I washed my face and hands before I come, I did
Tags and different type of Internet paratext is something users are becoming more an dmore fluent in, however, different site structures might lend themselves to different uses of paratext. In a previous post, it was suggested that Archive of Our Own’s users’ habit of chatty tags is a carry-over from Tumblr (where, one could further speculate, it might be the carryover of whisperspace on LiveJournal). On Tumblr, tags can not only categorise, they can communicate. (In different ways than how categories do.)
These motivations, while not mutually exclusive, do generate very different readings on the intended message in the Communication tags.
Gyhagen observes this specifically about tags added to bookmarks on the archive.
At the same time, Szczepaniak sees that works reuploaded to the archive from previous sites change their use of the Author’s Note: part of it is attributed to the site structure and the flexibility of tag usage, part of it is to the different relationship between the author, the work and the readers (publishing it all at once, instead of in installments).
While other research has rightly been fascinated how these folksonomies perform categorisation, this post and some of this research was focused on how these tags speak to reveal that metadata and sitestructure can be the message.
Does that mean we’ll be able to say if a fic was first posted on LiveJournal, Tumblr, FanFiction.net, Wattpad, ao3 or somewhere else and if it has been reposted and where? Not bloody likely.
Gyhagen, Mikael (2022) “Comments in Tags: Examining Bookmarking Cultures on AO3,” Proceedings from the Document Academy: Vol. 9 : Iss. 1 , Article 7.DOI: https://doi.org/10.35492/docam/9/1/7
Szczepaniak, Martyna. 2024. “The Differences between Author’s Notes on FanFiction.net and AO3.” In “Fandom and Platforms,” edited by Maria K. Alberto, Effie Sapuridis, and Lesley Willard, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 42. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2024.2543.
Additional reading:
@fanlore-wiki always
https://fanhackers.transformativeworks.org/2025/07/22/the-social-life-of-bookmark-tags/