I cannot believe that in the year of our lord 2020 there are legit people saying that “AO3 isn’t a big deal, there are other fan hosting websites”. That they don’t realise how fragile and precarious it all is.
I’ve been on the internet long enough to watch Photobucket and Imageshack go under, for old forum threads with art contests to now turn into broken dead galleries full of empty displays and metaphorical shattered glass cases.
If I read a fic ten or even five years ago on Tumblr, good fucking luck finding it now. Blog might be gone, URL might be different, and even if I find the blog, unless I reblogged that fic or bookmarked it in my browser and still have that bookmark (and can find it), good luck sifting through years of posts for something that might be tagged ‘fic’ or ‘fanfic’ or perhaps ‘writing’ or who the fuck knows what, because Tumblr certainly still doesn’t let you search or filter combining more than one tag at a time.
I’ve been on the internet long enough to remember when Tumblr let you post nsfw content - wait, my bad, that was just a little over a year ago, wasn’t it?
And that’s not even getting into the Livejournal Purge, the certain authors flat out banning fanfic of their work (and sites like Fanfiction.net enforcing this), or the C&D letters.
Archive of Our Own was built to be (among other things) an ARCHIVE. And so far it has been precisely that, and that is huge. I don’t blame the Gen Zs who are just now coming of age and starting to use the internet for not knowing the history, but damn, you have GOT to do research before you just take shit for granted!
