Before Ao3, before FFnet, before LJ, fanfic archives were curated, like zine collections. All of them were, even if they accepted everything ( or nearly everything ).
A human being would read your fic and then manually add it to the website they ran and possibly tagged or synopsised (it if it wasnt just a web address at the end of a site directory you kind of blind clicked and hoped for the best). This was the easiest way to get them out, and you didn't need to know a ton of HTML to toss together this kind of archive.
These days just anyone can post anything and let me tell you It's much much better this way. I'd rather wade through all of it then miss a bit of it. Sorry, this is a simple post. Ao3 is the peak of fanfiction readability.
I was just sorting by one rare pair and three highly specific tags and realizing how much came back and it kind of struck me how incredibly far we've come
