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When I started a recs list, everybody's were hand-coded html lists on their websites. Livejournal changed that, and popularized recs lists far more by removing the biggest barriers to participation, the need for webhosting and the need to code html. But livejournal was far from an ideal situation for a recs database, as it didn’t have tags for the greater part of its existence. Many people’s recs journals were simply filled with posts that started with a list of which fandoms were represented within; many didn’t contain a masterlist and were hence not searchable.
Fandom-wide resources Crack Van (where reccers could sign up for a week or month at a time to represent their favorite fandom, pairing, or subgenre with curated recs and introductory blurbs) and Recs Rainbow (a blog that maintained an index of self-submitted fandom reccers and when they were updated with what) also came into existence.
Navigating these resources in search of new recs lists for a new fandom was itself a big task, but they still made everything a great deal easier, because navigating the maze of personal blogs and fic posted directly to topical communities all over the site, + fic posted to smaller archives and personal sites, was still very difficult - arguably more difficult in some fandoms, because finding fic meant performing keyword searches for communities, paging back through their entire catalogs of entries, surfing from person to person.
Delicious.com, with its revolutionary tag sorting that went beyond the individual user account, became the best place to find and search for fic very quickly. Suddenly you could look at the most recent bookmarks from other people in real time for any pairing you could think of - although without standardized tags, they weren’t all the bookmarks for the fandom; for that you had to surf around between different bookmarkers’ accounts using their networks, or find them by clicking on popular stories to see who else had bookmarked them and going to each person’s account. External bookmarking services still rely on the user to fill on all the info, though, so not every bookmark is equally informative - warnings, ratings, summaries, even author names or story lengths, or more importantly, the fact that something was still a work in progress, could easily be missing from the bookmark.
In some ways - like the automatic inclusion of the author's headers - AO3 is already an improvement on Delicious. In others, it’s a pretty drastic step backwards - like the fact that you can’t follow a particular user’s bookmarks, or see whose bookmarks they follow. Right now AO3 is primarily adapted for saving your own bookmarks, for which purpose it’s quite useful; and the archive itself and its search filters already let you discover new fic with much more ease than the previous disconnected systems ever did; but they miss an essential function of recs lists, which is: they weren’t just for finding any fic, they were an aid in narrowing down the field of fic to ones you might be more likely to enjoy: the recommendation part. Simply the fact that someone, or several someones, has recommended a thing before isn’t the same as getting a recommendation from someone whose taste you already know is like yours in some respect. Sorting the search results by number of kudos or bookmarks is only going to give you the Billboard Top Whatever list, while reccers are djs, curators of content.
And as the recent discussion of exposing bookmarker-side tags as a provider of content warnings show - particularly for racism and other issues where the creator may be unaware or not want to tag correctly - AO3 has the potential to create new functionalities with tags that could do things we've never been able to do before. A simple 'hot right now' or 'trending recently' algorithm like the ones used at Ravelry and Pinboard's Recent Fandom Bookmarks page (which doesn't work, because of the fandom exodus away from Pinboard, but was a great idea) could make it much more efficient to check out recent significant developments in a fandom, for example. My present workaround is to use the works search, filter by date for things completed or updated within the last (2 weeks, 6 weeks, 1 year, whatever, depending if/when I last looked at the fandom in question) and then sort by descending bookmarks, kudos, or hits. The ability to follow other bookmarkers could let you surf to see what friends of friends are reading and discover new people with congenial taste, which is the best way to receive recs from outside your own fandoms. And if bookmarker tags were or could be exposed when browsing the archive, a highlight color for someone you already follow could allow you to pick out comments hat are more likely of interest.
Any of that functionality is definitely still in the future, if not a complete pipe dream, and it's quite rightly behind other issues for the people who are coding the archive. A support and feature request person commented on the recent Tumblr discussion that inundating them with duplicate requests would be useless, but someone on the post suggested that using the bookmark tags and bookmark collections functionality more would be the best current step. Of course, I don't know if that person was correct, but I've got nearly 900 bookmarks there, so beginning to tag them strikes me as a fun and exciting (albeit long-term and time-consuming) task.
