Well, locking up all my fics including any new ones I post to AO3 bc I absolutely refuse to let AI programs scrape through my work for a profit that I legally can’t have for the tens of thousands of hours I spent learning my craft. Sorry to those who aren’t registered on AO3 and were following anything i happen to not have locked but unfortunately I have to protect my work from the scourge for my own sanity
@nicolabarth what I’m concerned about in this situation is the fact that Betsy Rosenblatt, Head of Legal for AO3 is pro AI and has stated so by suggesting that AO3 allow AI scrappers the use of the site for those programs to learn from writers within the last two days in an interview. This is especially concerning with the current WGA strike going on and the fact that programs such ChatGPT would profit off the work that we, the fanfic writers, cannot profit ourselves (or at least not advertise it on AO3 for legality reasons which I’m 100% understand why that rule is there and support.)
Like I know it’s not possible to combat everything regarding the scrappers, but I don’t want someone on the board of AO3 to be supporting AI this way bc it’s not helping the community and is extremely suspicious to release such an interview right after the donation drive occurred. Betsy should be protecting the site/community of AO3, not the thing that threatens the jobs of most writers.
I haven’t read the interview you refer to, but I googled and found a different one (I think?), and yeah, Betsy Rosenblatt is saying some problematic shit. WTF?
”I tend to agree with Stability AI’s statement. I would like to see courts consider the “training” process separately from the process of generating works. It is, of course, possible that a machine could generate an infringing work. But the process of training that machine involves something very different—turning expressive works into data and creating relationships based on that data collection. We call it machine “learning” for a reason. A well-trained machine won’t generate an infringing work, but it needs as large a pool of data to work from as possible to do that. The mere fact that an AI can create something infringing doesn’t determine whether the gathering of information is infringement.”
She’s probably right from a purely legal standpoint, but the way she’s saying that she’s excited about AO3 being mined for data sucks
I’ve seen five different authors take down, or prepare to take down, their posted works on Ao3 this week. At the same time, I’ve seen several people wishing there was more new content to read. I’ve also seen countless posts by authors begging for people to leave comments and kudos.
People tell me I am a big name fan in my chosen fandom. I don’t quite get that but for the purposes of this post, let’s roll with it. On my latest one shot, less than 18% of the people who read it bothered to hit the kudos button. Sure, okay, maybe that one sort of sucked. Let’s look at the one shot posted before that - less than 16% left kudos. Before that - 10%, and then 16%. I’m not even going to get into the comments. Let’s just say the numbers drop a lot. I’m just looking at one shots here so we don’t have to worry about multiple hits from multiple chapters, people reading previous chapters over, etc. And if I am a BNF, that means other people are getting significantly less kudos and comments.
Fandom is withering away because it feels like people don’t care about the works that are posted. Why should I go to the trouble of posting my stories if no one reads them, and of the people who do read them, less than a fifth like them? Even if you are not a huge fan of the story, if it kept your attention long enough for you to get to the bottom, go ahead and mash that kudos button. It’s a drop of encouragement in a big desert.
TL;DR: Passively devouring content is killing fandom.
Reblogging again
So much this
You know, kudos and comments are much beloved by all esp. yrs truly, but I have to say: I’ve been posting fic for 20 years, and I have never in my entire life had a story stay above a 1:9 kudos to hits ratio (or comments to hits, back when kudo wasn’t an option). Usually they don’t stay above 1:10, once they’ve been around for a few weeks.
I also have a working background in online marketing. In social media 1:10 is what you would call a solid engagement score, when people actually care about your product (as opposed to “liking” your Facebook page so they could join a contest or whatever). If BNFs are getting 1:5 - and I do sometimes see it - that is sky-high engagement. Take any celebrity; take Harry Styles, who has just under 30M followers and doesn’t tweet all that often. He regularly gets 3-400K likes, 1-200K retweets. I’ve seen him get up to just under 1M likes on a tweet. That’s a 1:30 engagement ratio, for Harry Styles, and though some of you guys enjoy my fics and have said so, I don’t think you have as lasting a relationship with my stories as Harry Styles’s fans do with him. XD;
Again, this is not to say we, as readers, should all go home and not bother to kudo or comment or engage with fic writers. That definitely is a recipe for discouraging what you want to see in future. But this is not the first post I’ve seen that suggests a 20% kudo ratio is the equivalent of yelling into the void, and I’m worried that we as writers are discouraging ourselves because our expectations are out of whack.
I think about this a lot, because it’s important to know what a realistic goal to expect from an audience is, even though I admit it definitely is kind of depressing when you look at the numbers. I was doing reading on what sort of money you can expect to make from a successful webcomic, and the general rule of thumb seems to be that if your merchandising is meshing well with your audience, about 1% will give you merch. I imagine ‘subscribe to patreon’ also falls in this general range.
