Pinboard's good, but the catchment area is too small.

Talk to me about this catchment area. I don't know what the term means.

Is the basic problem twofold: a) the new Delicious removed features we saw as required for our fanfic bookmarking and bookmark sharing requirements b) nowhere else has the critical mass of users and bookmarks?

Or is this catchment area a functionality thing that Pinboard doesn't have? I guess it could be lack of critical mass too.

I don't Delicious near as much as I used to. Since I shifted reading to almost all AO3, I kinda stopped bookmarking at all, because it tracks everything you read anyway. But now I'm doing it because the authors get bookmarking stats (right? my artwork has never been bookmarked, so I don't know from personal experience) sent to them/shown in console, over and above looking at the entry? And hey, maybe a reader reads like me and can get something out of it.

But, shit, I'd love to put my "likes" and "favourites" and "kudos" in one place and have people be able to search tags across the media not just sites. If Pinboard, maybe I'd spend money. But unfortunately I also think about how I'd design it, and how much I can't actually code something of that scope.

With all that free time AO3 developers have (move in case the lightning hits you too) it would be great if they had a pan-site bookmarking sideline. But what's in it for them? Hell, I'd just love if you could host pictures there--so few of us put pictures up there.

Which reminds me, I'm ridiculously overdue for an LJ post. Sheeit. How's LJ doing as the former buzzing hive where you could get meta, fic, art, and fights all in one place? How's Dreamwidth doing as an alternative?

Talk to me about this catchment area.

I mean the same thing as you do by critical mass. When Delicious changed so much it seemed not to be working for the purposes I was using it for, I went over to Pinboard with a lot of other people in fandom. But the number of people on Pinboard is orders of magnitude fewer than people who were using Delicious. As a result, there's not as much posted there and I'm not finding as much stuff by searching bookmarks.

Which reminds me, I'm ridiculously overdue for an LJ post. Sheeit. How's LJ doing as the former buzzing hive where you could get meta, fic, art, and fights all in one place? How's Dreamwidth doing as an alternative?

Erm. Works okay for me, but I'm not active in any particular fandom right now, so I'm not lookin to DW for that. I mostly use LJ just to keep up with personal friends who are still posting there. There is a new Metablog community on DW that posts a link roundup once a week, FWIW.

If I were really into fanart, I guess I would be on Tumblr more, but I'm reluctant to join another platform. And Tumblr's text/conversation facility seems limited. Since that's my primary mode of fannish engagement, I'm not that attracted to it.

DW fandom is much more diffuse...and concentrated in small comms or groups.

LJ is a pale shadow of its former sprawling, brawling profane and prolific self, but there are echoes, and last entrenched bastions, still.

Although I originally set up my Tumblr (and I can only keep up with one) as a respite from fandom, that was a lost cause. It feels like the most fannish space to me now. Though as 'Suela says, the conversation is awkward and limited. The energy is there, though, and sometimes you just need to feel that, even if discussion isn't as easy as LJ used to be.

Crack Van is closing.

Aww, man. End of a cracky era.

Reading 6 chapters of the story where there was apparently a long gap between 5 and 6 (AO3 doesn't let you see that AFAICT).

Full page index. Gives the dates. When I've forgotten to subscribe to something, very useful.

I think as AO3 grows, the user base has grown and, err, diversified. I mean, given its start, the early users tended to be more established writers.

Also, it seems like the older a fandom, the crappier the quality of the work. The better writers lose interest and move to something shinier, you get a massive increase in improbably named OFCs, and signal to noise goes all fucked.

I occasionally use a rough kudos to page views measure, but as the original reader base and original writer base tend to shift fandoms in bulk at around the same time, the pandering to the LCD makes that an almost-meaningless measurement. One of the absolute WORST writers in any fandom (poor quality, high volume, skeevy race and gender issues, drama llama) had a very high kudo/comments to ratio, for example. Thankfully, the idiot flounced and is now just on DW.

I'm getting to the point where I'm clicking largely based on lack of spelling errors in the tags and summary.

If the summary doesn't include "OMG I don't even!" or "the feeeeeelllsss!" or "I know it suks", I'll likely give it a shot.

"Sorry-not sorry" is a huge warning flag to me too. I can't think of many cases where the sort of indulgence it heralds works out to the story's advantage.

In general, tumblr-style tags on a story are a huge red flag for me. Sometimes, they're genuinely clever, but in the majority of cases they just strike me as self-indulgent and twee. It takes a damned good summary to overcome a flock of bad tags.

One of my requests for Yuletide was The Fast and the Furious, and the mods have sent out a note to all of us who requested it. Given the death of Paul Walker, they're giving us a chance to decide if we still want to receive a story in that fandom (and if we would want that story to address the character's death).

My answer to the second question is hell no, but I'm not sure what my answer to the first question is. It's weird.

But the "character" hasn't died, right? Just the actor. (I don't mean to sound dismissive). If it is a story set in TFatF universe, Walker's accident shouldn't come into play. At least that is how my mind would reconcile it.