a-thing-for-pixels:
knebellindemann:
When I was younger I heard of AO3 and was intrigued.

I have read quite some books, mind you. But my book selection is easy because I usually buy books
by author or
by association like similar style or genre
by recommendation by someone who learned my reading habits.
Enter AO3. The flood of possible stories to read was so strong that I just gave up. Like immediately.
The switch felt like swimming in pleasantly gardened pools connected to a greater one and then standing in front of an ocean of unknown deepness and water quality. 🌊
I think, what I really want is an AO3 recommendation machine:
You in for sth new but popular?
Readers who like $XYZZY also read…

I have said this before, but:

I definitely don’t want AO3 to ever have an Algorithm in the same sense as social media sites.

And I wish people would not actually go by popularity when looking for a fic, because lots of excellent fics in obscure fandoms get ignored for years because of that. (It takes me barely any time to open up a fic and read enough of it to know if I want to continue.)

But, I recognize the other, increasingly common viewpoint…

And

I think there may actually be a need for something to help… ease the people who are accustomed to Recommendation Algorithms into how AO3 actually works.

So, I would be in favor of a browser plugin for AO3 that:

- puts a link at the bottom of a fic saying “Recommend More Like This”

- The link takes the reader to a list of the story’s tags and asks “Which of these things did you like about it?”

- And then “which ones did you not like? Are there any other tags you don’t want to see?”

- And once the reader has selected all their options, it takes them to a list of fics that are just the results for the search and filter function that it just taught them how to use.

(if you’re especially interested in the “readers who liked this may also like this” side of things, the best option is usually to look at the kudos and comments, and click on a few names– that’ll take you to their page, where they may have fics they bookmarked and/or fics they wrote.

Any of which are just as likely to be Relevant To Your Interests as anything suggested by an automated algorithm. Probably more.)

(and it might also be worth making a plugin that does those few steps automatically, because I’m starting to notice that a lot of people raised on Twitter or TikTok may really genuinely need help doing anything that takes more than one click.)

(No judgment for that difficulty. The world has changed a lot, and AO3 is very much an outlier by now, as much as it seems more intuitive to older fans. Some just want to complain about that, but I think we really should want to help.)