Stuff that is ONLY available for dollars are obviously going to have a different way of measuring this, but when it comes to ‘If people can consume something without engaging back in any fashion (hitting a like button, buying something, leaving a comment)’ the vast majority will.
And as a creator that is frustrating but as a consumer it’s pretty easy to see how it happens. I have gotten steadily worse at even liking posts, much less leaving comments on ones I enjoy, since I started using tumblr. It’s very difficult to engage consistently. I always kudo on any fanfic I read and comment on the vast majority, but then again I don’t read a lot of fanfic, if you are someone who browses AO3 constantly/regularly for months or years, I could see how it’s easy to stop engaging. I don’t remember to like every YT video or tumblr fanart I see, much less comment on them.
When we are constantly consuming free content it’s hard to remember to engage with it or what that engagement means to the creators. And lol, honestly that sucks. Certainly as consumers we should be better about it. But also like, as a creator be kinder to yourself by setting a realistic bar of what you can achieve.
And IMO, if numbers matter to you (kudos, comments, etc) be honest about the fact that you CAN improve those things by marketing yourself better. The ‘I just produced my art and put it out there and got insanely popular because it was just so brilliant’ is less than a one a million chance. Lots of amazing content is overlooked every day because there is a lot of good content and a metric fuckton of mediocre to bad content. You can only SORT of judge the quality of your work based on the audience it generates, but if what you WANT is an audience there is way, way, WAY more you can be doing than simply producing whatever you immediately feel like. Marketing yourself is a skill and if you want the benefits of it you have to practice it.
I have a professional background in internet marketing as my day job and a moderate hobby business. My definition for “moderate” is “it pays for itself, keeps me in product, and occasionally buys groceries.” In the day job, which is for an extremely large global company, there are entire teams of people whose entire purpose of employment is to ensure a 3% conversion rate. That’s it. That is for a Fortune 100 company: the success metric is for 3% of all visitors to a marketing web site to click the “send me more info” link. My moderate business that pays for itself has a 0.94% conversion rate of views to orders. Less than 1%, and it’s still worth its time – and this is without me bothering to do any marketing beyond instagram and tumblr posts with new product. I know it feels like no one is paying attention to you and you’re wasting your time if you don’t get everyone clicking kudos or commenting but I promise, I PROMISE, you are doing fantastically, amazingly well with your 10% rate. You probably aren’t going to go viral AND THAT’S FINE. You’re only hurting yourself if you’re expecting a greater return – don’t call yourself a failure, because you’re NOT. You’re just looking at it the wrong way. I promise, you’re lovely just the way you are.
Reblogging this bc it is a take on fan engagement at AO3 that I haven’t seen before, and as a writer I find it helpful to have this reality check. Also I wonder which came first: the overall low engagement rates in internet commerce, or the freaking shit-ton of unwanted spam and advertising we’re constantly bombarded with?
I think as writers our assumption (my assumption anyway) is that the portion of hits that don’t convert to kudos equals the portion of readers who looked at your fic, didn’t like it, and never finished it. But it would seem that is an overly pessimistic assumption.
I should know this, because I ‘like’ very sparingly here and reblog only less sparingly, and yet I read and enjoy a lot of posts I don’t like or reblog.
#also something that is really obvious that none of this points out#(probably someone did somewhere in the notes but I do have a life)#your hit count will go up by virtue of PEOPLE REREADING YOUR FIC#a hit count disproportionate to kudos/comments#which are things that are only really done once #is INEVITABLE#and a GOOD thing #people rereading your fic is a good thing
Also, while I will always defend people’s right to take down their work if they want to, I will point out that taking your work down simply because you think it didn’t get enough engagement prevents you from having the experience of seeing it slowly grow over time. You’re doing the equivalent of cancelling a TV show that doesn’t have an amazingly successful pilot episode, without waiting to see if it gains a devoted following by mid-season. It’s short-sighted. It means you’re not going to potentially have the pleasure of someone commenting on it 5 or 10 years later to explain that it was their favourite story, that they re-read it 20 times, that they shared it with their friends, or even just that they’re so glad they found it on that specific day, years after you posted it. You might not even have the pleasure of going back to re-read it yourself and see how you’ve progressed as a writer.
AO3 is an archive - it’s there to preserve fanfic. It has longevity, and if you leave your works there, they can have longevity too. And you never know when something is going to be rediscovered, or who it might mean something to (including yourself).
