at LEAST just stick to putting the oneshots into their own fandom fics. i understand feeling awkward about putting short stuff on its own, but at least if its all the same fandom it feels less annoying
And theyre so tedious to navigate past because they list 4000 characters and tags And they give false hope to people who want crossovers but are only finding these fics
oh god. i didn't even think about how they must fuck over people who actually want crossovers. OH DEAR GOD. no one is getting anything good from this. holy shit.
I so wish there was some rule about dumps like that like there is about the archive warnings/rating. Like, I get where it comes from, if you have everything in one place it feels like your 150-300 word ficlets take up less space, but in practice this is so consistently annoying it makes me question why it's set up that way at all!! Please just use collections, for fuck's sake.
Man, I do love the conversational use of tags on Tumblr, and I don't want to completely abandon that habit, but I think a big and important difference is that on Tumblr they're not all shown by default. Maybe AO3 could add a setting where if there's more than, idk, 10? 20? tags, then all the extras go behind a +More button. Still there, still taken into account by doing a search by tags, but no walls like this.
ao3 does have a setting that will hide all additional tags behind a button, but it'd be nice if it would hide tags beyond the first 10-20 instead.
the ideal would be if there was an option to always hide certain tags. I don't necessarily need to know these guys' 11 favorite sex positions!
I don't like conversational tags on Ao3, tbh. At best it's like the author put in a back-of-the-book blurb that they wrote, and at worst it's like a five-page interview before the story even starts. I'd much rather tags be descriptive, only, and that we go back to florid A/N's at the end of a chapter.
I don’t mind a couple conversational tags but anything more than a few words gets annoying. or I guess it depends on the message the tags convey. if their primary purpose is to let you know what kind of content will be found within, they don’t tend to bother me even if the tone is conversational. if their primary purpose is for the author to chat with their readers, that belongs in the A/N.
Some fandom wanna treat Ao3 as a social media so bad I can't read fic for them anymore. Like, pls, read the room, don't you know it's bad form to speak loudly in a library?
That's part of the challenge, AO3 is an archive for all of us, and new fandoms - and new fans - are going to bring with them new ideas of how to conduct fandom. Many are from Tumblr, and used to the norms established there. Putting tags in the Author's Note fundamentally looks different and has a different feeling than filling tags with commentary - it's more like it's put out in the open, and there's a self consciousness in doing so, even for people already putting their words up in the form of fic. Back in the day we went lol fuck it and made our A/Ns into secondary fics where we interacted with the characters, just ramming a hole in the middle of that self consciousness, but that's not in vogue these days. I don't want to risk discouraging people against doing what works for them, don't want to risk discouraging them against using AO3, by giving them Back In My Day speeches about how AO3 is supposed to be. (I'm not sure if that's how anyone's intending to sound - and I acknowledge this is our own griping thread rather than going up to these new fic authors and telling them so - but that's how I'm reading it and I want to outright caution against that.) Even if I'm hoping all the while that they'll get comfortable with doing a lengthier A/N instead, I want to start with troubleshooting - what could we change to coexist with minimal tension? The wall of words from that crossover of many pairings shoved in together, that is frustrating to look at and genuinely a challenge for people to find the stories they're interested in because it has so many of the normal tags in use. Conversational tags lengthen the tag box, but something that hides the bulk would resolve the wall of words effect. I don't believe that the unconventional conversational tags are likely to be flooding up anyone's search results... Does the conversational use of tags present other logistical challenges for us? What might it look like, if they filled their A/Ns with that commentary - are we envisioning literally the commentary tags, or that they will change the style to something else? (Edit for typo - what does dinne mean, I'm sure it doesn't mean don't.)
Alright, yeah, I acknowledge that that sounded very snippy and gate-keepe-y. You're right, of course, the best course of action is to find a way for everyone regardless of background to be able to comfortably use Ao3 b/c Ao3 is great. My problem with importing Tumblr conventions into Ao3 is that Ao3 already has a very specific utility, and I don't think there's anything wrong with Ao3 doing the one thing it does really, really well. It's just unfair to ask OTW to make Ao3 pull the work of bridging the gap between multiple different modes of interaction. I also had to learn the "manners" going from FF.net to Ao3, from Tumblr to Ao3, and realising that different sites exist for different purposes shouldn't be a big ask from anyone who wants to peacably coexist with other users. So if we suddenly did have some kind of tag view limit to better accommodate tag rambling, would a change like that dilute the utility of tags, which are a vitally important part of Ao3's organisation method? Is asking people to respect Ao3 as a shared space rather than an extension of their journal and learn to present themselves as an author, while making resources on how to get over your self-consciousness and pitch-writing available, unreasonable? (And I'm comfortable saying that b/c every time I've pointed out to someone who pulls drabble bricks or rambles in the tags how unpleasant that is for other users to interact with, they've been like "oh shit, yeah -- that is a good point". Maybe you think that I guilted them, which is fair, but honestly I wouldn't be talking this harshly if this wasn't The Griping Thread to begin with. Like, jussayin', I figured this place out of everywhere would be the one where me being Kinda Pissed would be understood as the extreme version of my feelings on the topic.)
I hate the things outright and would prefer never to see them again. I don't find them to be terribly useful. If others wish to use them they're going to use them, obviously. But I will gripe about the things. I will not go out and gripe about them to the people who use them out of the blue. But like I may explain my point if placed in a situation where I am needed to. And if it results in a lack of the behavior then fine sure. If they keep doing it then fine sure. In reality I just don't read the fics that use them and gripe about them to friends in private or like places here. I would honestly really like something that automatically truncates the tag lists regardless though. I skim very heavily when I look through fic. I want some tag info but I do want limits on how much of it I am seeing because the giant walls interrupt my skimming flow.
I don't feel like having a thing that collapses tags down after a certain amount would make all that much difference in people's use of them, provided they all still applied to searches and could be easily expanded from the search results page. Having to actually click through to the fic to see the full tag list would be what would become cumbersome and annoying, at least in my experience.
Which is why it should be an option to toggle on and off. Like dark modes or the shit with warnings about fics rated M or above.
Yeah, this is the gripe thread, it's for the griping version of the feelings. My caution is intended a little more for what we do with the feelings outside this space.
I'd like to know where I originally said anything about even taking this conversation outside of this thread other than wistfully sighing about Ao3 having better onboarding for its users.
I dont think this would actually WORK in practice, and i know it would make ME anxious about how to tag Correctly, but it would be interesting if there was a field for auto-displayed primary tags (with like, a max of five tags or so) and a field for click-to-expand secondary tags (the current free-for-all). Then you could lead off that this is a slow burn + enemies to lovers + explicit sexual content in the primary tags and then go into as much detail as you wanted in the secondaries. Which would be confusing for people to transition to, and make it even harder to get a consensus on How To Tag, but i like thinking about ways to streamline data and communication :p