Fandom-wide resources Crack Van (where reccers could sign up for a week or month at a time to represent their favorite fandom, pairing, or subgenre with curated recs and introductory blurbs) and Recs Rainbow (a blog that maintained an index of self-submitted fandom reccers and when they were updated with what) also came into existence.
Navigating these resources in search of new recs lists for a new fandom was itself a big task, but they still made everything a great deal easier, because navigating the maze of personal blogs and fic posted directly to topical communities all over the site, + fic posted to smaller archives and personal sites, was still very difficult - arguably more difficult in some fandoms, because finding fic meant performing keyword searches for communities, paging back through their entire catalogs of entries, surfing from person to person.
Delicious.com, with its revolutionary tag sorting that went beyond the individual user account, became the best place to find and search for fic very quickly. Suddenly you could look at the most recent bookmarks from other people in real time for any pairing you could think of - although without standardized tags, they weren’t all the bookmarks for the fandom; for that you had to surf around between different bookmarkers’ accounts using their networks, or find them by clicking on popular stories to see who else had bookmarked them and going to each person’s account. External bookmarking services still rely on the user to fill on all the info, though, so not every bookmark is equally informative - warnings, ratings, summaries, even author names or story lengths, or more importantly, the fact that something was still a work in progress, could easily be missing from the bookmark.
In some ways - like the automatic inclusion of the author's headers - AO3 is already an improvement on Delicious. In others, it’s a pretty drastic step backwards - like the fact that you can’t follow a particular user’s bookmarks, or see whose bookmarks they follow. Right now AO3 is primarily adapted for saving your own bookmarks, for which purpose it’s quite useful; and the archive itself and its search filters already let you discover new fic with much more ease than the previous disconnected systems ever did; but they miss an essential function of recs lists, which is: they weren’t just for finding any fic, they were an aid in narrowing down the field of fic to ones you might be more likely to enjoy: the recommendation part. Simply the fact that someone, or several someones, has recommended a thing before isn’t the same as getting a recommendation from someone whose taste you already know is like yours in some respect. Sorting the search results by number of kudos or bookmarks is only going to give you the Billboard Top Whatever list, while reccers are djs, curators of content.
And as the recent discussion of exposing bookmarker-side tags as a provider of content warnings show - particularly for racism and other issues where the creator may be unaware or not want to tag correctly - AO3 has the potential to create new functionalities with tags that could do things we've never been able to do before. A simple 'hot right now' or 'trending recently' algorithm like the ones used at Ravelry and Pinboard's Recent Fandom Bookmarks page (which doesn't work, because of the fandom exodus away from Pinboard, but was a great idea) could make it much more efficient to check out recent significant developments in a fandom, for example. My present workaround is to use the works search, filter by date for things completed or updated within the last (2 weeks, 6 weeks, 1 year, whatever, depending if/when I last looked at the fandom in question) and then sort by descending bookmarks, kudos, or hits. The ability to follow other bookmarkers could let you surf to see what friends of friends are reading and discover new people with congenial taste, which is the best way to receive recs from outside your own fandoms. And if bookmarker tags were or could be exposed when browsing the archive, a highlight color for someone you already follow could allow you to pick out comments hat are more likely of interest.
Any of that functionality is definitely still in the future, if not a complete pipe dream, and it's quite rightly behind other issues for the people who are coding the archive. A support and feature request person commented on the recent Tumblr discussion that inundating them with duplicate requests would be useless, but someone on the post suggested that using the bookmark tags and bookmark collections functionality more would be the best current step. Of course, I don't know if that person was correct, but I've got nearly 900 bookmarks there, so beginning to tag them strikes me as a fun and exciting (albeit long-term and time-consuming) task.
