AO3 musing

[soc_puppet]

I kinda wish it were possible for logged-in users to leave guest-marked kudos on archive-locked works. Or like. Kudos by users who would prefer to remain anonymous? (In general would be great, honestly; yes, you can just log out and log back in again, but that's more of a hassle than most people want to go to.)

Being able to leave anonymous comments on archive-locked posts seems like a recipe for harassment, but just leaving anonymized kudos? Might help with the problem of logged in users being reluctant to leave kudos on Explicit fics, particularly those with more stigmatized kinks.

IDK, I'm not sure how it would work, but I think the idea has at least a little merit. And me wanting my explicit fics to get more kudos and attention might be part of it, too.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

It doesn't help with archive-locked works (and I have no clue about non-desktop), but it just occurred to me and I checked: open the work in a Private Window and it won't be logged in, even if you're opening it from a logged-in session.

[soc_puppet]

Oh, that's useful! I'm currently in a "give no fucks" stage, but if I regress into a "giving fucks" kind of stage, I may use that trick. Thanks!

[krait]

Huh.

Every now and then I'm confronted with the fact that other people put a lot more thought into these things than I do. I leave kudos on fics I like, regardless of rating or content. The internetFandom is for porn, why would people not leave kudos on porny fic? Seems silly to me to read it but not kudos it! Support your pornfic authors, or else you won't have any more porny fic to read...

[soc_puppet]

It's part of the purity culture takeover of fandom, unfortunately. People are afraid to identify-ably interact with "problematic" fics, and with how some of the harassment campaigns are going these days, I can't say I blame them. I've also heard of some authors not correctly tagging their fics because bad actors would peruse the tags in order to harass anyone who wrote that stuff.

Anyway, it's not something that I tend to come across in my own fandom interactions, but with fandom climate as it currently is, I can say I sympathize. Around ten years ago, my anxiety was much less well managed and I was irrationally afraid of being perceived as consuming fic in a fandom I didn't "belong" to; there's a whole fandom that I read a lot of fics for that I don't know if I left any kudos on because of that, logged in or otherwise. Which was very much a me problem, and I'm glad I worked it out, but yeah. Sympathy.

Damn

[jesse_the_k]

I'm glad that I'm old and give no more fucks.

The "purity culture" sounds exhausting. I'm glad your anxiety isn't setting your brain on fire as much as before.

Re: Damn

[soc_puppet]

Same, both on giving fewer fucks and on my anxiety being somewhat better tamed ✌

I've seen a fair amount of meta about it, and how the rise of purity culture in fandom and in general may be, at least in part, in response to the heightened surveillance culture in the US following 9/11, and also the puritanical attacks on anything even remotely sexual in media where someone under the age of eighteen might come across it. Which does nothing to make it any less fucked up, TBH.

[teslac0ils]

I've only done a bit of poking around ao3 since it's been a hot minute since I was a big fic-reader, but I wish you could just use pseuds for kudos. The pseud thing feels kind of useless for people with the problem of being embarrassed to post or interact with certain fics on the same username they use everywhere else, since it's so obviously tied to the main account name. I truly think it would help with engagement on nsfw/kinky/"problematic" fics if they made the pseud system a little more anonymized. As long as the mods have the info of what account goes to which comment, potential harassment would still be more easily moderated than truly anonymous interaction.

[soc_puppet]

Right? Like, ideally, fandom would be a place where no one is worried about that, but we're not there right now; reducing worry from the other side of the equation seems like a reasonable approach.

The alternate pseud interaction seems like a good compromise, especially for anyone who wants to keep various fandom interactions to a specific pseud. And it just occurred to me that it might also be helpful for plural systems, as well. There's probably some worry about "kudos farming" through that method, but I feel like it's conceivable to do with guest accounts on unlocked fics anyway, so...

[teslac0ils]

Oh yeah, system stuff is something I'm not at all educated on tbh but I see the utility there! I wonder if for that use, folks would prefer pseuds worknig as they do now (relation to the main account name is very obvious) or with the option for it to be more obscured/anonymized... but I guess that would vary by the individuals using it.

As for the whole issue of "kudos farming" (and "comment farming" ) man, I just cannot bring myself to care whenever it comes up. Since ao3 doesn't run on an algorithm like so many other websites there just is very little tangible benefit to inflating those counts. Like, if the writer has a fragile ego and needs to see number go up, so be it, I don't really care if it would be a consequence of a system that would be otherwise useful (and would make pseuds closer in function to how authors irl actually use pseudonyms)