It’s also important to remember that your numbers/ratios are also affected by factors like which fandom/ship you’re writing for and the rating of your fic. There’s different fic-interaction cultures in every fandom (for example, in some fandoms, there might be a stronger comments culture, which leads to a higher average of a comments to fics ratio than another fandom). Smut fics always have a lower kudos to hits ratio. If you’re a writer trying to evaluate how your fics are doing, base it off of the numbers on fics in the same fandom/ship (and rating), not your previous works or your own expectations. You’ll find you’re doing much better than you think.
Okay so this is already a super long and really excellent post - but I have a couple really, really important notes to add as someone who has had the title “prolific” attributed to them, more than once. (With good reason as I am a handful of fics away from 600.)
@sp8sexual - Called out that fandom matters. It does. It does SO MUCH and you don’t even realize it. When I went from writing Sabriel (Sam Winchester/Gabriel) to writing Malec (Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood), the engagement increase I saw has been METEORIC in comparison. It’s insane. I knew what to expect the relative engagement to be for a fic when I posted it in the Sabriel fandom, and I posted enough of them that I knew what to expect - I was happy and more than fine with that. Going into an active, popular fandom by comparison? Blew me out of the water when I realized what a difference in can make. You have to realize what is “good” for you, and for your fandom, and set your expectations accordingly.
I’ve been tracking my Ao3 data weekly for 2 years now - and I regularly go in to peek at my overall stats, mostly out of curiosity and look at different things to see stuff! I checked so many of my fics (and I could be considered a well-known author in my chosen fandom at present, if not a popular one) and here’s a few of my fics:
- Dragons & Riders Fic #1: 2% Kudos Ratio
- A Mutually Beneficial Arrangement (The Domestic Prince of Hell AU): 4% Kudos Ratio
- A Curse, A Choice, A Claim: 3% Kudos Ratio
- THIS ONE IS IMPORTANT (it is the only fic of mine that has ever gone “meteoric” in terms of popularity) - Never Judge A Shadowhunter By Their Scent: 8% Kudos Ratio
- Magnus Bane: Certified BAMF: 7% Kudos Ratio
Three of those five fics are my most popular hit fics out of any I’ve ever posted to Ao3. None of them, not a single one, break a 10% Kudos ratio. It’s not a realistic goal, I promise it’s not.
Hell, I’ll even go a step further and say that I don’t think it’s healthy for a lot of authors to chase those kinds of numbers. (My personal opinion, obviously.) I think you get up chasing a number that feels almost impossible to budge.
And while I am fascinated (and I will emphasize, fascinated) by my own data and can engage with it in a healthy way - because I’m only comparing myself against myself - that doesn’t mean that everyone can, and that’s okay. I promise it’s okay.
Chasing hits, chasing kudos, chasing comments, every author out there wants engagement, every author wants to feel that rush of an Ao3 email hitting their inbox. I get it. I get it. Encouraging people to comment is always a good thing - especially making it a good place to just leave a single emoji when people can’t leave more. That means something to me, always.
But at the same time, I think writers really, really need to understand what their baseline is in turns of numbers before they start getting disheartened by numbers. You’re all doing great - promise.
[Image Description: Tags reading “car crash, ‘sex with a car’ is a suggested tag but 'car crash’ isn’t. I have no words”]
The AO3 Tag of the Day is: I hate to have to be the one to tell you about symphorophilia
Tagging things on AO3 in a nutshell.
Sometimes, my AO3 kudos mail is so long it doesn’t fit on my screen as a whole, and that makes me unreasonably happy.
FANFIC PSA
Leaving comments is great. Leaving feedback is great. Saying what you would like to see in the future is great.
HOWEVER.
What is not great is making an author feel like they are nothing but a tool used to fulfill fantasies and feel a bit used.
For the past several weeks, I’ve been getting comments on “50 Shades of Hell”, posted on AO3, that have left me feeling a bit uncomfortable. The commentor, who shall remain nameless, has been hinting rather urgently towards a story idea that is beyond what I write.
I am primarily an erotica writer, specializing in BDSM. We all know this- I think I’ve even been dubbed the ‘Queen of BDSM’ even though I’m sure there’s better BDSM writers out there than me.
This doesn’t mean that you can comment on my fics, asking for things that I may or may not feel comfortable writing about, and with subject material that isn’t going to present itself anytime soon.
I write a lot of fanfic for free, and it’s with a certain finesse. A lot of time, patience, research, and procrastination goes into each fic. I put pride into my fics, and the worst thing you can do to a fanfic writer is make them feel used- or dirty.
I joke that I sin, and that you all are sinners for reading my stuff, but I try to make my fics have a purpose. Whether that be to educate, to provide entertainment, even if it’s just to make you scream at me to write a sequel because I’m a monster who loves cliffhangers. If I’m commissioned, I’ll fall in line with the commissioner’s wishes. But, it all still has a purpose.
