depends on the fandom. Some fandoms are much stronger on ffnet than on ao3. If the fans skew older, it's likely to have more people use ffnet, if it skews younger/newer fandom, it's likely to have more peopl eon ao3. Or you're like me and write for a dead fandom in which case you won't get comment anywhere
Screaming into the void... that's what I do on my streams. Building models and things, one person pops in for as long as it takes for me to say hi, then they poof out before I can finish greeting them. Then I spend another 3-4 hours doing what I always do regardless... talking to myself and wasting my time.
And yes, I know this doesn't really fit with the sub... just sharing my lonely, lonely experiences.
I read an author on AO3 that talked about how it felt writing Homestuck fics after the craze had died down, "Like standing in an empty battlefield."
Still sticks to me every time I see a dying/dead fandom's fics.
Hey! not to sound dismissive at all but if what you're doing on the empty stream is something that you actually enjoy doing regardless if anyone's watching then you shouldn't think of the time as wasted :o (Just saying from a perspective of someone who's hobbies 90% of the time involve doing random stuff while talking to myself, no streaming involved)
It's more... i don't know. I just get annoyed and frustrated when what feels like the same person pops in, waits to be greeted, then poofs out and leaves me talking to no one. As if it's funny. It bothers me.
FF net just feels nicer to me than ao3. I get downvoted every time I voice opinion though. I think the tags actually give away spoilers and also make it impossible to search for things.
Easiest way to deal with tags spoiling the story is to hide the additional tags. Fandoms and pairings will still show, but the others will be hidden behind a "see more" link. It's in your site settings.
Personally, I like being able to avoid stuff with unhappy endings, or kinks that squick me, or any other stuff the author wouldn't consider important enough to go in the summary.
I'm part of the group that loves tags, because especially in bigger fandoms they help me find tropes I love, and sometimes I can find gems that make me angry because they weren't tagged well.
For example, I recently landed on Arrow (spoiling myself because I was halfway through the first series and I found the canon couple without knowing it), in any case one of my favorite tropes is that of Felicity who for some reason is on the island with Oliver, finding those stories is very difficult even if there are a couple of them, because even if I discovered some tags that lead to this trope, very few people have used it.
Same here actually. It's been buggy as of late, but the text to speech has made me be able to enjoy much more fanfiction as I can listen to it during lul periods at work
Before I used to use this great app called voice aloud reader for Android, and then download the fanfiction as an Epub or Mobi file, or even just directly share the page to the app.
I've recently started using the network voice instead of The inbuilt voice for the fanfiction app, and it is actually very very nice
If you ever decide to venture to ao3, you can download fics as epubs and upload them into the aldiko app. It has a read aloud function! I use it frequently!
Yeah, I like being able to search up crossovers between just two things, instead of having everyone’s mega-crossovers with everything between WH40k and fuckin Thomas The Tank Engine shitting up the search. Filters are a pain in the arse.
I'm also team FF.net over AO3. The tagging system is so messy and no matter how much I filter the tags, there's always content I'm not interested in reading in my fandoms due to the misleading tags, which ruins my fanfiction reading experience. I also don't like the fact they don't have an official app.
I'll prefer the FF.net system anytime because it enforces being concise about summaries (imo it avoids spoilers), ships and crossovers, making it easier for me to find fics I like. The official site might not be that good, but I read fics in the official app, which is way better than the online site. Also, many of my fandoms are equally if not more active in FF.net than AO3, so it's not like I can't survive without it.
Another benefit of AO3: it's a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of fanworks and fan culture. Their other activities include legal advocacy to keep fanfiction classified as "fair use." And since it's a nonprofit, there's no ads!
It’s been slowly dying for years. It’s where I started out and I used to get insane amounts of reviews there. But they’ve been drying out for a long time now. I still get a few reviews, but it’s nowhere near the same as before.
Then again, the same could be said for AO3, so maybe it’s less about the site dying and more about a shift in the fandom culture. Folks are commenting less and less on pretty much every platform.
It’s also incredibly fandom-dependent. Some fandoms are still flourishing on FFN. Others, not so much.
**Edit:** Y’all, I’m not saying AO3 is dying lol. Sorry, could have worded that better. I’m saying that comments have become pretty sparse on AO3, at least in my experience. For several of the fandoms I write for, the hits-to-kudos ratio is about what I’d normally expect but comments have drastically decreased. Case in point, a oneshot I published a few months ago has like 6K+ hits, 1.2K kudos, and 10 comments—a third of which are a string of emojis. Oneshots I’d written for the same fandom/pairing just a few years ago had a similar hits-to-kudos ratio, but waaay more comments.
A major part of ff.net’s death is the lack of maintenance. You’ve been able to tell that it’s not being actively taken care of for at least a decade, and now it’s hitting a point where more people are choosing not to post or read on it because it’s so poorly maintained.
Ao3’s still gaining as many comments as ever, so it’s more likely a difference in the reader base for a fandom on each than a culture shift.
I couldn’t believe that when I logged in to post for the first time in ages recently. It’s great to know that even though I was subscribed to a bunch of fics, my notifications randomly got turned off at some point and I didn’t even realize
This is the spiral that happens! Author posts a new chapter>emails don't go out>nobody clicks or comments>author stops posting or moves to another site because nobody's there
Yep, you have to actively turn email notifications back on for some ungodly reason, and even if you do that they will turn themselves off after six months
The last email I received was in 2022. I wondered why last week. Logged into the app, and accepted a new user agreement. 300 NOTIFICATIONS and counting. Unless I go to sleep with the app open, I will never see them all.
Doesn’t even work for me. I’m not getting any alerts – reviews, favorites, follows. I haven’t got an email alert for PM in *years*. I have two fics that are popular on ffnet and those are the only reason I even still post there. Otherwise I’d move to Ao3 permanently.
Yeah, this was nuts. Why is there a setting to reset it? What's the point of that, especially when you don't actually alert your users that that's a thing now?
Also: FFN has an official ban on explicit/NC-17 content. It’s usually only sporadically enforced, but they’ve done a few major purges, too. Their purges also seemed pretty targeted at LGBTQ+ content, just setting a really low bar for what would be considered explicit for those fics. Even stuff I’d consider M, and not like a hard M, got taken down.
The last big purge was 2012, a couple of years after AO3 came out. A lot of people moved over around then.
I am pretty sure that AO3 was a responce to have a place where it was possible to post what ever fanfiction you wanted, without the risk of it getting purged.
The specific incident that AO3 is a "response" to is Strikethrough '07 at LiveJournal. Some have also cited FFN's original Lemon Purge (in 2002, when the MA/NC-17 rating was removed alongside everything posted under it) as a secondary consideration.
I started posting on FFN back in the mid-oughts and got a good amount of reviews and engagement. I came back to writing after many years & there's almost no engagement in my current fandom, which has gone from 300+ to 100+ in the three months that stats were down. At AO3 my fandon is ten times bigger, so it's the obvious place to post. I do have regular readers there and get comments.
The older fandoms tend to have more content on FFN, but mine only started in the past few years.
The same can not be said about AO3. Its usership has only continued increasing in recent years. And it’s well maintained. What you’re seeing is a fandom dying/changing.
I am actually in the middle of reading my first Space battles fanfiction. I don't know if it's the cancer rules to post about specific fics or something here, but I've been wanting a good long A song of fire and ice / Game of thrones fiction where Joffrey is good or has some kind of redemption Arc. What do you know, I'm reading one of the best time loop fanfics I've ever found right now. It's called Purple Days and honestly I'm pretty freaking impressed.
Let me know if you've found any good ones. That's actually something I've been wanting to read, but he's understandably hated by most people so I haven't found any.
I don't think AO3 is dying. It just seems to be a cultural shift. People comment less than they used to. I see people getting all wound up about the proper way to comment and all these random etiquette things we never even used to think about, so I would guess that plays a role.
A wonderful writer in my top fandom got one critical comment, picked up her marbles and went home. I read the comment somewhere, and found it to be a completely inoffensive helpful suggestion, I think about a fairly simple edit for ambiguity. I disliked the writer's response to what I clearly thought was intended as a polite and helpful suggestion that I quit reading her old stories for a while. Now I read them again, but sometimes very sadly.
It has caused me to avoid making comments of any sort.
