depressing fandom things

[ratcreature]

Going to your bookmarks on AO3, that you tagged with "To Read" for later, only to see a blank "This has been deleted, sorry!" placeholder in your list. :(

Comments

[brownbetty]

Yeah, i know that feel.

[ratcreature]

It's especially bad because so often I'm too lazy to edit my AO3 bookmark to include what I was bookmarking in my own field, so I don't even know what's vanished.

Though actually in this latest case I was able to reconstruct what this bookmark was (a ST:AOS story, "your body drowning in gravity" by ofthenight), because of by bookmarking date, and what I downloaded from AO3 that day. I mean, precisely because of this situation try to remember to download first, decide to read later. But especially with mobile browsing it doesn't always happen.

[sholio]

I think in a way, knowing what it was (assuming you don't actually have the fic downloaded) is actually worse than knowing nothing. I encounter it most often while going through older bookmarks, and I'm honestly kind of glad not to know anything other than a fic used to be here and now it's not. Otherwise it's like that thing where you find a rec to a fic that sounds amazing and click on it and get a file not found error. (Which is going to be happening to a lot of people now, I guess, on account of so many journals being deleted off LJ ...)

[ratcreature]

I feel differently. Not knowing drives me crazy. And once you know what a story was you can usually get some fan to send you their copy via email, if you ask in a ficfinder comm or such. But even if I can't get a copy, knowing what it was is better than a blank for me.

[sholio]

Fair enough, everyone is different! :) I just tend to go nuts with KNOWING there was once a story like that out there, but there isn't anymore. For me, the total blank is easier to deal with.

[brownbetty]

I'm with you. I think it would drive me mad knowing there was once that perfect X,Y,Z story waiting to be read, or finished, but now it no longer exists.

[gwyn]

I feel like there should be a special hell for people who delete fanworks.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I feel similarly, especially with the option to orphan works available on AO3. With widely recced works deleting it won't even help to disconnect your pseud from your work (if you are embarrassed by your earlier works or such -- and sadly I suspect similarly if you delete something that was controversial for whatever reason and got tired of getting trolled and deleted), because all the links to it will still be out there. So why not just leave it up? Even if the author doesn't like it anymore, other fans will.

[bluemeridian]

Boooooo :(

[ratcreature]

Yeah. Somehow it feels worse to loose fic to intentional deletion on an archive than to website attrition, like geocities going down and such.