Kudos Ao3 Meme Log Out and Leave Kudos Again
What'southward Incorrect with the Kudos Button on Ao3 and What to Do About It
As a long-time fanfiction author, I sometimes detect myself thinking back to the days before Archive of Our Ain came into being. People engaged with fanfiction differently and then. I call back long, thoughtful comment debates under the most contempo chapters of my favourite stories. On some of the more notable Live Journal fanfiction (e.one thousand. The Shoe Box Projection), these comment debates would span multiple pages. Friendships were formed, flames were had, the wank was good. Ah, the pre-Russian, Pre-Strikethrough, Pre-Boldthrough days on El Jay.
Back then, people engaged with fanfic authors. They read, they commented, they asked questions. Sometimes they didn't say much. 'Nice Story' or 'Good Update' were still comments that came in a lot, but they did come in. Reason being: this was the merely way to let the writer know you were reading and enjoying the story. So readers, even shy ones or those without a ton to say beyond expressing their enjoyment, would leave a comment and an author's day would be made. And and so on the bike went. Until the strikethroughs and the boldthroughs, and the tiresome steady creep of the Russian government'due south presence on Live Journal, made it and then that many on LJ did not feel safety sharing their stories. This is not to mention the political and legal action against the visitor past homophobic groups.
Around this time, some of the older Spider web 1.0 fanfic archives were starting to disappear. This, coupled with continued issues with Fanfiction.net (that I will non go into but are indeed many), brought Archive of Our Own (Ao3) into being. Run by the Arrangement of Transformative Works (OTW), Ao3 is a for fans, past fans archive designed to '[provide] access to and [preserve] the history of fanworks and fan cultures in its myriad forms' (Ao3/About). The organisation is built upon the legitimacy of transformative works, of which they consider fanworks a part, and growing and nurturing young fandom creatives. They run a peer-reviewed academic journal on the subject and their work preserving old single-fandom athenaeum has prevented thousands of stories and other pieces of fandlore from disappearing into all simply memory.
There is only one problem with OTW/Ao3, and it is built into a niggling Web ii.0 metric button at the lesser of every story. The Kudos push button on Ao3 is a noted difference from Fanfiction.net or Live Journal in terms of reader engagement. It is alike to the like button on Facebook or the centre characteristic on Twitter or Tumblr, and, like on Facebook, the reader cannot view the Kudos they have left on a fanfic until they try to leave Kudos on that same fanfic once again. Information technology is essentially a useless metric, equally Ao3 does not monetise likes in the mode Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr do (i.e. through like-based/cookie-based advertising). However, this ane button has fundamentally changed the way that readers engage with, and swallow, fanfiction.
Instituted in 2010, the kudos push provides the illusion of giving feedback, and minimizes reader engagement with the text (Fanlore/kudos). Authors cannot disable the feature. The reader feels as though they've provided praise, expressing their similar of a story which could accept taken hours or weeks or months of work, through a single click of button with a heart on information technology. This practise fosters passive date with fanfiction. It lets the reader off the hook: effectively eroding whatever need to engage with thoughtful critique and analysis of the text read. The same is true of the fandom migration to Tumblr, as moving to an image-based blogging platform rather than a text-based one with easy comment threading options, has deeply cut into fandom debate and discussion. Twitter is equally problematic, every bit the 140, and now 280-character limit means that discussion can only happen in short bursts that does not permit for nuance or elaboration.
The introduction of the Kudos/Like push button at the same time every bit this movement abroad from a platform designed around conversation/commenting fundamentally inverse fandom from a community of equal commutation into 1 of consumption. Readers now would race through fanfic after fanfic, reading at a frantic pace because all of the fanfics are in one place. That is the magic of the OTW/Ao3: they've centralised fanfiction to their website, which is ad-gratis and easy to use thanks to their uncomplicated design and not-for-profit status. Other websites accept fanfic archives, such as Wattpad, Fanfiction.cyberspace, and even Tumblr itself. However, none of these other archive platforms accept the same advertising-gratis feel to them, as they are all commercial organisations. Ao3 is run by fandom folks, and for that alone, information technology will continue to be the all-time archive for fanfiction around in the eyes of most fans.
The only drawback, however, is that Ao3, through their centralisation of fanfic and the implementation of the kudos button, has shifted fandom toward consumption. Probably inadvertently. Probably because they wanted some sort of 'like' feature/metric to make Ao3 like the Spider web 2.0 sites popping upwards around its advent. One can debate that the kudos/like feature is good for readers with anxiety issues, or those who are shy, or who don't speak English well (though this confuses me), or for those who merely don't accept anything to say but want to express enjoyment yet. Still, the clean interface and preferred condition of most writers has created in Ao3 a space for readers to swallow and consume and consume the creative labour of fan writers without, for the most part, engaging meaningfully with the story. The kudos button every bit cheapens this labour, and makes information technology easy for readers to opt-out of commenting or providing feedback — equally evidenced by memes such as this 1:
In many means, the centralised archive and the kudos button devalue the work of the fandom artistic. Readers will accident through a dozen i-shorts in a night, or will read fourscore,000 words of a single story in one sitting. With all the fanfic centralised, the quondam fandom struggle of tracking down individual stories on obscure athenaeum or friends-locked LJ posts is gone. There is no work involved in finding stories to read anymore. This lack of work, coupled with the convenience of a central archive, makes the skillful story less something to be savoured, and more than something to be consumed. Near people do not read 80,000 word long books in a unmarried sitting of 3 or iv hours. And if they do, they certainly are not reading for depth or agreement. In centralising fan writing, OTW/Ao3 has created an environment where the reader no longer engages with the text in any depth, because in that location is always another story to satisfy the peckish for a good story. Moreover, the presence of the kudos push button at the bottom of each of these fanworks encourages the user to like and motion on. This is an accidental consequence of a noble endeavour on OTW'due south part, merely information technology is one that I remember can exist remedied easily.
I propose the elimination of 'kudos' as a metric all together. Go rid of the button; get rid of it as a metric. This feature creates the illusion of feedback given and actively devalues fanfic writer's work. The elimination of the kudos button and a prompt to leave a comment before moving on to the adjacent affiliate would practice wonders in terms of encouraging readers to engage with the author whose labour they simply consumed for free. Additionally, I would encourage Ao3 to speak out about digital labour and the work fandom creatives do gratis inside the actual interface where folks are reading these stories. I would urge them to encourage their annal users to monitor their binging of fanfic, and to speak out against such practices through the features of their website. A Netflix-style pop upwardly of 'Are you still reading? Why non exit a annotate to tell the author how much you like this story' later multiple chapters would likewise assistance encourage this. It'd be annoying, just it'd get the point across.
Fandom creatives put forth thousands of hours of gratuitous labour for their fandom peers on a daily basis, but until mechanisms are put into place to acknowledge that this work is done for free and out of love of their thing and get-go to honor this labour, fandom civilisation will always be take-first.
Source: https://medium.com/@ellenannes/whats-wrong-with-the-kudos-button-on-ao3-and-what-to-do-about-it-203a9cc45cfd
0 Response to "Kudos Ao3 Meme Log Out and Leave Kudos Again"
Post a Comment