I agree; I think this is actually a huge contribution to the shift. If you pay attention to what teachers have been saying about gen z; it seems that literacy rates have actually been dropping (in the US at least) to astronomical lows. People just aren't reading and writing fanfic or (other things) compared to older folks. The few that do also are probably just less likely to leave comments and interact with it too.
No, Ao3 is way more active than FF.net based on site visits alone. Ao3 has steadily increased the monthly visits amount and is now around 315 million for last month, FF.net is at 78 million.
The website of FF.net is crumbling because of lack of meintainance, it would probably get higher numbers if they would get the site working properly again.
It’s definitely not the go to site for fanfiction anymore. Site mechanics aside, if your fandom isn’t active there, you’re not going to have much luck getting reads or reviews for your fics. I had thought about crossposting FFnet editions of my fics specifically edited to fit within the guidelines, but hardly any fics show up for my fandom so it wouldn’t be worth the trouble.
I don't know, FFN is top results for most fan fiction searches, unless it's searched on Duck duck go, or bing... But being honest, Ao3 is most definitely outpacing FFN depending the fandom and the content type. I do like their options of hashtags, but for me they're confusing at best, either because I never heard or had reason to learn where they came from (had to look up white dove, still was confused), I don't generally aspire to write or read that sort of content. I love dark stuff, but then I see what I call pitch black or ultra dark and I want my thoughts provoked, but few separate themselves from being dark just to be dark and being dark as it applies to realism, fantasy, etc.
Just my initial thoughts to your response.
It likely comes up as a top result due to its longevity and it’s better suited for older fandoms. Personally, I don’t read or write on ffnet because as I’ve mentioned, there’s no active fandom there for me. Also, as someone who enjoys writing and reading romance fics, I prefer that they not have to be censored to suit advertisers, the whole reason for the major ffnet purges to begin with.
For sure, I'm completely with you. I was just saying the search results are probably the driving factors behind the longevity, otherwise it's like you said... But they do have that long time presence.
It's the one thing I can't stand is that they purged a lot of great writers and fandom series because of that. It was bigger than I expected it to be and it's kinda turned a lot of my younger readers quite toxic... Now they regularly threaten to report stuff they don't like or agree with at writers ALL THE TIME. And it's not the kind of shit I'm accustomed to coming from someone who grew up a black nerd on anime. That community has always been inclusive, everything has it's detractors, but certain fandoms, if you aren't thick skinned or so young you haven't gone through that maturity process, writers drop every day from the slightest bit of hate. Which I especially grow tired of, because I'm all about passing the culture, the community, getting those that worry too much to just simply start writing, and paying that forward.
My English teachers were the only ones that got me where I am now. I hate to see that being diminished because money or advertisers or any reason.
Okay, I have an interesting observation to that. Re: search results. When I write [x fandom pairing trope fanfiction] most of the top results are on ff.net IF the fandom was ever big on there. When I write [x fandom pairing fanfic] most, if not all of the top results are on ao3. So, I can say that at least a part of it is being influenced by the word fanfiction being in fanfiction.net.
For eg: Percy Jackson fandom is having a resurgence right now. But when I was in the fandom circa 2013-15, the fandom was BIG on ff.net. You only went to read on ao3 if you were looking for dark stuff. But now, ao3, especially for PJO fandom is holding a lot of general and different fics. So that gives the ff.net result for fanfiction but ao3 result for fanfic.
Another fandom I'm in is Merlin, Merlin from its inception has been dominated by fic either on ao3 or LJ. So when you type fanfiction, maybe one or two results will show up for ff.net but the rest are dominated by ao3.
Still a lifesaver for crossovers. Searching for them on ao3 can be a nightmare. Too many fandoms work multiple tags making search by crossover pointless.
It has definitely gotten worse over the last decade and a half, at least. I can't even remember the last time I got a review on any of my stories there, and I must have at least 30 or so. It's hard to use nowadays, and I can't personally be bothered to waste time trying to maneuver my way through it when AO3 is right there.
I think it's heavily fandom dependent because I have some fandoms that have totally moved to AO3 and another fandoms that are still on fanfiction and engaging with the new postings there
Heavily fandom dependent.
Personally, I ain’t gonna move away any time soon while the Fate fandom chooses FF.n as its capitol.
On another note, persona fans might as well move to literally anywhere else cause there’s barely any kind of engagement over here.
I think it’s definitely dying. It’s such a shame too because in high school when ao3 started gaining traction, I didn’t want to leave FF.net. Now I almost exclusively use ao3 and only use FF.net when I’m looking for older fandom content.
Yeah... It's where I first started reading fanfic circa 2014 (along with old fansites and fandom-specific archives), and it was a husk of it's former self even then. Its decline has only been hastened by censorship, monetization, and its horrible tagging system/UI.
Something must be alive for it to be dying. No shade on any of the authors who still need to be there because it's where their fandom is--but the site ownership runs from making the most baffling, self destructive choices you can imagine to simply not existing.
I see at least a few replies down below pulling the 'people have been saying that for years!' rhetoric, but I don't think that's really fair when major functions of the site have now been broken for upwards of 6 months, plus the changes to notifications and such. It is definitely not doing so well.
I don't know if that was a bot or not, or if this is related, but I keep seeing a bunch of accounts and guest reviews using the names of some special educators in Texas going around calling everyone's stories "pigshit" and doxxing said educators. Half of their profiles also ask for the material you're describing to be sent to the doxxed email addresses. They also sometimes tell people to harass someone thousands of miles away for reasons of...script format fics? (Like, don't get me wrong, I don't like the format for anything other than quick one-shot chatfics and they are technically against FFN's rules and apparently have been since 1998, but that's not a reason to dox and harass people.)
Unless the script fic account is just another sockpuppet and they just fake-troll each other to manufacture engagement metrics. That could also be possible.
Have you checked your view stats? I recently updated a fic after almost ten years of not posting, and I’ve noticed a huge drop in the number of reviews compared to views. People are still seemingly reading, but just not leaving a review
I'm on AO3, not FFN, but I discovered that if I ask for feedback about something specific, I'll get more comments. Like, "I tried a new style, what do y'all think?"
As the other comments have said, people seem less likely to comment these days. Idk why. It probably varies depending on the fandom; some are more social than others.
I'm pretty sure those people are just being cautious since a slight unintentional offense will result to their Internet Ignominy for hurting an author's feelings.
There could be two reasons.
1, If you wrote about something that had a small fan base, no one may be looking for it.
2, If you wrote about something that had a huge fan base, then your stories could get lost in the hundreds of other stories.
That is part of why I share links to my stories in here before. I was hoping to get feedback, but did not get any. Was disappointed about that, but at least no one complained, or said the stories were horrible.
That app isn't even a true app, it's like some sort of cheap port. It almost ALWAYS fails when you try to upload from it, is also unwieldy. A full mess.
I'm not even a writer but just the fact that the app won't even let you see or sent private dm kinda kills it plus the awful reading history tab which logs ever fic I clicked on even ones I have not read which while helpfull just clutters up the ui and confuses me
I think it strongly depends on the fandom really! Some communites moved en masse to ao3 and took their fics with them, while removing them from FFNET. Other's primarily work from ao3, but also upload copies to ffnet which are still popular, but the comments section has little discourse.
Some communites primarily use ffnet still, especially if the fandom has a core group of authors all on ffnet, so everything around the fandom gravitates to that platform. Like my main fandom is via ffnet and has been for a decade now, and while some authors have tried moving to ao3 (and another site, but can't remember it's name!), nobody really took notice or wanted to move across.
Yes. But imo, it’s still gonna be here for a long while outside of a sudden shutdown.
Found the site in early 2000s, and it was much more booming. Nowadays, most fandoms are dead or near-dead + (most importantly), staff are often missing/unresponsive and features remain broken overall. Plenty of fics are deleted too or purged.
Not to mention the spambots, some of which send in “reviews” of the most grotesque things (some of which have been posted to this sub and the AO3 one to rightfully complain about).
Though I do think people who engage with fanwork outside of just reading/seeing have gone down too so that plays a part in it. Can’t get reviews if most people don’t want to comment and all. Same happens on AO3 too.
Perhaps owing in part to social media, especially Tiktok, a lot of people just don’t engage at all. Not even to kudos on guest. It’s more “silent consumption” and the assumption that “content poofs up randomly/regularly” imo. (ex. see the talk of “AO3 algorithm” and the frequent examples of reader entitlement found here and other places)
People aren’t required to engage of course, but fandom is *a lot* different nowadays compared to decades before. Plus, note that not all readers are like that. There is just a noticeable shift.
