i am not feeling good about this

This is venting.

After reading the Free Food Restaurant meta--context at FF_A since the original meta post at AO3 was deleted and replaced with an orphan account I can't find the link for--I:

1.) rediscovered the power of a secondhand embarrassment squick. I did not know anything could make me twitch that hard for someone than reading that meta.
2.) realized I have probably passed the point where if I flounced, I could do it in any way that could possibly qualify as original. Which is, honestly, a little depressing to consider.
3.) wonder just how well this entire adding meta to AO3 thing is going to work when there is not a system of forced categorization so when searching for fic, meta does not display. Since that is currently happening right now. As in, Free Food Restaurant is showing up under two fandoms and no meta tag in sight. Of course, I'm still hoping for the magical day I can filter out crossovers without giving myself an aneurysm doing a complicated tag thing that only works about half the time.

I mean, if this is going to be an honor system thing like labeling crossovers or hell, labeling pairings correctly--which I am completely shocked to report people don't do that all the time--this is very quickly going to be a problem. Unless we are implementing a way to require that before huge amounts of meta posting start? Which does not seem to be the case.

I don't want to knock AO3 here or anything, since this was obviously the result of a lot of thinking on the subject and everything, but I have yet to think of a good reason, an actual good reason not just a why-not reason, why meta, which is not even by a stretch of imagination quite beyond anyone living labor under the legal problems that fanfic does, should be included with fanworks--that being fanfic, vids, and any form of art--needs so desperately to be included in a fanworks archive. I am willing to stretch and say I consider it a non-fictional creative work--because well, it is--but couldn't it have it's own non-fictional creative work archive? A meta archive, you might say. Separate from the fic. Which in general, the archive was created to house? Just a thought.

Because in general, when I am in a reading fic mood, I am not technically interested in meta, and when sorting through a few hundred thousand fics to try to find non-crossover fandom of my choice with my pairing or pairings--which already requires me to start considering a blood sacrifice to shorten the process of horror--I now will have to watch for snowflake's feelings on a pairing not being labeled as meta.

Spoken as someone who is really not okay with the nightmare of having to figure out how run exclusion strings with not only crossovers, but every single pairing I don't like and now meta may need to be added, assuming the writer bothers to label it. That doesn't always work.

References
AO3 Announces Meta Allowed in Archive - link to AO3's announcement page

In case anyone wonders if the addition of meta has a plan on how it will be handled:

Just as art, podfic and video can currently be found on the AO3, so can meta. The difference, of course, is that the AO3's current infrastructure already supports the direct hosting of meta in text form, so its continuation on the archive has been more a question of policy than ability. This does not mean that there won't be technical issues involved, particularly when it comes to users' desire to filter their search results to find or exclude it. We don't currently have a time estimate from our AD&T committee (which runs the AO3) on how quickly a solution can be created to address that. -- Admin-claudia in comments, AO3

ETA:

Free Food Restaurant - AO3 meta. Okay, it's hilarious, stupid, and lists two fandoms without any meta tags whatsoever. And also, again, hilarious. Free food, y'all. Fic is like free food, but not in a clever way like hummus. (THANKS cathexys!)

Comments

[tazlet]

Seriously on the meta archive. And don't we already have the Symposium?

[seperis]

You know, I forgot what it was called, but yeah, I think so?

[arduinna]

... the Fanfic Symposium? That hasn't been updated since 2006, and most fans who've come in since then have never heard of it, so no, I don't think we really have that anymore.

If you mean the Transformative Works and Culture journal's "Symposium" section, also no, I don't consider that remotely the same thing as a fannish space to put fannish meta. I know that the journal editors want fans to submit things, but honestly, I for one would never want to, or even dare; I don't have an academic bent at *all*, and the thought of working and reworking a fannish essay to be appropriate to an academic journal is... no. I can't do it, and I won't tie myself in knots trying. And I don't think most fans seek out that journal as a place to find fannish meta, anyway; I think that audience naturally skews very hard toward academics.

