des-zimbits:

Hey!!!

That thing you wrote that isn’t “good enough” to put up on the AO3. You can put it up there! The AO3 isn’t meant to be The World’s Classiest Showcase. It’s an archive. It exists because most other forms of hosting fannish work eventually degrade or disappear. Accounts get deleted. Websites shut down. The AO3 preserves those things.  Ten years from now you’ll be like, “Shit, there was this really great tag essay, but the person changed their Tumblr URL and then Tumblr closed up shop…” (look, even Tumblr will die eventually) and your only hope of finding it will be if the page was cached, or if somebody uploaded it to the AO3.

The AO3 exists to preserve ephemera as much as substantial works. You know how valuable it is for archaeologists to be able to read the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii? The little things, the notes, the headcanons, the notfics, the meta, the back-and-forths, are all important too.

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2lzqT0Q

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Responding with a post on your own blog? You can connect it back to this one with a Webmention by writing something on your site that links to this post, and then entering your post URL here. I have comments moderated for approval to control spam, so it may not show up immediately. If you want to update or remove your response, you can update or delete your post and then re-enter the URL here again. (Learn more.)