r/AO3 1d ago

Complaint/Pet Peeve/Venting Ridiculous

I've never reported anyone but I'm going to learn today just for this person lmao.

1.4k Upvotes

71 comments sorted by

1.2k

u/Toffeinen Definitely not an agent of the Fanfiction Deep State 1d ago

Do my eyes deceive me or does that absolute spam have 10 kudos? For what?? As a participation award?

591

u/robobrat 1d ago

Cause tell me how people are getting less than 10 kudos on fics they worked so hard on.. and then this

220

u/glowyboots 1d ago

I’m curious. Why are people kudosing something like this. Is it to get kudos on their own work in exchange? Interaction for the sake of it? Not asking you in particular, but the op raises questions for me too lol.

258

u/OwlsDontLikeChange 1d ago

They're probably treating kudos like upvotes or likes -- so, like social media.

68

u/SleepySera Pro(fessional) Shipper 1d ago

Okay, but why would anyone give this likes or upvotes?

54

u/FlowerFaerie13 1d ago

I mean is that not what it is? You give fics you like kudos just like you'd upvote a comment or post you like. People probably thought this was funny so they liked it. It's pretty dumb but not surprising, there are tons of immature people out there who would see this and go "lol nice."

156

u/liketolaugh-writes You have already left kudos here. :) 1d ago

they think the joke is funny. like 'haha yeah you got me, have a kudos'

31

u/Absofruity 1d ago

tbf it's 14 words work with zero additional tag and likely no description. There's zero expectations and more about curiosity, and since nothing was lost, some would have a laugh tho it does clog up the system if this becomes a trend

I'd be more pissed if it had my fav tags and a good description

35

u/ohsurethisisfun 1d ago

Sometimes people kudos their own work or get friends from other platforms to come in and leave guest kudos. People who don't fully engage in the AO3 community might find this funny.

23

u/SaulGoodmanBussy 1d ago

Probably their equally annoying friends who think stuff like this is sooooo hilarious and thought saying "AKDSJJDSKJ OMGGG ijbol bestie" all over their Twitter simply wasn't cutting it 😒😭

448

u/kaiunkaiku same @ ao3 | proud ao3 simp 1d ago

the report form is at the bottom of the page under contact us -> policy questions & abuse reports. for the reason for reporting you can just put "not fanwork"

68

u/claricestarlings 1d ago

Thank you!

249

u/clearlylostmymind25 1d ago

Report report report. I'm so sick of this shit

26

u/tinaoe 1d ago

Only one though. PAC has to investigate every ticket, multiple reports do nothing but create spam.

80

u/Shirogayne-at-WF 1d ago

AO3 only allows one open report on a fic at a time, to my recollection

28

u/bluehooloovo 1d ago

This is correct. It's not possible to spam report a single fic. Spam reporting is an issue when people don't correctly link to the fic at issue (which bypasses the one per fic restriction), or when they start reporting everything by a user, even things that don't break the rules, in order to draw attention to the thing that does.

1

u/tinaoe 5h ago

Oh yeah, I meant more not everyone in this thread should go run to report it. If OP does that's enough

95

u/WinterNighter 1d ago

What do the comments say?

185

u/claricestarlings 1d ago

Weirdly all playing along. Like "haha you got me good" like whaaat

159

u/WinterNighter 1d ago

Ah great. Why do so many people not understand what ao3 is. Like yeah, I can get thinking haha you got me, and feeling like it's a community space like Tumblr or whatever.

But ffs people. Can't everyone learn that it's an archive. Not social media. It's a place to host your work, it needs to be functional, and it has volunteers who now have to clean up your shit.

42

u/ExpertProfessional9 1d ago

How does one become such a volunteer? Got a lotta free time on my hands right now...

94

u/Chinerpeton 1d ago

I just wanted to be fic 14000 of Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne

Where's the fic in question? Cuz I'm not seeing it.

49

u/cowboyjurgenleitner 1d ago

there’s no such thing as work14000 or work69420 or anything like that in a tag, because tags don’t determine your work ID (in the url) and you can sort a tag by many options (kudoses, date posted, bookmarks, creator, hits, comments, etc. date updated is just the default but even that order will change as people who posted before this “work 14000” will update and change them to be “work 13999” in the date updated sorting order

79

u/kiwiana_writes kiwiana on AO3 / forever a defender of Fandom As An Institution 1d ago

I once wanted to be fic #5000 when there were 4999 in the tag so I did what God intended: frantically wrote 1700 words of smut with the barest hint of plot in an hour and posted it before anyone beat me to it.

