You keep talking about the origins of AO3 as this group effort by an actual group of people who were friends and who spent time discussing this with each other in person. It's kind of blowing my mind. Is there a post or a journal somewhere that specifically keeps record of this?
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I'm dying.
Nonnie, seriously?
No, that's mean, I know you're serious. It's just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn't a direct link to the past.
Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn't going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.
A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.
Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/
For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.
Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat's original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven't thought about it, AO3's name is a reference to A Room of One's Own.)
But also notice how many people voted: 562.
That's how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn't just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what "our" community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.
Here's an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn't do so, given the rise of antis.
Here's the invite to a fundraising party at astolat's in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.
You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat's initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.
The way my tumblr is now with a ton of text, back and forth, and hopping around between threads of conversation, all featuring a consistent set of faces, is very much like LJ. Most of tumblr is not.
This is important info to put out there, and I constantly forget that "fandom" as it is now is nothing like the community we had then. This is a good resource for understanding what was going on with the creation of AO3 in particular, but it's also a great example of why older fans say that we miss the Livejournal era of fandom so much.
AO3 is the result of long discussions, hard work, and a dedicated community of fans. Though it isn't is a social media site (and it was never intended to be), it is the only place now that sometimes feels like how the fannish community used to be on LJ--when a good discussion gets going in the comments on a story. But AO3 is for fanfiction et al, and therefore is limited in discussion subjects.
(The ads you'll encounter if you follow those links, though? Did not exist when we were there and were one of the reasons we abandoned the site--not the most important reasons by a long shot as you'll understand if you read more about why AO3 was created, but they were a factor.)
We were a collection of communities, with some-to-significant overlap in members. Fanfiction writers were not "content creators," and people who didn't write fanfiction were not "the lucky audience who should be soooooooooooo grateful that writers deigned to gift us with their incredible talent." We knew each other. Many of us met each other IRL after meeting through fandom (once fandom shifted to the internet there was some hesitancy at first about meeting "online" friends, but that was quickly gotten over). We went to conventions together. We had lunch and dinner and parties and meet-ups IRL outside of conventions.
If you take a wander around from even just that one LJ community (click on a username to check out their personal LJ), you can see how discussions would branch off without excluding anyone the way they do on Tumblr. If you wanted to share something you saw on someone else's LJ, you just linked to it, and people followed the link to read it and join in the discussion (or just lurk). The force of Tumblr splintering is an active barrier to creating real communities.
I really miss LJ. I miss the connection I felt to my community there.
Showing my age here, but one of the things I really miss was going to conventions like MediaWest and putting faces to names. I met and befriended so many brilliant, talented people there, and we got up to a ton of mischief together.
There were the post-art auction zombie walks across the street to Denny’s. There was the gathering in someone’s room where I performed a Patrick Stewart-style reading of a poem that featured Picard and Riker debating the merits of kinky sex. And if I’m recalling correctly, that get-together culminated in a thrilling luggage cart race down the halls.
There was a joke con flyer featuring “Men in Fandom—they’re both here and ready to talk”. Kevin Parker and I proudly offered to take the roles on. I did a hell of a lot of networking, too—getting editors’ names for submissions as well as culling for writers and artists for my own zines.
Sadly, we had to give a lot of that up when Darling Daughter came around and our disposable income had to go for more important things. But man, those were incredible times and I cherish every single memory.
I made it to MediaWest just once, long after its heyday. Still an interesting experience though.
It’s still amazing to me to realize how many people I knew (well, their writing and online presence, anyway) from The Sentinel went on to help found AO3. The little fandom that could, we were!
I suspect one could say the same of due South and Highlander and SGA.
There used to be The Next Big Slash Fandom that just about everyone stampeded to. It's just that it was an "everyone" that was a lot more niche than now when far more people are into fanfic and far more different fanfic communities cross-pollinate.
But yes, man, the sheer staying power of Sentinel fandom!