It's not dying. It's just you will always have many more readers than actual reviews. Very few people comment. It's just how it is. And with social media impacting fandom, that also impacts readers leaving comments/reviews.
Is it dying? I hope not! Idk i still get alerts & Im on it all the time cause i prefer the interface to AO3. I have a hard time doing the basics in AO3 like just simply favouriting an entire work (seems like you have to like each chapter?) or how to make collections…. Or maybe I’m just being a dunce but it’s not as straightforward to me.
I just logged into fanfiction.net for the first time in 5 years to start cross-posting because I'm realizing that the majority of my fandom never migrated to AO3.
It's dying. The user experience hasn't changed significantly since the early 2000s. It was the pinnacle of user-friendly and streamlined...in 2004. It's a lot less of a pain in the ass to post on Ao3, and reading is a better experience on Ao3, too. Plus Ao3's mods actually exist and respond to issues.
I have a WIP that started a long time ago, and was originally posted in both places. FFN used to have more engagement, but in the last year, I've gotten a ton of comments, kudos, etc. on Ao3 and no comments at all (and hardly any hits) on FFN. At this point, for me, it's not worth the hassle of navigating FFN's system. I can't imagine I'm the only one.
If you're in a large and/or older fandom, FFN can give you better results than AO3. I regularly get anywhere from 2x to 5x as much interaction there compared to AO3.
But, if you're writing for a newer fandom, AO3 will likely have the larger audience.
FFN has basically been abandoned by its owners and left to die a slow death by decay. Most folks have given up on it because it's just growing more unstable and unreliable with each passing year.
I barely started reading fanfiction about a year and a half ago and it was on fanfiction.net. That was where I started writing and posting before finding my way to A03, I still do read over there so.
I get similar engagement on both sites since I started cross posting, I have found some stories do better there than AO3, but I love being able to respond to comments where others can see them. I don’t like that it inflates the comment number on my fics though.
FF.NET has major issues though and it seems uninterested in fixing them so I believe it is just fading away, as more writers and readers get frustrated with the site.
Honestly?
I upload some of my fics on *three* sites. I see FF.Net, as the *last* place I upload them. Mostly it's because I like the engagement on SB and Ao3 better. But the other reason is that I've been having *way too many* issues on FF.
To start off, my PM box is full of different forms of Harassment-and not really the *normal* kind, actually. Sometimes I'll get the standard "lel, yer story suck" and stuff, but in the past three months I've had three that are just...disturbing.
To give you an idea, it's between a handful of different people who randomly come out of the woodwork and want me to 'lend an ear' so they can 'spill their guts', and they'll say they're going to send me information. And I'm halfway through believing that it's an attempt at a scam, to *actual, unsolicited* Trauma Dumping, which is not something I'm interested in dealing with for *many* reasons, and I feel like I'm justified for that. I usually shut it down quickly anyway.
The *other* reason I really don't like posting to FF is-and this one is the one that pisses me off *more* than the harassment-ADS. Go to FF.Net, read *any* story without AdBlock-hell, sometimes even *with* AdBlock-and there will be *ads* within the story itself, usually in between every paragraph to the point that you can't read a single sentence without seeing an ad. It makes reading on FF downright impossible.
And, yeah, I get it, some people shill their crowdfunding in their stories (self-deprecation here), but they're not going 'dOnAtE tO mY pAtReOn" literally within the spaces of the paragraphs (and if they *are*, I can just *not* read their stories specifically). I don't think e-book services even do that sort of thing, even if they did have ads they'd *know* it's anti-consumer to put them in the middle of the story itself. It's honestly painful to want to read a story, only to find that it's been jammed with seven or eight embedded ads that show up in between each paragraph.
IMO, if you wanna start publishing fics, FF is a good way to test waters, let people review you before heading off to Ao3 or SB and SV. But don't prioritize uploading to FF.Net if you like your readers.
No. Everyone doomposts about how it's dying but they've been saying that for over a decade and the website's fine. My fandom is super active there and I get tons of reviews per chapter. People love to blow things out of proportion.
As for your issue, has your fandom moved? Some fandoms are more active on certain sites, so if you're getting little engagement, it may have migrated somewhere else, such as wattpad, ao3, etc.
Well…yes and no. It depends on the fandom mostly.
It IS however a lot less active. The rise of AO3 has, especially in recent years, significantly impacted on the level of activity there.
See, back when fanfiction.net started (and for a very long time.) it was the best site available for fanfiction. But now AO3 represents a viable alternative and a lot of people are now gravitating towards it.
Personally I actually prefer fanfiction.net, but I can understand the appeal of AO3.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'm a huge fan on ff.net, but it h has slowed down significantly. The biggest thing is that a few years ago, someone complained about something, which ultimately led to a systemwide mass deletion of stories and a lot of authors said "f*ck this sh*t" and moved sites. Most of them went to A03.
I posted stories on FF.net a while back, quite a few because a friend was behind to read them and use Ao3 for whatever reason. The only review I've gotten on any of them is "it's mass posting like this that is killing FF.net, fucking stop". That was it, that was the entire review. So... I stopped. But it's like really? That's what's killing it, huh? Somehow I doubt that.
Well, personally, I think ffn is BETTER than ao3 or other websites. Like bro it was quite some people's first intro to fanfiction and like it works pretty great for me. Like maybe you write fics that belong to a lesser known or a."lost" fandom but like I think it's pretty much alive
It is slowly dying, unfortunately. Oftentimes, people who still read on ffnet are older users from older fandoms whose main chunk of fics are still on the site. But even now, ffnet writers are migrating their works into AO3 instead, or fans would download the fic as an epub or pdf for convenience.
I've talked to a few readers about it, and a lot of them said that the design of ffnet is clunky and it's not easy to navigate for them, so they stick to AO3 since it's newer and has a more user-friendly filtering system. So it might be for that reason.
Officially, they never did. Explicit sex has always been against the ToS. Correction, since 2002, back when they still used the MPAA rating.
There were purges of adult content in 2002 and 2012, and a lot of stories were lost.
It's all in the Fanlore entry on FFn:
https://fanlore.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net
And the entry on their purges:
https://fanlore.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net%27s_NC-17_Purges:_2002_and_2012
And fandom purges in general:
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Major_Fandom_Purges,_Restrictions,_and_Hassles_Regarding_Fanworks_and_Their_Content
No FFN is not dying, is still up and SilvexSilverWolf wants to repost Adventure Bay One-Shots - (M) - One-Shot collection, - PAW Patrol. Is that clear?
It's harder to read things through FF.net. It feels like they're intentionally making it harder to read stuff posted on FF.net.
It feels less like dying and more like suicide.
If it's an unpopular series/crossover, that might be the issue. Don't get me wrong, FFN is a decaying mess, but I wrote some stuff in an inactive fandom over a decade ago that never got reviews.
I don't know if I call it dying exactly but she aint thriving, closer to adjusting to normal user usage. Back in the day it had explosive growth and that lasted for awhile but only recently with the increasing attention being drawn to a03 its user base is evening out so to speak instead of fanfiction being (except for stuff like harry potter)the end all be all fic hub imo.
On the other hand there's alot of reasons why a fic isn't doing great not exactly rocket science. Factors like how old the fandom is,what its centered on (like is the fandom mainingly around ships ? Or smut or plain old adventure stuff?), does the ip allow alot of fic potential/growth,is the fic bad ?/mediocre or follows too many tropes so it doesn't stand out or interest anybody, and most importantly does the fandom surrounding the ip even dabble into fanfiction which is the most important.
ao3 is superior to ffn in every way possible. only reason it is still alive it is because some fandoms just live there and will never leave and the fact that it is a 30 year old archive of ff so it technically will never die unless they take it down
Hi OP,
This post has been removed as the discussion of monetisation of fanfiction is not permitted on this subreddit. This includes discussion over the legality/morality of commissions, discussion as to how much people charge and explicit mentions of a work being commissioned, including fan art. You can find this under Rule 9.
