This.
I donβt know about others but the only reason I put both is so that whichever someone clicks on, they will find my fic. So if there is supposed to be rules, I guarantee you that no writer knows these ones. We can barely get people to comment, you think weβre going to specifically choose & or / ? Hell no.
Iβve been in fandom for twenty years, and β/β means romance and β&β means no romance was literally one of the first things I learned. It dates back to Star Trek fanfiction of the 70s. Iβm boggled by the fact that anyone whoβs been reading fic on AO3 for more than like five minutes wouldnβt know that, and Iβm curious as to what fanfic community you come out of.
I donβt think that tagging with both is actually going to get your fic in front of more readers. People looking for romance often exclude the β&β tag if there are too many gen fics tagged with both. People looking for gen often exclude the β/β tag if there are too many fics with both. So rather than putting your fic in front of twice the people, you are in fact more likely to get your target audience ignoring your fic because it has a tag they donβt want.
Also, by overtagging you are more likely to annoy potential readers away from your fic than entice them. A fic tagged both & and / better have both romance and a ton of platonic interaction between the two characters, like a slow burn romance friends-to-lovers arc. If it isnβt, Iβm going to be very unhappy because the author lied to me with the tags to try and trick me into reading a fic with deceptive advertising.
When Iβm in a fandom and see tagging where some of the tags donβt really apply and are just there to get it in front of more eyes, Iβm going to assume one of two things. Either the author is a newb who doesnβt know anything, or the author is purposefully spamming the tags because they donβt care about lying to their potential audience and think that βspray and prayβ is an effective tactic. In the first case, their writing probably will not be very good, so why bother reading their fic. In the second case, the fact that I canβt trust the tags to be accurate means Iβm not going to read it to see if itβs interesting even if it has a tag I like. Chances are, that tag isnβt actually in the fic anyway, and even if it is, by spam-tagging the author is making the archive harder to use for everybody. Why would I reward bad behavior with attention? No. Far better to mute the author and move on.
More to the point--and no, I will never stop harping on this, because we have GOT to stop leaving our strongest points in the drawer--it doesn't matter if you heard of this convention before joining AO3 or not, because it's in AO3's tagging FAQ.
[id: the "How do I tag a romantic or platonic relationship?" section of the tagging FAQ here.]
"But Jo," you may argue, because you're wrong. "There's no way to find that without digging through site FAQ menus, and that's really inaccessible!"
sure
except
that when you go to post a new fic, and you go to put in those relationship tags, you see this
[id: the Relationships field]
and that tooltip, the one THERE TO EXPLAIN HOW THE FIELD WORKS, links to the Relationships segment of the tag FAQ, which explicitly lays this shit out.
I don't care if you don't know fandom history. I don't care if you've never heard a goddamn word about the spirk shippers. I don't care if you've never been exposed to fandom culture in your life. It is, frankly, not fair to expect those things of everyone.
What is entirely fair to expect is that you will READ THE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED NEXT TO THE FUCKING BOX, actually. Forget fandom conventions. It genuinely doesn't matter whether you agree with or respect fandom conventions. This is a site policy. This is explicitly how tagging on AO3, specifically, works.
Someone comes to you for ice cream. You tell them your sundae has chocolate and peanut butter when it in fact only has chocolate. Folks who want just chocolate aren't going to order it. Folks who want just peanut butter aren't going to order it. Folks who want peanut butter and chocolate are going to be disappointed there's no peanut butter. Tags are an ingredients list. It's not that hard.
If you don't understand tagging on AO3 when you've been on there, posting, for more than a couple months, it's a skill issue on your part
AO3 DOES NOT HAVE AN ALGORITHM. Okay? You can't game it.
Tagging both / and &, or tagging pairings and characters whom the fic isn't actually ABOUT (hint: the fact C/D are dating in your fic doesn't mean you should tag them if all the action is focused on A/B) is, as mentioned above, just going to piss people off, and it's not going to get you more "exposure".
