Archive of Our Own vs. A Library

[grayestofghosts]

I keep seeing posts about people wanting Ao3 to be “more like TikTok”, and aside from how horrible that sounds it sounds like aside from the constant cries for censorship, people are very confused about Ao3’s “algorithm” and are either complaining about the one it “has” (it does not have one) or that t should get one.

I don’t navigate Ao3 terribly much but uh. It is an ARCHIVE, not a LIBRARY, and people don’t understand the difference, it seems like. 

Like, there’s this fantasy among people who love media of a “library of everything, wouldn’t that be cool”  and they have heart attacks when they see librarians throw out old books, but then they finally get to a place that, for a certain measure of ‘everything’ actually does have everything, and their puny minds have no way to deal with it. And like, fine! Yes, actually, everything is overwhelming and not useful! That is literally why libraries curate! We also need a place for everything, and that’s why we have archives, and why archives aren’t libraries!

With this in mind, and the fact that Ao3 is open-source, the most logical thing to do seems like it would be to build fic libraries that do this recommendation, maybe not by algorithm, but potentially by algorithm if you were clever enough to do so. And it is very weird to see so few attempts at this. Sometime in the last 10 years or so, any kind of halfway ambitious web project became the sole territory of a few megacorporations rather than dorks trying to glue together a website from free web space and twine. Everything has been so funneled into a few websites, and they all look the same and provide the same things.