replies, about rudeness

[dragonlady7]

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Replies to my post This is rude https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/bomberqueen17/674722947055894528

msilverstar https://msilverstar.tumblr.com

Good points, all! They should change the way they do collections and make them less prominent and bookmarks by default.

See, the thing is, collections are the way they are for very good reasons. But it’s not immediately obvious to most users that you can use bookmarks this way– you can make a collection, and add things to it as a bookmark. Collections have as much potential control over the works as they do because of events and exchanges, which were a large part of why AO3 was built– but it’s not obvious if you don’t know that. I do wish the Bookmarks Collection approach was slightly more prominent, or that there was a little explanatory text on the page as you set out to do this. It’s definitely not immediately obvious; I didn’t know how to do it. But then, I don’t use AO3 for reading nearly as much as I do for posting, so I am not by any means a power user. If I read as much as this person does, one thinks I’d have devoted a bit of effort into working it out?

https://www.tumblr.com/view/littledeconstruction

littledeconstruction https://littledeconstruction.tumblr.com

i agree with OP and also … maybe it’s an error? i had no idea how collections worked as a new user, i thought they were like … fancy bookmarks? AO3 doesn’t make it super clear.

I’ve never said I think the person who sent that request is a bad person or anything, I’ve no doubt they don’t intend outright to cause harm, I’m just saying, what they’ve done is fucking rude. And i can see not having much idea of how a collection works at first, of course; I didn’t, but: you have to send a request to the author to include them, and that request, by the very name of this collection, is going to be “hi I’m not reading your stuff unless you finish it”, which is fucking rude, there’s really no way around that. I can put myself in a lot of places, especially a place where I’m not sure how to use a complicated website, but I cannot put myself in a place where I throw that shit directly into the email inboxes of– I looked– hundreds of writers. The brass fucking balls on this one.

Like– I really do, I get not knowing how a feature on a site like this works, and I get that it’s easy to make a collection, but

how do you go to an author whose stuff you’ve never commented on and who you don’t know and send them a direct email saying you’re not reading their stuff unless they finish it. and think that this. is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Like, fuck the fuck off man, I feel perfectly within my rights to be rude in return and not give the benefit of the doubt in that instance because there is literally no way that’s not an entitled, pushy, selfish thing to do.

Part of why I snapped and posted something was that a fellow writer in one of my Discords, a much slower and less-prolific writer, with a lot less of an audience, got a request for this collection a couple of weeks ago, and was devastated. It was the only AO3 notification they’d recieved that entire day, they were all excited it might have been a comment, and instead they got slapped with this, that someone was going to maybe conditionally read their WIP? It hurt their feelings so badly, and I spent some time consoling them, and went on with my life, and then I got this notification too and i was like all right that’s it fuck this person.

I’m not saying this person is a bad person or should be harmed or even should be shunned or whatever, or that they should stop reading fic, I’m saying they need to fucking stop emailing wildly demotivating things to authors. Think for FIVE SECONDS about WHAT YOU ARE DOING and CUT THAT SHIT OUT.

https://www.tumblr.com/view/puffinsandwich

puffinsandwich https://puffinsandwich.tumblr.com

What the fuck. “Collections” means “series this fic is a part of”. This use here is what “Bookmarks” was made precisely for.

Yeah. Like, that’s expressly how most people use bookmarks, I think. I tend to only bookmark stuff I find myself coming back to, but tons of people who are better at curation than me bookmark things just to finish reading them. I mean, etymologically, that’s what the physical object, a bookmark, is for– it marks your place in a book.

As a writer I sometimes look through the bookmarks on my works– I know the text in there isn’t for me, and if I read something I didn’t want to see that’s on me. That’s the place to say “i’ve read thru chapter 8″, or “this has great characterization up through the murder scene and then kinda goes off the rails”, or even shit like “nut nut nut!!!” which might be slightly creepy to comment with but is hilarious in a bookmark. I have absolutely no problem seeing a bookmark that says “read when competed” or something– that’s super fine. That text isn’t for me. (Bookmarks that say shit like “stop clicking this it sucks”– you’d really be better off putting that in private bookmarks, but I’m not going to yell at you for not doing so, I’m not everyone’s cup of tea and I know it and you might be warning a friend. This is not Be Nice Or Leave– that’s reserved for the stuff that actually is directed at the authors. The things that send them email notifications. The things that make them come click on a thing to respond to it.)

I get it, Mark For Later doesn’t let you sort things very well, and is clearly intended for the sorts of casual browsers who have no more than a screen or two of things they mean to come back to. Subscribe only works when you’re reading along and following a story as it goes up; I argue this is the best way to follow really involved WIPs, but I admit in my own life I tend to fall behind and then come catch up when the thing’s done. No shame there.

But there may come a time when these tools are not adequate to your needs! So, in case anyone reading this doesn’t know this! You can make a collection, and then instead of sending a request directly to the authors, to in effect put a banner of your metadata onto their work, you can just– bookmark things into the collection. This is fine, and works great as a rec list but also as a reference tool for you to come back to, to keep track of things you’d meant to get to, to curate your browsing experience. The collection then can be managed like any collection, but without impacting the original works or really notifying the authors at all. You can, as an author, see that you’ve been bookmarked, see that it’s in a collection, but it doesn’t show that on the work before it shows the work’s content, and it doesn’t push notifications to an author’s inbox by default, and nothing you do to that collection is going to affect the work at all.

I’m not mad about people asking to put me in collections, but I’m also not going to allow it. I’ve been collected into a few rec lists over the years, and I think I’ll let those stand if they’re already there– but to the newer requests, I’m just not going to. Those, the regular sort, that are just like “love this” or “my stuff”– they’re a bit presumptuous as a collection, why am I going to put a banner on my work that proudly proclaims it’s part of “my stuff” when “my” is not me???, but I’m not offended by those requests, those at least imply the reader has read the thing, which as a writer was frankly my intention by publishing it. (Your picture was not posted)