I'm not sure if it's a sign of improving mental health (less hoarding/control tendencies!) or a sign of worsening mental health (lack of interest/care about things) in that after discovering that, no, even logging in with my RSS reader to ao3 won't make archive-locked fics show up in RSS feed, my reaction is: eh, that's the author's problem that I never see their fic, not mine.
I fully disagree with a lot of the reasons people lock their fic on ao3 (especially the way many people on tumblr frame it as them being "forced" to do so) but hey, it's their decision.
Once upon a time, if you wanted people to see your fic, you would do things about it. Maybe you'd send it to a mailing list. Maybe you'd post on a LJ community.
And now what people seem to do a lot of is just post it to ao3 and never crosspost about it anywhere. Their assumption is, you'll see it on Ao3.
But I don't. Because a small one fandom archive, sure, I could look at it every so often and see the what's new.
But I'm following a lot of ao3 tags and I am not checking ao3 for 1) any locked fics, which don't show up in RSS, 2) any fics posted to collections which, because of changes ao3 made years ago, do not show up in the feed if there are 20 fics posted since that was posted.
And once upon a time, I was like "I need to see all these fics, especially ones in tiny fandoms I'd never see otherwise!"
And now I'm just like. Meh. That's their problem that I'll never see their fic, not mine.
Possibly this is because my "to read" list is so very very long and so is my author subscription emails that haven't been read yet.
But also it's like. If you make it hard for me to find your fic. Then you're just like those people back on LJ who would post a fic to a community with a note that they were going to friends-lock the fic after 3 days, and if you want to see previous ones in the series, you have to get them to add you to their friends list.
Because honestly why bother. If you're going to make it hard for me to read your fic, then clearly you don't want me personally to read it, and that's okay. There's plenty of others, from people who aren't making it hard.
Because, no, I am not going to be checking every single ao3 tag even monthly for archive locked/collections fics. I'm sure some people are checking them frequently. Those people will read your fic. And that's fine, honestly.
But I'm not putting in the work. And if I miss the world's great fic because I don't see it, then yeah, okay. That's fine. Go with god, do your own thing. Not my problem.
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kaffy_r) wrote2025-06-29 03:44 pm
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