programming class because Ao3 existed and showed me it could be done.
think of it this way: if someone nominated twitter (...go with me) for an award, would you immediately conclude they meant the tweets? pff. no. that's content. that's the squishy stuff. tech is the skeleton it rests on. well, guess what: the Archive of Our Own is Real Tech too.
's better than Amazon is for providing new content to read. god, the filters. the freeform tagging (sure, yeah, it's not Machine Learning, it's manually wrangled - someone had to go tell the robots 'AU' == 'Alternate Universe'). sort by length!! fuckin' ratings!!!
and - those of you who haven't been to ao3, y'know, may I suggest if you're curious, go take ten minutes and look? I'll wait. A good place to start might be the fandoms front page. https://archiveofourown.org/media
Go tell me if you can figure out how that works. Heck, I almost wanna start a scavenger hunt. Find a fic over 100k. Change the font to large. Go print a fic to mobi, or epub, or pdf and load it onto your tablet or kindle. Find me some meta with more than 500 comments.
The UI design is IMPECCABLE. Search box in the top right. fonts all clean and clear. never, EVER see any javascript overlaps or partial loads or slow graphics - they know better than that. you can slap a custom skin on it. heck, there's a link to the source code in the footer!
How about a fic - here we go, Speranza's classic, Written by the Victors. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15 There's a bunch of UI you don't see if you aren't logged in - the heavensent 'Mark for Later' button, for example - but still. Everything you could click is easy to grok.
Want more like it? Super easy and intuitive to click a tag, or the fandom, or a pairing (or even just M/M if you want to load half the site) and see more fic in that category. Sort by comments or hits or kudos and you get a good idea which ones are worth opening.
These folks REALLY know their UI. But, okay, hang on, yes they do, and many are trained pros, but many also aren't! the people building this site just WORK HARD, they try things out, they listen to feedback and iterate - (how much Big Tech can say as much these days)
- but ALSO, and here's what's important to realise, this is a community project, a community space, and it was DESIGNED to TEACH. (Did you know when it was first proposed, they trialed Ruby and Python to see which was quicker for beginners? I know 'cause I voted Python 🐍🤷♀️😂)
Do you know how rare it is to find that in Open Source? Listen, okay, I'm a professional techie and I would NE-E-EVER venture into eg the Linux core with 'Jennifer' attached to my sig in any way whatsoever. Aside from that, much of OSS is, hmm, results-oriented.
They expect you to show up fully-functional on day one, w/ a pull request ready to patch. Remind me, what's the demographic balance in Ye Average compsci program? And of those, who's working nights / caring for relatives / otherwise unable to Do Their Time posturing on github?
But the Organization for Transformative Works isn't here for that. They know (we know) that Fan is a Tool-Using Animal. idlewords.com/talks/fan_is_a… And the Archive of Our Own is proof of that.
So maybe think on that a little, the next time Patreon has a ToS hiccup. The next time Jack removes like counts. Think of what Archive coders built, in the face of Livejournal's hypocrisy, in spite of everyone telling us it was Too Much, we'd bitten off more than we could chew.
That. That's what this nomination is about. And yeah, we built it so we could host the smutty Harry/Draco and the conspiracy theories about Sansa and alllll the Naruto time travel fixit fic you could POSSIBLY ever read. And that's pretty fuckin' great, in my book.
(...I do not have a SoundCloud, but I do have a hugo nominated podcast, @serpentcast , which is entirely made up of the three of us yelling about fanfic in the same breath as professional fiction & media. which is where it has always belonged.)
