So what have AO3 done now?

[snorkackcatcher]

In regard to metafandom's latest kerfuffle (mercifully ism-free and so low-intensity) concerning feedback and downloads:

Your comments-to-hits ratio was 1%? (adopts faux Yorkshire accent) SHEER LUXURY!

Basically, that's about the best you can expect unless you actually are a BNF -- and a fair few of those comments will likely be drive-bys. It's a bit frustrating, yes, but there isn't much you can do about it short of begging or threatening to throw a strop if you don't get them, which will just get you mocked. I did a few calculations on the stats from Checkmated, which I'd always thought of as a particularly good archive for getting comments; turns out it's a corollary of the fact that it's also a good archive for hits. The proportions clustered around 0.5%, with the maximum of 1.16% the only one to top 1%. (Still seems better than FictionAlley though.)

As for the problems with the "download as PDF" feature at AO3, put me in the large camp that says "so? What's new?" Once it's posted on the web -- well, if someone can access it in the first place, they can download it if they really want to, forward the downloads anywhere they want, and generally muck about with it to their heart's content. And there are many perfectly good reasons why they might want to (e.g. reading offline). There's absolutely no point in getting antsy about an archive feature that makes the process a bit more convenient.

Hell, the only reason I didn't put PDFs on snorkfics was that I'm lazy and didn't expect the number of downloads to be worth the effort of making them up. Far from being upset at anyone wanting their own copy of one of my fics, I'd be thrilled that they liked it enough to do that. But then I've never quite seen the logic behind getting quite so passionately proprietorial over something that is, after all, a derived work based on some pre-existing canon you didn't write.

I've never been an AO3 partisan who goes around saying it's the greatest thing since they invented shipping, but I've always been happy to give it a chance. I still don't go there often, but the structure is getting quite impressive now, and it's really beginning to show its worth.

Comments

[dreamer-marie.livejournal.com]

Ah, BNFs... They don't have the same preoccupations as the rest of us.

[snorkackcatcher]

And there seem to be so few of them around any more.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with the person who responded "turn the hit counter off".

Actually, I have wondered why the Harriet/Peter roleplay fic doesn't get more hits on AO3 just because there is so little H/P out there. And then I realise that anyone who wanted to read it has already done so on my LJ, and I'm lucky there are as many people as have been moved to drive-by click and just see what is there, even if they run away screaming.

[snorkackcatcher]

I suppose H/P isn't ever going to get many hits unless you stumble across somewhere with an unusually large pocket of Wimsey fans.

Oddly, I don't look at the hit counters much, probably because I'm so used to the idea that they can be way out that I forget that they do actually provide a decent approximate guide to popularity.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I don't know how the hit counters work technically except for "they don't work perfectly", but I still think they can be interesting. It's notable that Yuletide fics continue to get hits, for instance, suggesting people are reading it as an archive.

The "no hits because of downloads" theory is just wierd. Do they think no-one ever used to print fics out?