plums.

Jiang Cheng: That’s childish.

Wei Wuxian: *throws pillow in his general direction*

I recommend doing this for any fic you like on ff.net.

Just in case.

IT IS NOT POSSIBLE due to the way ff.net is coded. EVERYTHING HAS TO BE SAVED BY HAND. Which means actively retyping it. Word by word.

IF YOU WANT TO ASSIST WITH THE PRESERVATION OF FANFICTION HISTORY, NOW IS THE TIME TO DO IT.

Pick a fandom. Any fandom. I’d honestly recommend starting with the ones with very small amounts of fic because those are most at risk for complete fandom loss. Start saving. Do it by screenshots, if you have to. Do it comprehensively—start on the last page and save every. Single. One. Make sure you include the header and any author’s notes. EDIT NOTHING, ONLY DOCUMENT. Yes, if that means someone misspelled something or you spot a misnamed character, you need to keep that error. If you can form a “network” with friends to save all of a fandom’s works, DO IT.

Do not skip any fics. We are not the arbiters of what “should” be saved. If you can get access to the forums in any way, save whatever you can access. I know some of that has been saved by the Wayback Machine, but not all. I can already tell you research into My Immortal has been rendered uncompleteable by the loss of the forums. That’s going to be true for ALL fics. Save whatever you can reach.

I strongly recommend using the following format for whatever you save, so it can be indexed later: fandom_fictitle_author_datefirstposted.fileextension. So for example (I’m making this fic up for demonstration purposes, don’t bother looking for it), naruto_blessing_ichigo98_07192009 would be Blessing, by ichigo98, posted in the Naruto fandom on 19 July 2009. This provides all the information needed to see if a fic has been cross posted to the AO3, and to run a search engine to see if it’s archived elsewhere.

We may not be able to save it all, but we need to save as much as possible. I can start a Google spreadsheet or something if people want to have a database to keep from getting the same three fandoms over and over.

As previous people in the chain have stated, the fact that the writing has been on the wall for FF.net for more than a year does NOT mean we were wrong - it means we are running out of time. The administration really does appear to have abandoned the site. So whenever the bill comes due for the hosting (and you can indeed buy hosting and domain names etc in large chunks - like decade-long chunks, in some cases) or whatever, and that doesn’t get paid? The site is going down.

There is no FF.net lead mission to archive or save it. There is no “I hope FF.net’s staff contacts AO3 so the fic can be archived.” If we want it saved, it is up to US to do it, and the time to do it is NOW.

Even if you literally go in there and pick a fic at random, EVERYTHING HELPS. Small fandoms, large fandoms, fandoms you’re sure somebody else has already covered - doesn’t matter. Do it anyway.

Please help. This isn’t a huge and co-ordinated effort. There’s no phone tree. If you are reading this, I am begging you personally to help. Even if you only archive ten things - THAT HELPS!

Dude, aside from people just going “ugh, kids”, the whole point is that the assumption that sites have algorithms is a sign of how the entire internet has been ruined. It’s a major cultural shift and a terrible one.

AO3 is the opposite of obscure in fanfic fandom, and its entire existence is political and an act of resistance.

No shit people react to cluelessness about how it sorts content: how it sorts content is a conscious ethical statement.

And to answer this other person’s comment:

Wattpad, dude. No separate index by fandom, no see everything by date, just a massive fic section and tags that show the 1k most recent or 1k most popular.

Algorithms could be written to do whatever, but in practice, they’re there to make the site user profitable to the site. The types of content they push are tied to this. They’re designed to make sits addictive.

Particularly in a hobby space like fandom or in queer spaces, they’re not a great idea. They can sort mainstream things well, but the minute you have something more niche, it starts being hidden because it’s not profitable and/or because there are just that many more mainstream audience members.

They also induce learned helplessness instead of expecting a user to proactively decide what they want to see.

Yea, if you just leave Instagram open you’ll just get posts about the most popular things, the latest fad and the celebrities with the most followers, but if you go out of your way to follow the right people (for example, some accounts centered around dungeon and dragons) you’re telling the algorithm that you are here for dungeons and dragons, and you will stay for dungeons and dragons, therefore the algorithm will push you dungeons and dragons content to keep you around, both from your follow list, and from people related to your follow list, which introduces you to new ideas/people you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

There are plenty of YouTubers i watch daily now because the algorithm thought ‘hey, they’d probably like this’ and pushed it to me that I likely never would’ve found if they weren’t on my reccomended.

A little effort at the start, and you have to do less effort in the future.

