Why AO3 Was Down

Hacker News helps me everyday break my information bubble. Archive Of Our Own is something that I wouldn't walk into when wandering through the internet

> I wouldn't walk into when wandering through the internet

it's interesting that some people are on the internet but is very well insulated! AO3 is very well known for me...

this is the first i've heard of it

> it's interesting that some people are on the internet but is very well insulated

Not sure I'd call it "insulated", the internet is just very, very vast, even when considering "just" the English-speaking web. Then you have all the other "versions" out there too that are kind of hidden to most people :)

Anecdotal, but also first time I heard about AO3, and I'd consider myself having broad interests and generally well-read, although my interests doesn't include fanfiction so maybe not so weird I haven't heard about it before.

Its very much a gendered thing. If you have lots of female (online) friends and late night topics with them ended up trending spicy, you might hear of AO3.

FWIW the vast majority of writing on there is decidedly mediocre. There is also an even more inferior alternative called Wattpad.

Funnily enough you learn that in general we aren't all that different in our tastes, it's just that what men like to watch, women like to read / imagine.

Edit: to paint the picture, this[0] was sent to me a while back :-)

[0]https://www.tiktok.com/@alexarowe11/video/746846214634761757...

I’d say AO3 is the insulated part.

Having been an active internet user for longer than most AO3 users have been alive, the first time I heard about it was a few years ago in a student radio show about the fanfic genre and culture. Poorly written smut featuring popular culture characters has just never been my thing. Probably because I’m not that much of a fan of any specific fictional setting or franchise in the first place.

The world of "spicy reading" isn't new to me (male), just that website in particular.

I don't think it's as gendered as you paint it, but I'd also acknowledge it depends a lot on geographic location, probably looks different where I am compared to where you are, I agree with that we probably aren't all that different in tastes in general :)

First time I read about it, not exactly sure what it is, by quickly glancing at it. Looks like a collection of links to some fan-fiction stuff.

It is currently pretty much the main repository of fanfiction.

I've been reading fanfiction on the Internet for two decades, so for me it would've been quite hard to miss it.

> Archive Of Our Own is something that I wouldn't walk into when wandering through the inter

Kind of crazy to hear. AO3 is so culturally massive I don't know how you miss it.

I have never heard of it, and I've been pretty active on the Internet since the early 2000s.

I think in this case, the more appropriate adjective would be “quarantined”.

The great thing about crowdsourced content is that if you have mediocre at scale, there are some gems!

I remember when I first stumbled across the main Antimemetics Division storyline on SCP. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

Anecdata, but it does seem like a very gendered divide on the whole. The only reason I know of Archive of Our Own is because my wife is quite familiar with it. And I do consider myself well acquainted with various smut filled corners of the internet well beyond Literotica.

QNTM is actually 'remastering' this into a book and then publishing it.

There's also another great one about a spinning disc that ends up opening a portal when placed on a mirror. SCP-093.

The internet’s big. I’m aware of it due to a moderate tvtropes addiction (there’s a enough crossover that it’s hard to miss) but probably otherwise wouldn’t be familiar.

"But... we don't even have an anti-memetics division."

"Yeah, we get that a lot."

Remember "Don't they know we're brothers??" from Supernatural? This was the site. <https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Dean%20Winchester*s*Sam%20W...>

XKCD on index number exhaution: https://xkcd.com/865/ Remember Data and the Borg? "Accessing... accessing... accessing... accessing..."

Literary vs visual porn is strongly gender divided. I would be very surprised if you were into erotica and weren't aware of AO3; I find it more likely that as a male you aren't actually very into erotica, as is the norm.

I'm sure you can find lots of studies about this, but just for a very easy data point, a few years old survey shows that AO3 is ~54% cis female, ~5% cis male, rest nonbinary/trans/etc.

What do you mean by "active"? IMO, if you haven't spent at least few years on, e.g., 4chan, then you haven't been very active at all, you've just stayed in a bubble.

Who is a better judge of what is insulated or not, someone who spent decades living in a single city, or someone who spent a few years traveling everywhere?

(I bring up 4chan because by virtue of being practically unmoderated, it is about as unlike a bubble as you can get. Where else do you get people into origami, hardcore rape porn, international backpacking, nobel prize winning mathematicians, and pranksters running iphone microwaving campaigns rubbing shoulders?)