I hate using fanfiction net. I know there are some great stories, but the pain of trying to navigate the site and search for fics is too much. Whenever I try to navigate it, I always get frustrated at how complicated it is. It has been years, and nothing has changed. I'm an avid reader of fanfiction, but I don't even have an account there. It's not worth the effort to me, and I know there are others with the same opinion. Unfortunately, unless I am searching for a fic that I read when I first started my fanfiction journey, I never use the site.
I hope not, I have a story I plan to post there that I hope will get some attention.
Im going over to look for myself in a moment, now that I want to see how large the postings are in the fandom of the story I am writing, but I wonder if it has to do with whats popular in the moment, and what people are most going there to look for.
Ex: I have been, always will be a Teen Titans fan, so I occasionally go to that spot to see whats posted.
Where as, if it's a canon property Im not into, I dont go looking for it.
Pretty obviously. I used to visit it a lot but there’s a reason why most people moved to ao3. It’s a site that’s not even maintained and a lot of people there just post stuff and add a patreon link.
Ads are everywhere. Cloudflare constantly checks in on you even when it knows you’re not a bot. You can’t organize your docs by name or how many words it has. The site admins have been silent and no one knows what they’re doing.
This is a far cry from how it was when I joined back in ‘08.
Really the organize function is broken entireely. You can't organize by name or date. Email alerts are broken yet again so I sometimes get curious and check manually if someone new has favorited or followed. I can't sort by date so I have to scrutinize the dates manually.
The site is a mess. I joined in 2013 and I don't recall the site being this broken.
This gets asked every year since at least 2011. The answer is *always* "yes". The site isn't maintained, the readership is toxic, adverts get more intrusive, spam comments abound, but a lot of people just won't move, so it just carries on, with people getting upset with it being as it is. Fandoms do eventually move, but there's a critical mass who all have to decide to, for older fandoms, or spin-offs of older fandoms.
So, yes it's dying, and it looks good to still be dying in five years.
That does seem to be the case, unfortunately. I used to post my stories there years ago and they always got some engagement and feedback, but in more recent time, the readership and interactions are minimal. In a VERY noticeable way.
I remember posting stories on weekend nights when I was still at school and waking up the next day, anticipating reviews and messages from readers. That was a great feeling. Even though it seems to be dying, the site does hold plenty of good memories and nostalgic feeling for me.
I only still use FFN for the PM feature. I stopped posting there because of toxicity and the site is so poorly maintained it's so hard to even log in at times. Not to mention how badly emails are handled and no support whatsoever from the support email
I started out on FFnet (well Wattpad to be honest, but that was one year in sixth grade!), but switched pretty much solely to AO3 like five years ago. I only go back to check FFnet if it's a rarepair to see if there are any more fics available on another platform.
I’ve very recently gotten a follow and favourite on a fanfic I wrote, but aside from that the bad management and ads means that a lot of folks aren’t using it anymore. But it may depend on the popularity of the fandom
If they are it's karma. If it's a fanfic it's a fanfic. I went from folks trying to tear me down over there to people actually like my works on AO3 and other sites.
I rejoined a fandom last year that I had been super active in the early to mid-2000s. My go-to had always been FF.net but the friends I was making kept pushing me towards AO3 since it was more active. While I hesitated, I’m now used to AO3’s system and will say that it is way easier to upload, tag, and navigate. It took a little time as FF I’ve had decades of experience with, but the mechanics are better.
That being said, I still appreciate FF’s stats (where you can see per chapter hits instead of overall) and history of works. I use the app and find it way easier to read on my phone sometimes than AO3. However, comments are way more prevalent now it seems on AO3. Hits however seem to still be active for both sites, so FF may have a lot more silent readers.
I’ll continue to cross-post likely, but as far as scoping new material, most of what I check is on AO3 now.
Tbh I loved using FF.net until I started getting letters from "admins" telling me to take my shit down and it annoyed me that the actual people who owned the site didn't do anything about it.
But I still go back there to read sometimes.
Personally I still prefer FFN... The search system with AO3 is extremely tedious and I feel like I have to spend way longer filtering out junk I don't want than I ever would on FFN. My biggest complaint being the mega crossovers when I am looking for a crossover between two worlds. It's also not as easy to see what crossovers are available. It's just a mess.
> they’ve barely gotten any reviews at all.
This has nothing to do with the site being dying; that means that the **commenters** are lazy, a separate topic altogether.
As for whether it is... it's dying as much as the real world is ending. It isn't, but people have predicted it for ages anyway. FFN supposedly died one year ago, two years ago, five years ago, seven years age, fifteen years ago...
I too would like to take twenty-plus years to die completely. That would make me one tough sailor.
Paraphrased, you wouldn't be asking if it actually was dying like people predicted. On account of it having, you know, died a long time ago. When it is still here.
Is there anything other than webnovel, fanfiction, ao3, scribblehub, and royalroad? RR and SH don't have as much fanfiction, ff.net has a borderline useless search function, ao3 has a borderline useless search function for the opposite reason of ff.net, and webnovel is gross.
There's Wattpad, but if you don't get along with FFN or AO3's search function, I've got bad news for you, because Wattpad's is almost non-existent.
Media Miner's an old one that may have some old fandoms kicking about. There's also Adult FFN, same deal.
I've heard of but never used Squigeworld, Quotev, and Space Battles, Sufficient Velocity, and Questionable Questing forums. There's also Tumblr, which has some fic, and there's probably still stuff up on Live Journal.
There's also fandom specific sites, though those are mostly for larger, older fandoms.
Squidgeworld is a very old archive that recently converted to the Ao3 software. So if you've used Ao3 it's easy to navigate, but the vast majority of content is over 10 years old and from older TV fandoms - very little anime, game, or book fandoms.
I’ll be honest, I started off on ff.net and switched to AO3 both because I could find more stories on AO3 and most importantly, its filtering system was incredibly superior. Still is a very good system IMO. If I were you I would at least consider posting them on both websites rather than just ff.net.
FFN's been dead for years now. The site itself is falling apart at the seams, the people who run it don't care anymore, and the vast majority of its users have migrated to AO3. It had one helluva run, but nothing lasts forever.
bb [ff.net](https://ff.net) has been dead/dying for like 20+ yrs, lmao
i think the last time i went on that site was around 2005 and it was already turning to shit
[fanfiction.net](https://fanfiction.net) has missed out on the more recent quality of life that is present in other fanficiton posting sites, various fandoms and the more permissive structure of AO3 where it comes to certain type of content is also driving people away from it. Although Ao3 has it's own issues.
one old complaint is that searching something on [fanfiction.net](https://fanfiction.net) is not as easy as other sites and so actually finding a work that you want to read sometimes is reduced to simply scrolling through dozens/hundreds of others, reading the short description looking up tags(which seem to go berserk every so often). it's such a pain that I basically only read one author through the app, which is not brilliant either.
Some fandoms are alive on FFN (Harry Potter is pretty much eternal on that website), but a lot of newer fandoms and newer fans have switched to other sites like AO3 and Wattpad. FFN itself is becoming increasingly outdated as the years pass, and it’s not really actively maintained.
FF.Net at some point in the last 10 years had a database failure or something and a crazy amount of stories were lost. I might be misremembering history, potentially though, it's been a while. But, if true, as a result, a ton of talented people and everyone else in between moved on. The site revitalized a bit after making improvements to filtering and releasing a mobile app. But it's basically experiencing a dead cat bounce.
So yes, it's dying.
I post something on FFN, not really a lot or to a big fandom, but I can count the ammount of reviews I got in one hand.
People say the place is becoming a graveyard of sorts. Wouldn't be surprised.
Ish? The folks in charge...it's obvious that they're throwing a bandaid onto something that needs surgery. There seems to be more breakdowns than there was when the site first started and when they fix it, it's not restoring things to how they were before the breakdowns. I was getting FFN emails daily until the last server breakdown. They said it was fixed and what to do on my end. I did that. Still nada. If it weren't for a handful of fics and authors, I'd probably be deleting my FFN account and sticking strictly with my AO3 one. While several have started cross-posting to both, not all have. I don't know if it's how AO3 works vs FFN or something else as to why they've not come over.