I also think calling people who enjoy algorithms ‘learned helplessness’ is wrong. is it helpless to ask a waiter for their reccomendation on a menu, when you could always search the menu for what you specifically want instead? Because that’s what algorithms do. While you can always use a searchbar on Twitter or YouTube or TikTok, the app is reccomending you what it thinks you’ll enjoy. It isn’t helpless, it’s utilising a service provided to you to get the most enjoyment out of the least effort. You’re just optimising your media intake so that you get the most positive experience and the least negative experience.

But the internet culture thing we’ve lost is the waiters!

In the 90s, when you really couldn’t find anything online, curated links lists—recs lists—were a huge thing. There used to be big name fan reccers of fanfic. The whole debacle with Delicious was because fandom used that bookmarking site so heavily for massive curated recs lists and manual organization according to individuals’ tastes.

Culturally, I think the human tastemaker or blog of tastemakers is far superior to the algorithm.

Rec lists are inherently not one size fits all, because it’s a single (or i suppose it could a few) people creating a list of things they enjoy and perhaps you will also like it.

Algorithms give the mathematically best piece of content for you, given the information you have provided the algorithm.

I don’t see an inherint problem with algorithms being profit driven. They have to be profit driven or the company will go bust, capitalism is what makes algorithms predatory, there’s no inherint evil to an algorithm, it’s just math and lines of code.

Were capitalism to be abolished, and profit motives made obselete, an algorithm would be the best for any media platform because all of the interruptions between your curated content of ads is gone now, and the website/app can give you exclusively the stuff you most want to see, and will keep you on the platform for longest. (Because naturally even without a profit motive, people want the apps and websites they create to be popular) which I don’t think is inherintly bad. Why shouldn’t an app try to keep you on it? An app not trying to keep you on it is self-destructive.

It’s because most algorithms have hardwired priorities that are fundamentally opposed to my personal tastes.

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Algorithms designed to maximize “engagement” rarely differentiate between positive and negative engagement. A lot of content is popular not because it makes people happy, but because it makes people angry, and goads them into an argument.

This is the reason the term “doomscrolling” exists. The algorithm is not delivering “good” content. It is delivering manipulative content that enables people’s worst impulses.

Another issue I have with algorithmic feeds is they always prioritize newer content over older content.

I love old shit!

I love reblogging 6 year old memes. I love rickrolling. I love reading 10 year old fanfic and watching 15 year old tv shows and reading 20 year old books. I follow a blog called @yesterdaysprint that posts old newspaper clippings.

For the past couple days, I’ve been getting a bunch of notes on a funny gifset I made in 2020. I love that something I made two years ago is making dozens of people laugh today. That would never happen on twitter, where memes die within a week.

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Beyond having the wrong priorities, algorithms also have a lot of limitations.

I can tell an algorithm what things I like, but I can’t really explain to the algorithm *why* I like them, and this leads to a lot of BAD recommendations.

Take the Netflix algorithm for example.

I started watching a lot of Chinese television on Netflix, specifically because I am trying to learn the Mandarin Chinese language.

The Netflix algorithm doesn’t know the reason I’m watching those shows.

I’m pretty sure the Netflix algorithm just assumes I have an Asian fetish, because 90% of the shows it recommends me are Korean. No matter how any times I type “Chinese” into the search bar, Netflix keeps pushing Korean media recommendations at me.

If I dislike a show, the Netflix algorithm doesn’t know whether it was the cinematography I didn’t like, or a particular actor, or the fact that my favorite character was killed off, or all of the above.

The algorithm can only guess my reasons, and its guess is often wrong.

So even though I probably use Netflix a great deal more than the average Netflix user, the Netflix algorithm still does a pretty shitty job of recommending me content I actually want to see.

That’s why I still trust the media recommendations of my friends and the tumblr mutuals I follow more than the media recommendations of any algorithm.

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I’m getting the sense, from your comments, that you have a uniquely difficult time finding content you like on AO3.

Most of my friends are my age, and none of us have ever have any problem finding content we like on AO3, and this is largely due to our technological upbringing.

Understanding how databases work, and how to get what you want from them, is a skill that takes practice.

Everyone in fandom who used the internet in the late 90s has spent a lot of time developing this skill. We had no choice! There were no algorithm-curated content feeds back then. If you wanted fandom content, you found a web archive that hosted content for that fandom, and you learned how to input search queries into that web archive’s database.

So we were all forced to learn basic database literacy.

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If you haven’t spent any time developing this skillset, an algorithm will seem like an easier way to reliably find content you enjoy.

However, if you spend a long enough time building this skillset, your ability to find what content you like eventually SURPASSES an algorithm’s ability to deliver content you like.

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So understand that when you say, “It’s impossible to find fic I like on AO3” what we hear is, “I never learned how to use a database.”

isn’t it good to make these kinds of skillsets not required, in general?

Like, maybe people today don’t know how to properly wash their own clothes but isn’t it good that we don’t need to learn that skill and can use a machine that does it for us? Isn’t it kind of shitty to require people to need to learn skillsets before entering a community?

