Comment on OTW Board Approves Meta Hosting on the AO3

  1. kelcat Mon 18 Feb 2013 09:14PM UTC

    I'm curious as to why you think a flood of meta will be coming in just because it's being officially allowed now. I write a lot of meta, but I doubt I'd post it here, because I like to have it in a place where I can keep an ongoing discussion with everyone.

    I can see why some people really want meta, but I'm interested to know why you (and others) feel so strongly that there will be a huge influx of meta that has already posted at other communities.

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    1. Penknife Mon 18 Feb 2013 09:56PM UTC

      penknife

      Personally, because I'm seeing meta appearing in my fandoms on AO3 where no meta used to be, and my experience is that things snowball once they reach an initial critical mass -- if it becomes "a thing people do," especially for people who mainly post to Tumblr where there's not really the same opportunity that there is on LJ/DW to host a discussion in one place, I think we'll see a lot more of it.

      I'm hoping not, unless there's a way to cordon it off from fic! But I'm not betting on that.

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      1. kelcat Mon 18 Feb 2013 10:08PM UTC

        Ah, I see. The fandoms I follow are relatively small, so I haven't seen any changes since the announcement. There's meta there, but it's stuff that's been there for ages.

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    3. navaan Mon 18 Feb 2013 10:53PM UTC

      The Unwritten Tom Taylor and his winged cat Mingus

      To be honest I feel like you about my own meta and discussions and think that there are many people who probably will think like that and leave most of their meta in one place. But I've seen "meta" pieces pop up in one of the bigger fandoms I'm reading in - a fandom that is already hard to search because people are using so many different canonical and higher level meta tags - and it was mostly about defending OTPs and preferences.

      As of now nobody can know what will happen - as we do not know what the final definition for allowed meta will be in the end (and I'm sure wherever the line is drawn there will be discontent).

      Because meta can be hosted directly here already, I expect it will be posted more than the other media fanworks that can only be linked or embedded like fanart, podfic, vids already. These non-textbased fanworks will be entirely swallowed, I expect.

      All of this isn't new. People have asked for the media categories for a long time now (as well as better bwosing functionality and filters).

      I do think that with adding another media type, possibly before implementing a way to put fanworks in mandatory categories for easy searching and browsing that will also mean that later down the line when the categories may be implemented, nobody will go back and do a thourough clean up. It makes sense to implement this sooner rather than later or at least start planning on how this will be done, before starting on the meta policy.

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