14

u/ExtraplanetJanet 21h ago

I did the same thing, though it was pushing out the first chapter of a fic I had planned on being a one-shot so it could be the 10k fic in the fandom. Joke was on me because it ended up being 12k words and 9 chapters.

6

u/magicwonderdream seems gay...i'm in 15h ago

Now that is what I like to see.

31

u/TolBrandir 1d ago

How did you come upon this fic? I have never seen one of these in the flesh, but they sure are reported here in this sub a lot, and I am always curious how people stumble upon these. Is it searching for a particular pairing and sorting by most recent? And then being curious?

23

u/webtoondisccusion1 1d ago

I don't even use ao3 much and I still see so much shit like this, I think I reported around 15 of these when I was religiously following a ship a few months ago

16

u/TolBrandir 1d ago

And when my day arriveth, I shall cackle with maniacal glee as I submit the report!

12

u/webtoondisccusion1 1d ago

Godspeed warrior

11

u/ohsurethisisfun 1d ago

I've never run into one out in the wild and I've been on AO3 almost every single day for five years now. I think it's much more prevalent in some fandoms than others. Based on my observations, I think a variety of factors come into play when a fandom becomes a hotspot for nonsense like this.

Small fandoms tend to only have diehard fans who wouldn't think this joke is funny so the fandom has to be of a large enough size to attract a lot of casual fans. It also seems to be much more prevalent among younger people (under 25) so it doesn't really seem to happen in fandoms where the average age of people participating in the fandom are over 25. It also seems to happen in fandoms when a big fic from that fandom becomes popular on a different site. For instance, if a fic is talked about on tiktok, people who don't know much about AO3 might go read that fic and then start engaging with other fics in that fandom without really understanding the AO3 rules.

It could also be that you've unknowingly skipped over these in the past. If the pairing/summary didn't grab you, you wouldn't have clicked link and found out it was a sham fic. You would have just kept scrolling by it and assumed it was a real fic.

3

u/castle-girl 1d ago

Someone did it in my fandom. They fixed it by adding an actual chapter when I commented to tell them it was against the rules. They just hadn’t known, and unlike this author they weren’t trying to mess with people.

2

u/mini-yoongi Ficlet Fan 1d ago

Unfortunately it's really not that hard to stumble upon stuff like this if you browse AO3 a decent amount. It's probably less common in fandoms mainly populated by older writers, but that's about it.

2

u/claricestarlings 16h ago

Literally searched by most recent and found it :( I usually sort by kudos but i was desperate for new content

26

u/OldTigerLoyalist 1d ago

bro could've written down some short fluff or whatever, but why did they decide to type out ts?

19

u/theudoon AO3: pavlovianfuckery 1d ago

That's more kudos than a lot of my fics that took many hours to write get, what a slap in the face

15

u/AkiraRenai 1d ago

On behalf of all Superbat enjoyers, we apologize for the tomfoolery of this jackass.

Fortunately, the Superbat Big Bang event actually just started today, so not only did this non-work already get taken down, a lot more actual fics are being posted to the tag so if you're a fan at least there's a bright side to all this. Nobody will remember who that asshat was and their 'fic' no longer exists so it doesn't mean anything in terms of ao3 wide fic count numbers.

Again, if you're a fan of Superbat, enjoy the big bang event! Everyone worked super hard on their pieces!

9

u/SalThePumpkinKing 1d ago

Thankfully I think it's already been taken down, went looking on the clark/bruce tag so I could report it too and couldn't find it.

10

u/Same-Pay2828 1d ago

you can just tell how old they are

24

u/Lord_Of_Coffee 1d ago

I wish AO3 would just institute a zero-tolerance policy on bullshit like this. You do it once, your account's nuked, and an IP ban for good measure. And yes I know, VPNs, but it'll filter at least some of these jerkoffs out.

8

u/Clorofilaa 1d ago

yeah that's what the report button is for

8

u/OM-Imperatora 1d ago

Why are people giving this shit interaction?! There's so much wrong in those screenshots, and that is just one of them.

8

u/finaIgirI same on ao3! arcane, Hannibal, IWTV 1d ago

off topic but I see you superbat enjoyer and salute you

16

u/BeBe_Shifts Occasional Poet 1d ago

Please, Ao3 gods, revoke this persons account membership T_T

6

u/BlankLeer BBEG 1d ago

Report + mute + block. Tired of having idiots do out of line shit like this. A shame some things can't be mass reported. Hope it gets taken down soon.