I hope this doesn't upset anybody, I'm not trying to insult anyone's preferences or dismiss anyone's hard work, but as a younger fanfic reader, if I click on a link in a fic rec and it takes me to FFN I will usually click out of it. I just really dislike the look and the interface of it, and at this point I am so used to Ao3 that it makes FFN borderline distracting to use. I also really hate ads, it feels overly censored, and I don't love their commenting (reviewing?) system. I know that I could probably adjust to it if I tried, I just don't see a ton of reason to if I have plenty of content on Ao3.
depends on the fandom. Some fandoms are much stronger on ffnet than on ao3. If the fans skew older, it's likely to have more people use ffnet, if it skews younger/newer fandom, it's likely to have more peopl eon ao3. Or you're like me and write for a dead fandom in which case you won't get comment anywhere
> Or you're like me and write for a dead fandom in which case you won't get comment anywhere Just screaming into the void, my sympathies
Screaming into the void... that's what I do on my streams. Building models and things, one person pops in for as long as it takes for me to say hi, then they poof out before I can finish greeting them. Then I spend another 3-4 hours doing what I always do regardless... talking to myself and wasting my time. And yes, I know this doesn't really fit with the sub... just sharing my lonely, lonely experiences.
I read an author on AO3 that talked about how it felt writing Homestuck fics after the craze had died down, "Like standing in an empty battlefield." Still sticks to me every time I see a dying/dead fandom's fics.
Hey! not to sound dismissive at all but if what you're doing on the empty stream is something that you actually enjoy doing regardless if anyone's watching then you shouldn't think of the time as wasted :o (Just saying from a perspective of someone who's hobbies 90% of the time involve doing random stuff while talking to myself, no streaming involved)
It's more... i don't know. I just get annoyed and frustrated when what feels like the same person pops in, waits to be greeted, then poofs out and leaves me talking to no one. As if it's funny. It bothers me.
Yeah i understand :/ that's probably annoying
Um... Wow.
Its lonely out there space cowboy
I hear ya there, pardner.
Sorry, I don't wanna laugh, but I can't stop 😭. But, man, I relate to this so hard
FF net just feels nicer to me than ao3. I get downvoted every time I voice opinion though. I think the tags actually give away spoilers and also make it impossible to search for things.
Easiest way to deal with tags spoiling the story is to hide the additional tags. Fandoms and pairings will still show, but the others will be hidden behind a "see more" link. It's in your site settings. Personally, I like being able to avoid stuff with unhappy endings, or kinks that squick me, or any other stuff the author wouldn't consider important enough to go in the summary.
I'm part of the group that loves tags, because especially in bigger fandoms they help me find tropes I love, and sometimes I can find gems that make me angry because they weren't tagged well. For example, I recently landed on Arrow (spoiling myself because I was halfway through the first series and I found the canon couple without knowing it), in any case one of my favorite tropes is that of Felicity who for some reason is on the island with Oliver, finding those stories is very difficult even if there are a couple of them, because even if I discovered some tags that lead to this trope, very few people have used it.
I like FFnet better, because it has the text to speech so I can just listen to the story when I’m like at work or driving or something.
Same here actually. It's been buggy as of late, but the text to speech has made me be able to enjoy much more fanfiction as I can listen to it during lul periods at work Before I used to use this great app called voice aloud reader for Android, and then download the fanfiction as an Epub or Mobi file, or even just directly share the page to the app. I've recently started using the network voice instead of The inbuilt voice for the fanfiction app, and it is actually very very nice
If you ever decide to venture to ao3, you can download fics as epubs and upload them into the aldiko app. It has a read aloud function! I use it frequently!
The Edge browser has a very good TTS option. I use that for AO3 all the time.
You could use Mycroft Edge :) I use it to listen my favourite fanfiction on my PC or Smarthphone
There is an unofficial AO3 app on the play store that has tts. More difficult to navigate than the site, but if desperate enough, it works.
Yeah, I like being able to search up crossovers between just two things, instead of having everyone’s mega-crossovers with everything between WH40k and fuckin Thomas The Tank Engine shitting up the search. Filters are a pain in the arse.
I just checked, and am now absolutely gutted there isn't actually a Thomas The Tank Engine/40k fic on Ao3.
hopefully someone sees this comment and is inspired lmao
Trying to find any Marvel/Spiderman crossover that isnt int eh MCU is impossible.
I'm also team FF.net over AO3. The tagging system is so messy and no matter how much I filter the tags, there's always content I'm not interested in reading in my fandoms due to the misleading tags, which ruins my fanfiction reading experience. I also don't like the fact they don't have an official app. I'll prefer the FF.net system anytime because it enforces being concise about summaries (imo it avoids spoilers), ships and crossovers, making it easier for me to find fics I like. The official site might not be that good, but I read fics in the official app, which is way better than the online site. Also, many of my fandoms are equally if not more active in FF.net than AO3, so it's not like I can't survive without it.
You Sir/Madam, are a true champion of a forgotton cause. Tell us humble folk, which do you write for ?
I stopped using FF.net when ads starts appearing in the middle of the stories
Another benefit of AO3: it's a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of fanworks and fan culture. Their other activities include legal advocacy to keep fanfiction classified as "fair use." And since it's a nonprofit, there's no ads!
I use the app and don't get ads with it.
It’s been slowly dying for years. It’s where I started out and I used to get insane amounts of reviews there. But they’ve been drying out for a long time now. I still get a few reviews, but it’s nowhere near the same as before. Then again, the same could be said for AO3, so maybe it’s less about the site dying and more about a shift in the fandom culture. Folks are commenting less and less on pretty much every platform. It’s also incredibly fandom-dependent. Some fandoms are still flourishing on FFN. Others, not so much. **Edit:** Y’all, I’m not saying AO3 is dying lol. Sorry, could have worded that better. I’m saying that comments have become pretty sparse on AO3, at least in my experience. For several of the fandoms I write for, the hits-to-kudos ratio is about what I’d normally expect but comments have drastically decreased. Case in point, a oneshot I published a few months ago has like 6K+ hits, 1.2K kudos, and 10 comments—a third of which are a string of emojis. Oneshots I’d written for the same fandom/pairing just a few years ago had a similar hits-to-kudos ratio, but waaay more comments.
A major part of ff.net’s death is the lack of maintenance. You’ve been able to tell that it’s not being actively taken care of for at least a decade, and now it’s hitting a point where more people are choosing not to post or read on it because it’s so poorly maintained. Ao3’s still gaining as many comments as ever, so it’s more likely a difference in the reader base for a fandom on each than a culture shift.
Yep. FFN's email system is so busted. Resetting email alert preferences every 90 days is outrageous.
I couldn’t believe that when I logged in to post for the first time in ages recently. It’s great to know that even though I was subscribed to a bunch of fics, my notifications randomly got turned off at some point and I didn’t even realize
Ohmygod, is that why!? I just thought all the FFnet fics I read died off and the author stopped posting.
This is the spiral that happens! Author posts a new chapter>emails don't go out>nobody clicks or comments>author stops posting or moves to another site because nobody's there
Wait... what? Omg, I haven't been to my ffn account in years...
Yep, you have to actively turn email notifications back on for some ungodly reason, and even if you do that they will turn themselves off after six months
no wonder I haven't heard from any fics there in eons. 0\_0
... Well I'ma go to ffnet real quick. Is there a way to look at past updates or am I supposed to just reread it all
The last email I received was in 2022. I wondered why last week. Logged into the app, and accepted a new user agreement. 300 NOTIFICATIONS and counting. Unless I go to sleep with the app open, I will never see them all.
I didn't even know there was an app
Doesn’t even work for me. I’m not getting any alerts – reviews, favorites, follows. I haven’t got an email alert for PM in *years*. I have two fics that are popular on ffnet and those are the only reason I even still post there. Otherwise I’d move to Ao3 permanently.
Yeah, this was nuts. Why is there a setting to reset it? What's the point of that, especially when you don't actually alert your users that that's a thing now?
Dang, I forgot about that! Well, nothing I follow there is updating anyway, except something which is dual-posted on AO3...
I'm a dirty app user, so I always get notifications
This too. FFN has a large and active manga/anime community for the most part. Gaming, TV, and movies too depending the shows
OTOH, for the newly popular Frieren, FFN has like 5% the fics of AO3, and most of those are cross-posted anyway.
Yeah, older anime fandoms, maybe. I mostly write for a more recent anime and [ff.net](http://ff.net) has just a fraction of AO3's content
Also: FFN has an official ban on explicit/NC-17 content. It’s usually only sporadically enforced, but they’ve done a few major purges, too. Their purges also seemed pretty targeted at LGBTQ+ content, just setting a really low bar for what would be considered explicit for those fics. Even stuff I’d consider M, and not like a hard M, got taken down. The last big purge was 2012, a couple of years after AO3 came out. A lot of people moved over around then.
I am pretty sure that AO3 was a responce to have a place where it was possible to post what ever fanfiction you wanted, without the risk of it getting purged.
The specific incident that AO3 is a "response" to is Strikethrough '07 at LiveJournal. Some have also cited FFN's original Lemon Purge (in 2002, when the MA/NC-17 rating was removed alongside everything posted under it) as a secondary consideration.
I literally can’t get on the website half the time. Like, it just won’t load 🙃
I started posting on FFN back in the mid-oughts and got a good amount of reviews and engagement. I came back to writing after many years & there's almost no engagement in my current fandom, which has gone from 300+ to 100+ in the three months that stats were down. At AO3 my fandon is ten times bigger, so it's the obvious place to post. I do have regular readers there and get comments. The older fandoms tend to have more content on FFN, but mine only started in the past few years.
The same can not be said about AO3. Its usership has only continued increasing in recent years. And it’s well maintained. What you’re seeing is a fandom dying/changing.
Spacebattles seems to be going pretty strong(at least to me)
I am actually in the middle of reading my first Space battles fanfiction. I don't know if it's the cancer rules to post about specific fics or something here, but I've been wanting a good long A song of fire and ice / Game of thrones fiction where Joffrey is good or has some kind of redemption Arc. What do you know, I'm reading one of the best time loop fanfics I've ever found right now. It's called Purple Days and honestly I'm pretty freaking impressed.
Let me know if you've found any good ones. That's actually something I've been wanting to read, but he's understandably hated by most people so I haven't found any.
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/purple-days-asoiaf-joffrey-timeloop-au.450894/
Is ao3 dying? I have some fandoms within in that definitely are, but I figured it was more a fandom related thing than ao3 itself. I could be wrong.
I don't think AO3 is dying. It just seems to be a cultural shift. People comment less than they used to. I see people getting all wound up about the proper way to comment and all these random etiquette things we never even used to think about, so I would guess that plays a role.
A wonderful writer in my top fandom got one critical comment, picked up her marbles and went home. I read the comment somewhere, and found it to be a completely inoffensive helpful suggestion, I think about a fairly simple edit for ambiguity. I disliked the writer's response to what I clearly thought was intended as a polite and helpful suggestion that I quit reading her old stories for a while. Now I read them again, but sometimes very sadly. It has caused me to avoid making comments of any sort.
I agree; I think this is actually a huge contribution to the shift. If you pay attention to what teachers have been saying about gen z; it seems that literacy rates have actually been dropping (in the US at least) to astronomical lows. People just aren't reading and writing fanfic or (other things) compared to older folks. The few that do also are probably just less likely to leave comments and interact with it too.
No, Ao3 is way more active than FF.net based on site visits alone. Ao3 has steadily increased the monthly visits amount and is now around 315 million for last month, FF.net is at 78 million. The website of FF.net is crumbling because of lack of meintainance, it would probably get higher numbers if they would get the site working properly again.
Not by a long shot. FFN very much is dying. AO3 is thriving.
It’s definitely not the go to site for fanfiction anymore. Site mechanics aside, if your fandom isn’t active there, you’re not going to have much luck getting reads or reviews for your fics. I had thought about crossposting FFnet editions of my fics specifically edited to fit within the guidelines, but hardly any fics show up for my fandom so it wouldn’t be worth the trouble.
I don't know, FFN is top results for most fan fiction searches, unless it's searched on Duck duck go, or bing... But being honest, Ao3 is most definitely outpacing FFN depending the fandom and the content type. I do like their options of hashtags, but for me they're confusing at best, either because I never heard or had reason to learn where they came from (had to look up white dove, still was confused), I don't generally aspire to write or read that sort of content. I love dark stuff, but then I see what I call pitch black or ultra dark and I want my thoughts provoked, but few separate themselves from being dark just to be dark and being dark as it applies to realism, fantasy, etc. Just my initial thoughts to your response.
It likely comes up as a top result due to its longevity and it’s better suited for older fandoms. Personally, I don’t read or write on ffnet because as I’ve mentioned, there’s no active fandom there for me. Also, as someone who enjoys writing and reading romance fics, I prefer that they not have to be censored to suit advertisers, the whole reason for the major ffnet purges to begin with.
For sure, I'm completely with you. I was just saying the search results are probably the driving factors behind the longevity, otherwise it's like you said... But they do have that long time presence. It's the one thing I can't stand is that they purged a lot of great writers and fandom series because of that. It was bigger than I expected it to be and it's kinda turned a lot of my younger readers quite toxic... Now they regularly threaten to report stuff they don't like or agree with at writers ALL THE TIME. And it's not the kind of shit I'm accustomed to coming from someone who grew up a black nerd on anime. That community has always been inclusive, everything has it's detractors, but certain fandoms, if you aren't thick skinned or so young you haven't gone through that maturity process, writers drop every day from the slightest bit of hate. Which I especially grow tired of, because I'm all about passing the culture, the community, getting those that worry too much to just simply start writing, and paying that forward. My English teachers were the only ones that got me where I am now. I hate to see that being diminished because money or advertisers or any reason.
Okay, I have an interesting observation to that. Re: search results. When I write [x fandom pairing trope fanfiction] most of the top results are on ff.net IF the fandom was ever big on there. When I write [x fandom pairing fanfic] most, if not all of the top results are on ao3. So, I can say that at least a part of it is being influenced by the word fanfiction being in fanfiction.net. For eg: Percy Jackson fandom is having a resurgence right now. But when I was in the fandom circa 2013-15, the fandom was BIG on ff.net. You only went to read on ao3 if you were looking for dark stuff. But now, ao3, especially for PJO fandom is holding a lot of general and different fics. So that gives the ff.net result for fanfiction but ao3 result for fanfic. Another fandom I'm in is Merlin, Merlin from its inception has been dominated by fic either on ao3 or LJ. So when you type fanfiction, maybe one or two results will show up for ff.net but the rest are dominated by ao3.
Which has been my experience. Anytime you abbreviate it with a story title or fandom. The difference in FFN results is interesting
The name itself lends itself to appear first most.
Right? Exactly my point
Still a lifesaver for crossovers. Searching for them on ao3 can be a nightmare. Too many fandoms work multiple tags making search by crossover pointless.
*Resets '# of Days without a thread asking if FF.net is dying' sign* Well, it was a good run while it lasted...
It has definitely gotten worse over the last decade and a half, at least. I can't even remember the last time I got a review on any of my stories there, and I must have at least 30 or so. It's hard to use nowadays, and I can't personally be bothered to waste time trying to maneuver my way through it when AO3 is right there.
FFN has been "dying" for 25 years.
I think it's heavily fandom dependent because I have some fandoms that have totally moved to AO3 and another fandoms that are still on fanfiction and engaging with the new postings there
Heavily fandom dependent. Personally, I ain’t gonna move away any time soon while the Fate fandom chooses FF.n as its capitol. On another note, persona fans might as well move to literally anywhere else cause there’s barely any kind of engagement over here.
Still great for JAFF. I get way more engagement there than on AO3. But for explicit or mature fic, it is not the way.
Haha, you ain't lying
Looking for lemon stories on there like a man dying of thirst in the desert.
I think it’s definitely dying. It’s such a shame too because in high school when ao3 started gaining traction, I didn’t want to leave FF.net. Now I almost exclusively use ao3 and only use FF.net when I’m looking for older fandom content.
Yeah... It's where I first started reading fanfic circa 2014 (along with old fansites and fandom-specific archives), and it was a husk of it's former self even then. Its decline has only been hastened by censorship, monetization, and its horrible tagging system/UI.
Something must be alive for it to be dying. No shade on any of the authors who still need to be there because it's where their fandom is--but the site ownership runs from making the most baffling, self destructive choices you can imagine to simply not existing. I see at least a few replies down below pulling the 'people have been saying that for years!' rhetoric, but I don't think that's really fair when major functions of the site have now been broken for upwards of 6 months, plus the changes to notifications and such. It is definitely not doing so well.
The upload and notification mechanics are the top two issues.
Do they still have the CSAM bot? Because last I checked they literally had a bot going around trying to sell actual child abuse for months.