There's no central place in fandom right now to put meta. There's no way to find it, unless you already know the person writing it or happen to get linked to it by someone. The new "metanews" comm is trying, but it's only been around for a few weeks, and afaict is being run by one person, who's pretty much bound to burn out at some point.

[lydiabell]

I'm really discouraged and saddened by the AO3's "Let people post whatever they want and we'll make it usable later! Much later! Maybe!" approach. If people can't find what they're looking for, what you have is not an archive. It's a haystack.

There's no excuse for opening up to vids and podfic and meta without first implementing an easy way to select what type of work you're looking for (edit: and a required way to specify what type of work you are posting). It makes no sense. Any system that they bolt on later will necessary be uglier, work less well, and require more work than building in this ability from the start. And they can't possibly have failed to know that people wanted that feature.

I'm at the point where I'll continue to post on AO3, but I'm backing up my fic against the day when people abandon it as unusable. Not saying it'll be tomorrow, but if they continue down this road, it'll happen.

[seperis]

This was a bad idea at this point and executed with, from what I can tell, minimal understanding of the impact to the archive users or for that matter, impact to the archive itself. They need to rework the entire interface for both upload and search already; adding this will just make something that is already not easy to navigate into a morass. It's ridiculous.

[dreamatdrew]

RIGHT THERE WITH YOU on "NO, I do not want crossovers, your jelly needs to stay FAR AWAY from my peanut butter, thank you."

[seperis]

THIS.

[silveraspen]

Wow. Just... wow.

It honestly seems to me that a "select by type of media" function and required categorization of a work into an existing type at the time of upload should be basic functionality. Shouldn't it?

[seperis]

...you would think so. It's blowing my mind that this wasn't implemented before alternate media types were added.

[cathexys]

Because the pain needs to be shared!!!!

http://archiveofourown.org/works/689630

<3

[seperis]

LOVE YOU. ADDING NOW!

[seekergeek]

Oh dear lord, no. AO3 has already become an unwieldy mess due to nonstandardized tags and now they're adding meta to mix? *facepalm*

[seperis]

Welcome to hell.

[petronia]

As I understand it, this was a horse-well-out-of-barn decision on the tons of meta already posted to the site (I've seen, and even bookmarked, a few essays, so not a surprise here). Which... yeah, I don't know why no one made the call at/before the functional requirements stage, since it could not have surprised anyone that some people were going to try to post meta to the fanfic archive, but there you are.

[seperis]

Honestly? All meta should have been removed until the functionality of the archive caught up. I may be in a minority here, but I want to read for fic, and if we have to have meta--which I honestly see no reason to have in this particular archive and not a separate one--then a workable category system to separate it from fiction should have been done first. I don't see any reason why it should be this hard in a transformative work archive to find actual transformative works I want to read.

[ratcreature]

Thanks so much for linking the thread with the caps, I've been really curious what was in that meta post that gets linked but deleted all the time. I've always been too late to click it and get anything on either AO3 link I'd seen.

[seperis]

I know the feeling. I missed it this morning and then read it at ff_a and was very sad I missed.

In comments in my LJ, shinetheway has a cap of one of the original pages of comments on the original post.

[out_there]

*frowns* I... have to say, I think maybe meta should have either it's own separate/sister archive, or there should be some mandatory entry field of type of fanworks. Surely that's not too difficult.

Then again, all of the non-standard tags must make maintaining that archive a pain. I mean, I get that tumblr fans are used to communicating through tags rather than the body of the messages but those of us who remember older archives (like, say, SSA) would like tags that are consistently useful and make it easier to find fic.

...mind you, I don't hit crossovers too often. Maybe because I'm used to filtering by pairing rather than fandom, and pairings within one show rarely feature as crossover fodder. (As opposed to pairings across canons.)

[seperis]

Both of these. Honestly, if teh archive functionality was good enough to separate fanworks, I'd have no objection to its inclusion. But it's not, the filters are not workable like this, so yeah, either new archive or walk this back until we have the functionality.