I like only following the creators I know and follow, and I appreciate the lack of algorithm on Tumblr and I enjoy the ability to only view sub feeds on Youtube, but… on some level, isn’t an algorithm more accessible for a larger audience who doesn’t need to learn to grapple with databases?

Isn’t it a general rule of accesibility that the fewer skills that are required to obtain your desired results, the better?

but regardless of that, I don’t think that setting up unnecessary barriers to entry is a good thing. Communities will definitely self-sort by skill level, sure, fans of a game but that doesn’t imply a barrier to entry to the entire community, just to the parts that thrive on a certain skill. A skill can be good to have without being necessary.

1) This thread keeps speaking about algorithms in terms of them being optional. They are not optional, however. You cannot opt out of these algorithms. If you use major internet spaces today, you don’t get to “read the rest of the menu.” You get fed what your digital waiter says you will get fed. Everyone around you gets fed what their waiter says they will eat, too. There is no genuine freedom of choice. There are only artificial choices selected for you by a complex mathematical formula that you do not get to see, know, or understand.

The reason AO3 (and to a lesser extent tumblr’s chronological timeline) sticks out as an oddity because of this omnipresence of algorithmic sorting.

2) These algorithms’ goals are not your goals. You don’t even know what the algorithms goals are. No one actually does at this point, because we cannot see or understand the metrics these algorithms use. We do know they were initially designed to maximize interaction and profit.

Lies are more profitable than the truth.

Rage is more interactive than stability.

THAT is what makes these specific algorithms so dangerous and predatory. They are omnipresent, and they make people tired, angry, and misinformed, because those traits are more engaging and profitable.

Yes, conceptually, a truly personalized algorithm that you control in its entirety with goals you set and manage would be an AMAZING time saver!

But that is NOT the algorithms we have today. It’s not. Because a company’s profit is not about you. It’s about separating you from your money in the quickest way possible.

The algorithms we have today are not “accessibility tools.” THat is something algorithms CAN be used to make, and for some people an algorithmic system is more accessible, but for others it is more alienating and dangerous.

Lest we forget, the antivaxxer movement was hugely fed by early versions of algorithmic rabbit holing.

Since then so many other movements have sprung up as a result of these algorithmically driven isolation and misinformation systems. It’s at every level, from the Q-anon conspiracy that helped lead to the US coup on Jan 6 2021 to little baby shit like whatever the latest micro-level artist to be called a child rapist because they watched Sailor Moon is this month.

Algorithms as they exist today are not neutral. They are exceedingly dangerous.

If rec lists were “washing your clothes by hand,” AO3 already is the washing machine.

Rather than having to find unlisted communities, join them, learn where to go to access rec lists, learn where to go from the rec list to access each fic individually, accept that half the websites will be dead….

AO3 lets you pick a fandom, no need to hunt or join anything. Lets you sort content for that fandom in any conceivable way, from the broad “F/F” to the microscopic “Wingstuck AU.” Check and uncheck boxes to combine filters any way you want. A straightforward search bar right at the top of the page.

Using the algorithm is much more like hiring a complete stranger you’ve never met and never will to break into your house looking for dirty clothes, sneak away with them, and bring back clean clothes that are probably the same ones you owned last week but might just been the same color in whatever material and style was available at the Mysterious Stranger’s Laundry Event Horizon.

Instagram is free because you are the product. Tiktok seems to thrive on engagement because you are the product.

Want to know why in spite of all the scandals, Facebook and Twitter are sill doing the bare minimum to protect users instead of being proactive? Because the cows don’t get to make demands from McDonalds.

In any site or app that uses an algorithm THE PRODUCT THEY’RE PEDDLING IS YOU.

Algorithms are sold as having a ‘curated experience’ but it’s actually a data harvesting mechanism. That is all an algorithm is: a slot machine in which you put in your personal information for the company to bundle and sell to their actual customers.

It’s all part of a concept called Big Data and it’s taught in business school. That’s right, this isn’t even considered a tech thing, this is considered a business concept. I sat through a lecture in which the professor gleefully stated that all the data harvested through apps on the average social media user can predict when they’ll get a cold before they have symptoms. “In theory we can start prepping cold medicine advertisements by predicting when someone’s going to get sick!”

Learned helplessness is not a purity whistle or a lapse of moral character. Learned helplessness is the result of Facebook et al. spending years conditioning their users to be spoon-fed by the algorithm instead of learning to search and curate your own experience.

That frustration due to lack of instant gratification, that’s the algorithm conditioning. I mean these guys literally made these programs to be as addictive as possible to the point where they won’t let their own kids use social media.

Me who devours fanfics after getting a minor obsession: