cesperanza:anindoorkitty:iwantthatbelstaffanditsoccupant:melmey-fanfics:iwantthatbelstaffanditsoccup
cesperanza:anindoorkitty:iwantthatbelstaffanditsoccupant:melmey-fanfics:iwantthatbelstaffanditsoccupant:miadifferent:iwantthatbelstaffanditsoccupant:livinginthequestion:justanotheridijiton:[thread]fuckin’ this, folks.and I mean you KNOW I am here for fanfic, now and always, but that is NOT what this nomination is about! do you know how advanced an archival system ao3 is? the ways its indexing and DB structure improve discoverability for MILLIONS of readers?I know librarians who’d kill for that kind of tech! and this is glued together from cloudsourced specs while training their OWN coders on the way.and - this is not wordpress, people, they OWN THE SERVERS. they fund and pay wages for sysadmining! there’s rackspace!no, okay, look, listen, look:this is my job. I do it for a living. it is the only way I could go to cons, could take time to write.I only, only, ONLY ever took a programming class because Ao3 existed and showed me it could be done.think of it this way: if someone nominated twitter (…go with me) for an award, would you immediately conclude they meant the tweets?pff. no. that’s content. that’s the squishy stuff. tech is the skeleton it rests on.well, guess what: the Archive of Our Own is Real Tech too.’s better than Amazon is for providing new content to read. god, the filters. the freeform tagging (sure, yeah, it’s not Machine Learning, it’s manually wrangled - someone had to go tell the robots ‘AU’ == ‘Alternate Universe’). sort by length!! fuckin’ ratings!!!and - those of you who haven’t been to ao3, y'know, may I suggest if you’re curious, go take ten minutes and look? I’ll wait. A good place to start might be the fandoms front page. https://archiveofourown.org/mediaGo tell me if you can figure out how that works.Heck, I almost wanna start a scavenger hunt. Find a fic over 100k. Change the font to large. Go print a fic to mobi, or epub, or pdf and load it onto your tablet or kindle. Find me some meta with more than 500 comments.The UI design is IMPECCABLE. Search box in the top right. fonts all clean and clear. never, EVER see any javascript overlaps or partial loads or slow graphics - they know better than that. you can slap a custom skin on it. heck, there’s a link to the source code in the footer!How about a fic - here we go, Speranza’s classic, Written by the Victors. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15 There’s a bunch of UI you don’t see if you aren’t logged in - the heavensent ‘Mark for Later’ button, for example - but still. Everything you could click is easy to grok.Want more like it? Super easy and intuitive to click a tag, or the fandom, or a pairing (or even just M/M if you want to load half the site) and see more fic in that category. Sort by comments or hits or kudos and you get a good idea which ones are worth opening.These folks REALLY know their UI.But, okay, hang on, yes they do, and many are trained pros, but many also aren’t! the people building this site just WORK HARD, they try things out, they listen to feedback and iterate -(how much Big Tech can say as much these days)- but ALSO, and here’s what’s important to realise, this is a community project, a community space, and it was DESIGNED to TEACH.(Did you know when it was first proposed, they trialed Ruby and Python to see which was quicker for beginners? I know ‘cause I voted Python ♀️)Do you know how rare it is to find that in Open Source?Listen, okay, I’m a professional techie and I would NE-E-EVER venture into eg the Linux core with ‘Jennifer’ attached to my sig in any way whatsoever. Aside from that, much of OSS is, hmm, results-oriented.They expect you to show up fully-functional on day one, w/ a pull request ready to patch.Remind me, what’s the demographic balance in Ye Average compsci program?And of those, who’s working nights / caring for relatives / otherwise unable to Do Their Time posturing on github?But the Organization for Transformative Works isn’t here for that.They know (we know) that Fan is a Tool-Using Animal. idlewords.com/talks/fan_is_a… And the Archive of Our Own is proof of that.So maybe think on that a little, the next time Patreon has a ToS hiccup. The next time Jack removes like counts.Think of what Archive coders built, in the face of Livejournal’s hypocrisy, in spite of everyone telling us it was Too Much, we’d bitten off more than we could chew.That. That’s what this nomination is about.And yeah, we built it so we could host the smutty Harry/Draco and the conspiracy theories about Sansa and alllll the Naruto time travel fixit fic you could POSSIBLY ever read.And that’s pretty fuckin’ great, in my book.I have learned so much today. Congratulations, Ao3!! Congrats to AO3! We love you and all you do!But regarding this “you writers didn’t do anything, so quit your jokes” attitude…lighten up. No one is denying the incredible work that is the AO3 platform. It is beautifully run and well-designed and eloquently *conceived’ as the ultimate space for writers. I have supported AO3 at every pledge drive and in that sense I am a financial stakeholder. My Amazon purchases go to AO3. No platform is worth much without content and users, and while any award is generally rich with irony (just look at who has won a Nobel ‘Peace” Prize over the years to see what I mean by irony) this is seen as a sci-fi/fantasy writer’s award for the most part, not a technical framework one.Twitter is far from a writer’s platform. It is grabing the attention of a traditional writer’s award rather than a technical award (which it also richly deserves) because of the writing content it has attracted due to its excellence. So…it’s a joke, yes, but a reasonably conceived one. one doesn‘t work without the other so I really see no point in this argument. Here‘s the description of the category from the website.Thank you, @miadifferent …I was looking for this, and was attempting to extrapolate it from the other nominees. I just take issue with the attitude many have had that profeses to state this is a tech only acknoledgement. It shows no indication of that. It is noteworthy as a forum for transformative fiction (like an art collection). That includes all aspects of AO3 content and formating and design. Not any individual work—but all of them as a collection, the technical framework, and its driving philosophy as an Archive *Of Our Own*. I think the problem that led to the initial post is the fact that the work the developers do is often underestimated. Every time there is a call for donations people come up complaining that AO3 wants money because they don’t understand how the platform works and how extraordinary the work of the volunteers is that keep the platform running. There needs to be an understanding that AO3 is so great, like you said, not because of any individual work, but because so many great things come together, the developers working on the technical framework, the people organizing the volunteers and those looking into legal aspects, the writers who provide the stories, the readers who enjoy them and keep the thing going with their donations. Once you start thinking about it you realize that in times of highly commercial online platforms with more often than not dubious settings regarding their user’s privacy AO3 is a bit of a miracle.Yes. It is a miracle. It deserves serious accolades. Its role in providing a creative outlet, means of finding a community and friendships, and exposure to discussions and concepts that probably came very close to saving my life, or at least my self-esteem and sanity (This is not an exaggeration. I needed this at a certain point of my life and it was there). There are always people who have underestimated the work involved in maintaining the site, or openly criticised its social value or its content. I would like to think that is a tiny percentage. I hope I’m right. People who think they are asking too much in terms of financial support are not only ignorant but should go without AO3 for a while to see what they are missing. Or try to run a site themselves. Or—run anything themselves without financial support.I sometimes can’t believe that it is as good as it is in terms of ease of use, as dedictated as it is to free expression, as accessible (free) as it is, as vast as it is. And that takes a tremendous amount of people all doing their thing. The work to keep it functioning properly is inconceivable to me and I am grateful for every person keeping the site running every day on a purely technical basis.I hope this increases funding to provide the amazing folks who tag wrangle and code and do legal advocacy and all the other aspects of non-content maintenance with everything they need. And I hope the nomination provides the level of respectibility fic deserves as a force of expression. People always take good things for granted. AO3 is a very very wonderful thing. And I never would have thought it would be nominated for something like this in this way. And I’m glad it has been. Congratulations to all who have made it and who continue to make it so.CONGRATS AO3 for your Hugo award nom!!!!Where I spend a lot of my free time and would be absolutely bereft without it. Thank all that are responsible for the tech and the art. Both are the best!ALL THE AWARDS! Uh, lots of good meta here but mainly AHAHA LOOK ITS MY STORY THAT’S THE CITED CLASSIC LOOK PEOPLE I AM ONLY HUMAN AFTER ALL. \o/ -- source link