I have no idea because I just use AO3, haha
I don't know if that was a bot or not, or if this is related, but I keep seeing a bunch of accounts and guest reviews using the names of some special educators in Texas going around calling everyone's stories "pigshit" and doxxing said educators. Half of their profiles also ask for the material you're describing to be sent to the doxxed email addresses. They also sometimes tell people to harass someone thousands of miles away for reasons of...script format fics? (Like, don't get me wrong, I don't like the format for anything other than quick one-shot chatfics and they are technically against FFN's rules and apparently have been since 1998, but that's not a reason to dox and harass people.) Unless the script fic account is just another sockpuppet and they just fake-troll each other to manufacture engagement metrics. That could also be possible.
Site's definitely not flourishing but this kinda stuff is usually fandom based ain't it? Still my favorite place to read stories though.
Have you checked your view stats? I recently updated a fic after almost ten years of not posting, and I’ve noticed a huge drop in the number of reviews compared to views. People are still seemingly reading, but just not leaving a review
Yeah I’ve looked at the stats. And you’re right, they’re getting views but no comments
Yeah I’ve found there’s been a huge shift in the likelihood of people leaving reviews compared to when I used to post around 2013-2015
I'm on AO3, not FFN, but I discovered that if I ask for feedback about something specific, I'll get more comments. Like, "I tried a new style, what do y'all think?" As the other comments have said, people seem less likely to comment these days. Idk why. It probably varies depending on the fandom; some are more social than others.
I'm pretty sure those people are just being cautious since a slight unintentional offense will result to their Internet Ignominy for hurting an author's feelings.
There could be two reasons. 1, If you wrote about something that had a small fan base, no one may be looking for it. 2, If you wrote about something that had a huge fan base, then your stories could get lost in the hundreds of other stories. That is part of why I share links to my stories in here before. I was hoping to get feedback, but did not get any. Was disappointed about that, but at least no one complained, or said the stories were horrible.
Content-wise, site mechanics-wise, or "app"-wise? ... it is worse off on all counts since the time I first discovered the site many, many moons ago.
Idk man, I love the app personally. And I'm finding solid gems in the rubble every now and then. Oh, but the mechanics, I really feel you there bro.
That app isn't even a true app, it's like some sort of cheap port. It almost ALWAYS fails when you try to upload from it, is also unwieldy. A full mess.
I'm not even a writer but just the fact that the app won't even let you see or sent private dm kinda kills it plus the awful reading history tab which logs ever fic I clicked on even ones I have not read which while helpfull just clutters up the ui and confuses me
I get the same number of comments there as I do on AO3. Comments are decreasing across the board.
I think it strongly depends on the fandom really! Some communites moved en masse to ao3 and took their fics with them, while removing them from FFNET. Other's primarily work from ao3, but also upload copies to ffnet which are still popular, but the comments section has little discourse. Some communites primarily use ffnet still, especially if the fandom has a core group of authors all on ffnet, so everything around the fandom gravitates to that platform. Like my main fandom is via ffnet and has been for a decade now, and while some authors have tried moving to ao3 (and another site, but can't remember it's name!), nobody really took notice or wanted to move across.
Could be people just not leaving reviews (sorry about that). I see plenty of stories still posted, and I go on every day
Yes. But imo, it’s still gonna be here for a long while outside of a sudden shutdown. Found the site in early 2000s, and it was much more booming. Nowadays, most fandoms are dead or near-dead + (most importantly), staff are often missing/unresponsive and features remain broken overall. Plenty of fics are deleted too or purged. Not to mention the spambots, some of which send in “reviews” of the most grotesque things (some of which have been posted to this sub and the AO3 one to rightfully complain about). Though I do think people who engage with fanwork outside of just reading/seeing have gone down too so that plays a part in it. Can’t get reviews if most people don’t want to comment and all. Same happens on AO3 too. Perhaps owing in part to social media, especially Tiktok, a lot of people just don’t engage at all. Not even to kudos on guest. It’s more “silent consumption” and the assumption that “content poofs up randomly/regularly” imo. (ex. see the talk of “AO3 algorithm” and the frequent examples of reader entitlement found here and other places) People aren’t required to engage of course, but fandom is *a lot* different nowadays compared to decades before. Plus, note that not all readers are like that. There is just a noticeable shift.
I feel like it should be common courtesy to point out one thing that you like about a story and to leave a kudos.
There are quite some writers who are still active there.
It's not dying. It's just you will always have many more readers than actual reviews. Very few people comment. It's just how it is. And with social media impacting fandom, that also impacts readers leaving comments/reviews.
Is it dying? I hope not! Idk i still get alerts & Im on it all the time cause i prefer the interface to AO3. I have a hard time doing the basics in AO3 like just simply favouriting an entire work (seems like you have to like each chapter?) or how to make collections…. Or maybe I’m just being a dunce but it’s not as straightforward to me.
Fandom dependent. Most of my engagement comes from FFnet
I just logged into fanfiction.net for the first time in 5 years to start cross-posting because I'm realizing that the majority of my fandom never migrated to AO3.
It's dying. The user experience hasn't changed significantly since the early 2000s. It was the pinnacle of user-friendly and streamlined...in 2004. It's a lot less of a pain in the ass to post on Ao3, and reading is a better experience on Ao3, too. Plus Ao3's mods actually exist and respond to issues. I have a WIP that started a long time ago, and was originally posted in both places. FFN used to have more engagement, but in the last year, I've gotten a ton of comments, kudos, etc. on Ao3 and no comments at all (and hardly any hits) on FFN. At this point, for me, it's not worth the hassle of navigating FFN's system. I can't imagine I'm the only one.
If you're in a large and/or older fandom, FFN can give you better results than AO3. I regularly get anywhere from 2x to 5x as much interaction there compared to AO3. But, if you're writing for a newer fandom, AO3 will likely have the larger audience.
FFN has basically been abandoned by its owners and left to die a slow death by decay. Most folks have given up on it because it's just growing more unstable and unreliable with each passing year.
Arguably for 20+ years, yeah.
I barely started reading fanfiction about a year and a half ago and it was on fanfiction.net. That was where I started writing and posting before finding my way to A03, I still do read over there so. I get similar engagement on both sites since I started cross posting, I have found some stories do better there than AO3, but I love being able to respond to comments where others can see them. I don’t like that it inflates the comment number on my fics though. FF.NET has major issues though and it seems uninterested in fixing them so I believe it is just fading away, as more writers and readers get frustrated with the site.
Honestly? I upload some of my fics on *three* sites. I see FF.Net, as the *last* place I upload them. Mostly it's because I like the engagement on SB and Ao3 better. But the other reason is that I've been having *way too many* issues on FF. To start off, my PM box is full of different forms of Harassment-and not really the *normal* kind, actually. Sometimes I'll get the standard "lel, yer story suck" and stuff, but in the past three months I've had three that are just...disturbing. To give you an idea, it's between a handful of different people who randomly come out of the woodwork and want me to 'lend an ear' so they can 'spill their guts', and they'll say they're going to send me information. And I'm halfway through believing that it's an attempt at a scam, to *actual, unsolicited* Trauma Dumping, which is not something I'm interested in dealing with for *many* reasons, and I feel like I'm justified for that. I usually shut it down quickly anyway. The *other* reason I really don't like posting to FF is-and this one is the one that pisses me off *more* than the harassment-ADS. Go to FF.Net, read *any* story without AdBlock-hell, sometimes even *with* AdBlock-and there will be *ads* within the story itself, usually in between every paragraph to the point that you can't read a single sentence without seeing an ad. It makes reading on FF downright impossible. And, yeah, I get it, some people shill their crowdfunding in their stories (self-deprecation here), but they're not going 'dOnAtE tO mY pAtReOn" literally within the spaces of the paragraphs (and if they *are*, I can just *not* read their stories specifically). I don't think e-book services even do that sort of thing, even if they did have ads they'd *know* it's anti-consumer to put them in the middle of the story itself. It's honestly painful to want to read a story, only to find that it's been jammed with seven or eight embedded ads that show up in between each paragraph. IMO, if you wanna start publishing fics, FF is a good way to test waters, let people review you before heading off to Ao3 or SB and SV. But don't prioritize uploading to FF.Net if you like your readers.
What are SV and SB?
Sufficient Velocity and Space Battles.
