Addendum: I don't doubt that people put their heart, their blood, their soul into this project. I know how these things tend to work, I did my own share of volunteer work in my corner of fandom, so please don't think I want to use a verbal bulldozer to steamroll all this effort!
However, my fandom as I experience it is fast-paced, tech-savy and colorful. There is a massive competition out there, mostly from blog communites and forums, and if AO3 wishes to have even a small chance to get fans to move here it has to offer something for people who are used to certain things, like having the possibility to "decorate" ones corner to make it feel like home. But if it really comes down to a purely text-focused website, then at least the technical side of the project has to work. There are a lot of services out there who offer intelligent tagging solutions one can get ideas from. There are forums and other archives that can provide hints to successful navigation designs. Programmers need to watch out for errors (for example, when I narrowed my search in Naruto, I suddenly had parings from SciFi shows between my Naruto pairings, or some of my personal bookmark tags bring up stories I have never bookmarked nor are they tagged with my tags) and so on.
I'm sure whoever was responsible for AO3 design did their research, but I don't know... somehow a few things seem to have been lost on the way. ;) My point is: I can stomache a weak layout, if the usability shines and works better than anything else out there. It won't be "home", but if the tools are unique and work well, it can probably be enough to make entire communities consider to move their events to AO3, for example.
(Actually, I was pondering the benefit of making seperate "entrances" for seperate media fandoms which could be accordingly decorated or not. It could help to make people feel more welcomed and more at home, and depending on the way it's done it doesn't neccessarily have to be a divider between "cultures", but more like one house with seperate rooms.)
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However, my fandom as I experience it is fast-paced, tech-savy and colorful. There is a massive competition out there, mostly from blog communites and forums, and if AO3 wishes to have even a small chance to get fans to move here it has to offer something for people who are used to certain things, like having the possibility to "decorate" ones corner to make it feel like home. But if it really comes down to a purely text-focused website, then at least the technical side of the project has to work. There are a lot of services out there who offer intelligent tagging solutions one can get ideas from. There are forums and other archives that can provide hints to successful navigation designs. Programmers need to watch out for errors (for example, when I narrowed my search in Naruto, I suddenly had parings from SciFi shows between my Naruto pairings, or some of my personal bookmark tags bring up stories I have never bookmarked nor are they tagged with my tags) and so on.
I'm sure whoever was responsible for AO3 design did their research, but I don't know... somehow a few things seem to have been lost on the way. ;) My point is: I can stomache a weak layout, if the usability shines and works better than anything else out there. It won't be "home", but if the tools are unique and work well, it can probably be enough to make entire communities consider to move their events to AO3, for example.
(Actually, I was pondering the benefit of making seperate "entrances" for seperate media fandoms which could be accordingly decorated or not. It could help to make people feel more welcomed and more at home, and depending on the way it's done it doesn't neccessarily have to be a divider between "cultures", but more like one house with seperate rooms.)