anonymous · 4mo
hi so follow up from the post about ao3 fics disappearing. i had noticed after ao3 was hacked that there was a drastic decrease of fics. and its not just bts fandom but many fandoms everywhere so I thought maybe it hasn't something to do with that. bc it all happened so suddenly and i was wracking my mind if it was just me and i was just imagining there being more fics site-wide. Its just so sad to see so many amazing creation disappear:(
ah, thank you for clarifying! i can't say i've noticed this, but i also don't really pay much attention to total numbers of fics; i'm much more likely to filter by ship and pay attention to those numbers, and i haven't seen any decreases there at least. i haven't seen ao3 say anything about fics being deleted by the hack, and i also haven't seen any authors mention their fics being affected by it either, so i'd be skeptical of that as an explanation. but! one of my friends has a fic she loved that was definitely an orphaned work (there's evidence of it existing and being orphaned on the wayback machine), but she noticed it's now deleted, which should be impossible since once an author orphans a work they have no control over it anymore. like it literally CAN'T be deleted once it's orphaned, unless ao3 takes down the page themselves, and i don't know why they'd do that. (the fic is "where the heart is," and it was previously here https://archiveofourown.org/works/7080832, and here's a wayback machine screenshot that proves it was orphaned http://web.archive.org/web/20201124034344/https://archiveofourown.org/works/7080832 if anyone wants to confirm! i wouldn't believe me either, it's a very strange situation. as far as i can tell, it disappeared sometime in early 2023.) so i don't know if that is somehow related? i truly don't have any explanation for how/why that could happen.
also, someone pointed out on twitter that a LOT of authors have archive-locked their fics in the past couple of years to avoid AI scraping and keep out of view of all those apps that keep popping up that just scrape ao3 to republish it for profit. so if you usually view ao3 logged out, that might be why you're seeing total numbers of fics decrease! when fics get archive-locked they're only visible to signed-in users, and they won't show up in search or lists of fandom fics to people who are logged out. so the number of fics that seem to be on ao3 DID decrease very abruptly for anyone who's not logged in around 2022, and i remember seeing that for some fandoms it was like a third of fics got archive locked, so that's a pretty drastic decrease.
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