I do not exist to fulfill your personal fantasies. That’s what you are for. Please do not leave lewd comments describing what you want to see in the future. Just because I write certain material doesn’t give you the right to project your fantasies onto me.
The next time I get a comment that makes me uncomfortable on “50 Shades of Hell”, it will be put onto moderated comments. Please do not make me do something like this. I would hate to have to moderate every comment that came in for this fic, because there are 10 chapters left as of today and I have a feeling there’s plenty more to come.
Happy Sinning!
I got the same kind of comments from the same person for a while even though I'm not writing that much porn into my stories. And it took me a while to figure out what was wrong with it, because one of the things I like about fandom is actually that we can talk about sex pretty freely here without anyone having to be ashamed. And I actually invite people to tell me what they want to see next. But having someone demand (in a pretty rude tone) you write their fantasies (that get described in detail without asking if that is okay beforehand) without any regard to the characters or the story... That kind of feels like the text version of an unsolicited dick pic.
To anyone who might also get these kind of comments: There is nothing wrong with feeling uncomfortable about this no matter what kind of filthy smut you write.
Ao3 Ao3 There might be an update Ao3
I wish that ao3 had an option to filter warnings (and tbh certain authors) out like I will never ever want to read it and just seeing it puts me off so much that often I end up closing my browser because that content upsets me so much lmao
There is a way to do this but I can’t recall how to do it. it’s something you type into the box for “other filters” or something, I don’t remember. who knows?? It’s not a great option, and I don’t know if you can sort out authors that way, but it’s better than nothing if someone can reblog this with how to do it!
Alrighty friends! It takes some specificity, but you can do this. Let me show you how!
So I started with going to the Sherlock (TV) section of Ao3. On the right we find this lovely section! ((I know I’m going over things you already probably know, but I figure this post may go to new Ao3 users, so bear with me.))
Underneath this, I chose sort by Kudos, because that’s a quick way to find most popular fics, for the sake of this demonstration.
With those filters on, we end up with this being our first two results:
As you can see, we have Nature and Nurture by earlgreytea68, and The Internet Is Not Just For Porn by cyerus. So what if I am utterly sick of seeing earlgreytea68 on my list? Let’s pretend I’ve read all their fics, or that I just don’t like her, or whatever. I want this author out. I go to this section on the right:
In “Search within results” I type earlgreytea68 into the bar, with a minus sign in front. This gives me the following page, upon hitting the sort and filter button:
There goes earlgreytea68! But now I’ve decided that Crack is just not my thing, I’m sick of that, too, for heaven’s sake, I want something reasonable in my gay slash fanfiction about detectives that solve crimes about glowing dogs and irish megalomaniacs. Heaven forbid this get ridiculous.
Well, then I add this to my search:
Which gets rid of everything with that tag. My results are now:
Performance in a Leading Role is now my first result!
You can do this as many times as you want; the biggest problem I have is trying to filter out multi-worded tags. For example, “Secret Relationship” is hard to filter. Better to go with authors you dislike or with words like “DubCon”.
I hope this helps! Also remember that googling site:archiveofourown.org and then adding search terms will mean google searches Ao3 for you, and sometimes that works far better.
Good luck!
An excellent in-depth guide! Thank you!!
omg changed my whole ao3 rarepair game
An excellent guide to filtering on AO3!
You can filter out phrases by enclosing them in quotes. For example, if ABO and Hydra Trash Party are not your things, try:
-“alpha/beta/omega dynamics” -”hydra trash party”
I have more advice!
Say, you’re in your random fandom- I went with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, since I’ve been reading Iron Man stuff recently. Tony Stark is awesome.
But anyway, you’re on the page, and you see that there are 174,774 works! That is way too many for a casual afternoon’s browsing.
And you see that the first one is Peter Parker/Tony Stark and that is not your jam. It doesn’t work for you, or it squicks you, whatever. Wouldn’t life be easier if you could browse without seeing that pairing (or whatever pairing you don’t like)? You can!
First, click on that pairing tag(You may want to open this in another tab, actually.):
and it’ll take you to the page for that pairing tag. Click this button:
and then look at the address bar! The actual page is unimportant. Copy the numbers located here:
and go back to the original search page! Down on the side, in the same place you can get rid of other tags, type -relationship_ids:”the number you just copied”
Then hit ‘sort and filter’ annnd… magic!
The fics with that pairing are gone! You can also do multiple pairings, get rid of any tags you don’t like, and sort it by date or length or kudos, or whatever.
Enjoy.
I’d just like to add that these sorts of search modifiers ALSO WORK IN GOOGLE AND MOST RESEARCH DATABASES. The more you know.
AO3 tags ...