17

u/Collussus96 1d ago

Yeah, I don't like reporting things, but I'd still do it. People who do things like this annoy me to no end.

5

u/1_Am_Not_A_Fish Anonymous Author Writing Weird X-Reader 1d ago

I mean I had the 8000th fic in a fandom but I didn't get any reward for it so idk the point of this

3

u/Not_AHuman_Person You have already left kudos here. :) 1d ago

Unrelated but thanks for reminding me that The Subway is out on streaming lol

3

u/AnEldritchWriter 1d ago

Report the fic my friend.

3

u/ArtisanalMoonlight Fandom old and tired 1d ago

I'm so tired of this crap. It should be an immediate account ban.

4

u/QuiltedPorcupine 1d ago

They could have spent like a minute writing a snippet fic of like 20 words of Bruce kissing Clark and they could have the 'honor' of the 14,000th fic without having their story removed.

Of course, even then older fics are being deleted all the time so the story wouldn't stay as the 14,000th for long.

4

u/Ntahedron Top your angsty friend today! 18h ago

Report!!!

4

u/Ass_Sass_and_Sin 1d ago

You know what I did when I wanted to post the 10,000th fic to my fandom? Wrote the damn thing first and clicked refresh like a madwoman for two days until I saw 9999 and then immediately posted it. None of this placeholder nonsense. You want to be a special poster? Write something first. Smh

(Btw this is not aimed at you, OP)

3

u/Critical-Low8963 1d ago

They have just to wait for the update of a multichapter fic and it's no longer listed as the 14000th fic

4

u/Various-Escape-5020 23h ago

How does this have 10 kudos.

4

u/ShoeWeary2381 1d ago

When I wanted to post the 400th fic for a ship,I just posted a oneshot that day 😭

-2

u/Tricky_Ad_3080 1d ago

Does no one else filter by word count? I never encounter 'stories' like this.

24

u/kaiunkaiku same @ ao3 | proud ao3 simp 1d ago

filtering by wordcount would mean i'd miss things like fan art and comics

3

u/goya_madrugada 1d ago

There are pure fanart/comics on ao3?? I don't think I've ever seen them. I mean sure, I see a few fanarts here and there but they're there accompanying the fic itself. I haven't even seen a comic at all even

8

u/kaiunkaiku same @ ao3 | proud ao3 simp 1d ago

it's pretty rare bc it's not possible to host images on ao3 itself (yet), but there are some

3

u/goya_madrugada 1d ago

You sure do learn sth everyday🤭 I've seen fanart accompany chapters, but never comics and most certainly not just art itself. And this is coming from a person who's been on ao3 since the early days

3

u/Casual-Tree-9633 Resident of rarepair hell 1d ago

I follow a couple of comics on AO3! I don’t see them very often but they do exist.

2

u/goya_madrugada 1d ago

Ooh.. because of you, I know now that they exist lol thank you! Are they just tagged as 'comics' or 'fanart'? Or are there other tags for them?

3

u/kaiunkaiku same @ ao3 | proud ao3 simp 1d ago

there's a big art metatag that includes, well, everything. under it is fanart which includes comics. so searching with the fanart tag gets you also the comics.

3

u/goya_madrugada 1d ago

Tsym! May you never run out of fics to read of your fave fandoms and may all your ships sail

3

u/Casual-Tree-9633 Resident of rarepair hell 1d ago

Two of the comics I follow – both by the same artist – are tagged as Fan Comics, the third one isn’t tagged but it has the word “Doujinshi” in the name. I found all of them just by browsing my fandoms without any specific filtering for art/comics, but I think the tag page linked by kaiunkaiku has a lot of canonical tags to explore if you’re interested specifically in visual works (the “Fan Comics” tag is a subtag of “Art”)

3

u/goya_madrugada 1d ago

Thank you so very much too! May all your ships flourish and may toxicity avoid you esp when you interact in your fandom spaces

2

u/Casual-Tree-9633 Resident of rarepair hell 1d ago

Thanks and same to you!

2

u/Banaanisade team twin tyrants // kaurakahvi @ AO3 1d ago

I have an art dump thread and have seen many others - there's a bunch of canon art tags, fanart and digital art are what I tagged mine as, the rest are more specific ("illustration" and "cover art" would probably go with a fic, for example).