thinking about that post of people assuming ao3 has an algorithm and also about how bonkers persistent the view is that ao3 is social media lite. like with startling regularity I get comments saying something along the lines of “it’s probably weird to comment on a fic this old–” no it isn’t!!!! this is an archive I am literally just assuming you searched for a selection of specific tags or sorted by kudos or looked back on my pseud or any other number of completely normal ways to use an archive site ?? kill the tiktok ghost in your brain and comment on old stuff it’s NOT weird
Guess how many people contact us regularly to ASK for us to have an algorithm, go ahead. Because it’s many. And I always take a little bit of enjoyment in explaining that no, we’re not going to build a system to recommend fics to you based on your kudos, because for one thing that would be extra work, and for another thing that would require us to be tracking and using a lot more of your data than we want to. We actually do not want to monitor that people who liked Fic A also liked Fic B, or that people who like the tag “butt plugs” might also enjoy the tag “anal fisting”, or whatever other nonsense seems to be the expectation these days. I already know enough (more than I’d love, in a perfect world!) about people’s reading habits, and I don’t want to have that knowledge deployed via algorithms on the Archive just because someone really wants an automated conveyer belt of content being streamed directly into their feed based on us extrapolating from their most commonly used tags or their most frequently visited works or whatever.
(I also do not want to imagine how many people would contact us to yell at us the second they got a ‘bad’ recommended fic. “I can’t believe that you recommended this to me, you monsters!”)
Anyway here’s my favourite sentence to include in my answers: “We hope instead that users will take control of their own experience using the Archive, and choose for themselves what works they wish to view or not view.” Apparently a novel view in this day and age.
Remember: an “algorithm” in the sense most social media sites use it? IS NOT VERY GOOD at showing you what you want to see.
It does not do a better job than you can do by looking through the kudos and comments on a fic you like, going to those people’s pages, and seeing what else they liked.
It does not do a better job than searching for tags you like, filtering out the ones you don’t want to see, and choosing which order you want to see them in.
(That search function technically is an algorithm! It’s just one that lets you control it! And, I don’t know how to tell you this if you don’t already believe it, but that makes it better!)
Someone should make a browser extension called AlgorithmForAO3 that makes a button show up under every story that says “Recommend More Like This”
and when you click it, it takes you to the list of that fic’s tags and asks “which things about this story did you like?” and then after you choose the tags you like, it goes to a similar page asking if there are any tags you don’t like, and then it asks you what order you want to see similar stories recommended in, and then it takes you to a list of “recommended for you!” stories that is just the search results on the AO3 search function that it just taught you how to use
AO3 only has the algorithm that YOU set up/define/“program” by searching and filtering the tags.
