thinking about that post of people assuming ao3 has an algorithm and also about how bonkers persistent the view is that ao3 is social media lite. like with startling regularity I get comments saying something along the lines of "it's probably weird to comment on a fic this old--" no it isn't!!!! this is an archive I am literally just assuming you searched for a selection of specific tags or sorted by kudos or looked back on my pseud or any other number of completely normal ways to use an archive site ?? kill the tiktok ghost in your brain and comment on old stuff it's NOT weird
the other day i saw someone refer to fic from 2022 as “really old” and how they were reluctant to comment on it bc they didn’t want to be a creep, and my heart just shattered in my chest. did y’all know there was a whole internet for like 20 years before social media took over everything? and we talked to each other on it! there are other ways to do all this, please don’t let corporations trap you in the for-profit cycle of endless rapid fire consumption and churn because they make it so hard to realize how anti-human it is and hard to find any of the the other options. and also, comment on old fic, a year old or five years old or twenty years old, there is a human being on the other end who put it there on purpose for you to enjoy!
I might not reply because I forget and let it get awkward, but I promise you, people who leave comments on the stuff I wrote when I was youngish and prolificish make my day in ways that are the opposite of creepy.
What’s happening here is people are applying the ethics of scrolling way back on an Instagram profile to scrolling back on an AO3 profile, without understanding the key difference that IG creeping is usually voyeuristic (looking at people’s pictures of themselves and their lives) so dropping a like on a 2022 pic is weird, but scrolling back on an AO3 profile is like getting books from the library and authors literally have their stories posted to an archive to enable readers to, you know, read them.
Also, the fanfic better fucking be older than you for you to call it old. There are actual old fics on the internet, but most of them are not on A03 because they predate the site. Like do y'all call movies, books, games etc. from 5- years ago, 'old'. Cuz that's crazy talk. Fanfic, like most media, isn't bread, it doesn't mould after a week. Sure, saying a fic is older is fine. but every time i hear someone call a fic that was written last year 'old', my soul leaves my body.
