no, it's the newbies who are wrong

[cimorene]

You know, at the time I was quite frustrated with Livejournal as a platform for hosting fic, as were so many other people, but it was the best many people had access to until AO3 came along. And in retrospect, at least there was SOME semblance of navigability, if the mods or owners of the journal in question chose to use it.

I could never have conceived of a platform as bad for fic hosting as Tumblr, yet almost daily I scroll by posts from people who have wilfully placed it there even though AO3 exists now and is free to join and use.

Comments

[larissabernstein]

Fic on Tumblr is an utterly weird concept to me. Not that it is so much better for meta and discussion (LJ / DW were great for that). I think of Tumblr mostly as loud and confusing picture book.

[cimorene]

Yes, precisely - the text it does incorporate is so random. If you have to talk to someone you ONLY know on Tumblr, sure, use Tumblr to talk to them, it's better than nothing! But otherwise it's inexplicable. Choosing Tumblr for text when you have ANY alternatives is just... weird.

[princessofgeeks]

I never could figure out Tumblr. I miss so much of fandom doings now because I could never figure out how to use that platform.

[aurumcalendula]

Yeah I really don't get Tumblr as a place to host fic (although I find it way more comprehensible than Twitter threadfic).

[elf]

Oh, we have worse now.

Did you know people post fic to Twitter? Not micro-fics of 2-5 posts. Entire 7000-word fics, broken into tweet threads. Sometimes they later post them to AO3, and I swear you can see the breaks in the original. (I mean. If they combine them into normal paragraphs. Sometimes they keep each tweet as a paragraph.)

Many of the Tumblr-fic people believe AO3 has a quality bar: "must be this good/long/grammatical to post." So they post their beta-read, big-bang-event fics at AO3, and all their "reply to an interesting prompt off the top of my head" fics to Tumblr and never even think about transferring them.

[alexseanchai]

a lot of people I follow post fic to both, and won't consider somewhere like Dreamwidth or (admittedly for reasons I 100% agree with!) FFN as an alternative for people who can't access AO3

on Tumblr, you see, fic posts are rebloggable

[alexseanchai]

there are admittedly several fics I have on Tumblr because I was responding to an interesting prompt, did not crosspost to AO3 right that very moment, and now will never find again

but yes, augh

[hebethen]

It's further evidence that social platform usage is not based on the quality of its features or UX design, but on whether people's friends are there.

[cimorene]

But you can post the fic to tumblr by using the share button, while still retaining the superior archiving and ui and interactivity of AO3! Not that I don't buy this as a reason,mind. I just think it's a choice based on poor evaluation of their alternatives.

[cimorene]

I did not know that! Thanks, I hate it!

[alexseanchai]

a link post is not a fic post, though. people open the link, usually to read later, and usually don't come back to reblog it. people read the fic post and the reblog button is Right There.

[cimorene]

I understand this impulse, and even posting extracts of fic in other places - fic that you don't intend to be archived and don't mind being unable to find again. I've left little bits and bobs and drabbles in comment threads myself. Twitter does seem like a much sillier extreme example though, because of the character limit.

[cimorene]

I've definitely seen them reblogged, more than I want to at least, because I really am only interested in recs from known and trusted sources. I'm sure there would be some reader attrition that way, but on the other hand, I imagine other people wouldn't read it in the first place simply because it WAS on Tumblr. I can't estimate the ratio of those groups though. It probably varies by fandom anyway.

[torachan]

Apparently some people write fic dribbled out sentence by sentence on Twitter, so I think that's probably worse, but Tumblr is pretty bad, too.

[cimorene]

I've just learned about that and I do have to admit it is even worse!