[amireal]

Crossovers are a slightly more complex issue, it depends on how you define it you know? Some people will call a story that's labeled Thor and Avengers a crossover despite being in the "marvel cinematic universe". What I want is for umbrella labels to be used with more force. So... if your fic is SGA, it should be labeled, BUT it should also have a Stargate Universe tag. Umbrella tags for Stargate, Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, etc. would be ideal for me, even when you have situations where Marvel has several universes (there can be smaller umbrellas) all with the same characters.

[seperis]

I just want to not see every fic in the world crossed over with Good Omens when I want to read Good Omens fic. I mean, it can't be that hard to pull off.

(That said, I agree, but the complexity is detail level; creating a system so you can filter for your story being a single fandom shouldn't be that hard.)

[isweedan]

I like your post and your commenters and they make many good points that I agree with!

[seperis]

Thank you!

[green_grrl]

I feel like I'm on my porch waving my cane. The issue, I think, is that people want to create community wherever they are. So if they're on Tumblr with a bunch of other people that love X, they start posting their X fic there. And if they're on AO3 with a bunch of people that love Y, they put their Y meta there. There's a perfectly good platform for community where you can share all your Tumblr posts, archived fic, podfics, Vimeo vids, episode thoughts, meta posts, etc., at LJ/DW. But people decided to "move on" and now they are bending single-use platforms to do things they're not meant to do. They should just get off my damn lawn! And quit it with that freeform tag shit, too.

[mercurybard]

And quit it with that freeform tag shit, too
AMEN AMEN AMEN

Tumblr's a different platform. Tumblr tags are appropriate for Tumblr, not for AO3. It's like the people who use hash tags on Facebook. Argh.

[busaikko]

What I would love the most would be the ability to see meta-data for all my works in a table - the way LJ shows icons, kind of? So there would be:

FicTitle1 □art □fic □meta □vid ○●crossover?(radio button Y/N)
FicTitle2 □art □fic □meta □vid ○●crossover?(radio button Y/N)
ArtTitle1 □art □fic □meta □vid ○●crossover?(radio button Y/N) and so on...

and checking all the boxes on that one, centralized page would edit the metadata on all the works. Because if all uses have to go to every single entry to one by one edit meta-data, it won't get done. I already have no idea what I have uploaded, and I think I just have about 200 works up.

[seperis]

Ooooh, that would be amazing. I like this idea!

[nianeyna]

You know, I'm okay with - and even cautiously enthusiastic about - AO3 including meta. I think that may be because I use it differently than you seem to, in the sense that I very rarely use AO3 to FIND fic. The thing I like most about AO3 is the idea of having a place to host all our fannish stuff where it's not in danger of getting deleted or blocked or whatever, so I'm always happy to see more stuff there, even if it's stuff I'm not interested in.

I do agree that there should be a more robust system to mark what kind of work something is, though. On the other hand, I can't see any way to do that that doesn't leave it up to the individual, which kind of puts us right back where we started.

I feel like there's more to be said about this but I really have to go to class, so.

[seperis]

I can't really imagine the point of an archive that's disorganized and unsearchable, to be honest.

I do agree that there should be a more robust system to mark what kind of work something is, though. On the other hand, I can't see any way to do that that doesn't leave it up to the individual, which kind of puts us right back where we started.

Having a mandatory field for type of fanwork would do the trick.

[fleetfoxes]

I'm on your side of the fence on this, but I think the other side is a result of Tumblr becoming the central fandom hub over the past couple of years (also responsible for the use of non-standardized tags in AO3, since tumblr tagging is about conversation rather than organization half the time. drives me nuts.) Taking ficbits and meta and art and podfic and throwing everything in a big pile willy nilly and putting filtering at the poster's discretion without providing useful/easy site-wide tools to enable the reader to do their own filtering is very, very Tumblr to me.