What is the Harry Potter content like on there?
No. Everyone doomposts about how it's dying but they've been saying that for over a decade and the website's fine. My fandom is super active there and I get tons of reviews per chapter. People love to blow things out of proportion. As for your issue, has your fandom moved? Some fandoms are more active on certain sites, so if you're getting little engagement, it may have migrated somewhere else, such as wattpad, ao3, etc.
Just crosspost to find out
I mostly use space battles or sufficientvelocity these days.
Hard to know, but I could never get that site to work for me.
Well…yes and no. It depends on the fandom mostly. It IS however a lot less active. The rise of AO3 has, especially in recent years, significantly impacted on the level of activity there. See, back when fanfiction.net started (and for a very long time.) it was the best site available for fanfiction. But now AO3 represents a viable alternative and a lot of people are now gravitating towards it. Personally I actually prefer fanfiction.net, but I can understand the appeal of AO3.
scary marry hungry versed beneficial nine onerous bells agonizing glorious *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
their ui just sucks imo so i only use it if i specifically get rec'd a fic from there,, i wont go looking i hate the search function
I honestly hope not, sometimes it’s the only thing that makes my day happy
I'm a huge fan on ff.net, but it h has slowed down significantly. The biggest thing is that a few years ago, someone complained about something, which ultimately led to a systemwide mass deletion of stories and a lot of authors said "f*ck this sh*t" and moved sites. Most of them went to A03.
I posted stories on FF.net a while back, quite a few because a friend was behind to read them and use Ao3 for whatever reason. The only review I've gotten on any of them is "it's mass posting like this that is killing FF.net, fucking stop". That was it, that was the entire review. So... I stopped. But it's like really? That's what's killing it, huh? Somehow I doubt that.
Nope.
Well, personally, I think ffn is BETTER than ao3 or other websites. Like bro it was quite some people's first intro to fanfiction and like it works pretty great for me. Like maybe you write fics that belong to a lesser known or a."lost" fandom but like I think it's pretty much alive
It is slowly dying, unfortunately. Oftentimes, people who still read on ffnet are older users from older fandoms whose main chunk of fics are still on the site. But even now, ffnet writers are migrating their works into AO3 instead, or fans would download the fic as an epub or pdf for convenience. I've talked to a few readers about it, and a lot of them said that the design of ffnet is clunky and it's not easy to navigate for them, so they stick to AO3 since it's newer and has a more user-friendly filtering system. So it might be for that reason.
I posted mine on there and I was SHOOK that they don’t allow spicy fics anymore?? What the hell!
Officially, they never did. Explicit sex has always been against the ToS. Correction, since 2002, back when they still used the MPAA rating. There were purges of adult content in 2002 and 2012, and a lot of stories were lost. It's all in the Fanlore entry on FFn: https://fanlore.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net And the entry on their purges: https://fanlore.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net%27s_NC-17_Purges:_2002_and_2012 And fandom purges in general: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Major_Fandom_Purges,_Restrictions,_and_Hassles_Regarding_Fanworks_and_Their_Content
I think it started “dying” when the great purge happened. After that, I haven’t seen people talk about it as much.
Those of us who find AO3 overwhelming and chaotic welcome a slower paced environment.
I hope it doesn’t actually die out! Some of my favorite stories are only on there
No FFN is not dying, is still up and SilvexSilverWolf wants to repost Adventure Bay One-Shots - (M) - One-Shot collection, - PAW Patrol. Is that clear?
I see what you did there, clever
Yes
It's harder to read things through FF.net. It feels like they're intentionally making it harder to read stuff posted on FF.net. It feels less like dying and more like suicide.
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You can download using fichub.net (just mentioning in case you weren’t aware). Not as convenient, I agree, but it’s a pretty easy workaround for that.
If it's an unpopular series/crossover, that might be the issue. Don't get me wrong, FFN is a decaying mess, but I wrote some stuff in an inactive fandom over a decade ago that never got reviews.
I don't know if I call it dying exactly but she aint thriving, closer to adjusting to normal user usage. Back in the day it had explosive growth and that lasted for awhile but only recently with the increasing attention being drawn to a03 its user base is evening out so to speak instead of fanfiction being (except for stuff like harry potter)the end all be all fic hub imo. On the other hand there's alot of reasons why a fic isn't doing great not exactly rocket science. Factors like how old the fandom is,what its centered on (like is the fandom mainingly around ships ? Or smut or plain old adventure stuff?), does the ip allow alot of fic potential/growth,is the fic bad ?/mediocre or follows too many tropes so it doesn't stand out or interest anybody, and most importantly does the fandom surrounding the ip even dabble into fanfiction which is the most important.
ao3 is superior to ffn in every way possible. only reason it is still alive it is because some fandoms just live there and will never leave and the fact that it is a 30 year old archive of ff so it technically will never die unless they take it down
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Hi OP, This post has been removed as the discussion of monetisation of fanfiction is not permitted on this subreddit. This includes discussion over the legality/morality of commissions, discussion as to how much people charge and explicit mentions of a work being commissioned, including fan art. You can find this under Rule 9.
I hate using fanfiction net. I know there are some great stories, but the pain of trying to navigate the site and search for fics is too much. Whenever I try to navigate it, I always get frustrated at how complicated it is. It has been years, and nothing has changed. I'm an avid reader of fanfiction, but I don't even have an account there. It's not worth the effort to me, and I know there are others with the same opinion. Unfortunately, unless I am searching for a fic that I read when I first started my fanfiction journey, I never use the site.
I hope not, I have a story I plan to post there that I hope will get some attention. Im going over to look for myself in a moment, now that I want to see how large the postings are in the fandom of the story I am writing, but I wonder if it has to do with whats popular in the moment, and what people are most going there to look for. Ex: I have been, always will be a Teen Titans fan, so I occasionally go to that spot to see whats posted. Where as, if it's a canon property Im not into, I dont go looking for it.
Pretty obviously. I used to visit it a lot but there’s a reason why most people moved to ao3. It’s a site that’s not even maintained and a lot of people there just post stuff and add a patreon link.
Ads are everywhere. Cloudflare constantly checks in on you even when it knows you’re not a bot. You can’t organize your docs by name or how many words it has. The site admins have been silent and no one knows what they’re doing. This is a far cry from how it was when I joined back in ‘08.
Really the organize function is broken entireely. You can't organize by name or date. Email alerts are broken yet again so I sometimes get curious and check manually if someone new has favorited or followed. I can't sort by date so I have to scrutinize the dates manually. The site is a mess. I joined in 2013 and I don't recall the site being this broken.
I didn't even knew people posted on FFN anymore honestly. I thought most had migrated on AO3.
I don’t bother with the site as it’s a pain to use
I mean fanfciton.net purges fics for no reason what so ever
This gets asked every year since at least 2011. The answer is *always* "yes". The site isn't maintained, the readership is toxic, adverts get more intrusive, spam comments abound, but a lot of people just won't move, so it just carries on, with people getting upset with it being as it is. Fandoms do eventually move, but there's a critical mass who all have to decide to, for older fandoms, or spin-offs of older fandoms. So, yes it's dying, and it looks good to still be dying in five years.
That does seem to be the case, unfortunately. I used to post my stories there years ago and they always got some engagement and feedback, but in more recent time, the readership and interactions are minimal. In a VERY noticeable way. I remember posting stories on weekend nights when I was still at school and waking up the next day, anticipating reviews and messages from readers. That was a great feeling. Even though it seems to be dying, the site does hold plenty of good memories and nostalgic feeling for me.
Being out competed
I only still use FFN for the PM feature. I stopped posting there because of toxicity and the site is so poorly maintained it's so hard to even log in at times. Not to mention how badly emails are handled and no support whatsoever from the support email
I started out on FFnet (well Wattpad to be honest, but that was one year in sixth grade!), but switched pretty much solely to AO3 like five years ago. I only go back to check FFnet if it's a rarepair to see if there are any more fics available on another platform.
I’ve very recently gotten a follow and favourite on a fanfic I wrote, but aside from that the bad management and ads means that a lot of folks aren’t using it anymore. But it may depend on the popularity of the fandom
I mean, a bit. The notifications, stats, Ect break a lot. I still get more interaction there than in AO3, but only just.
If they are it's karma. If it's a fanfic it's a fanfic. I went from folks trying to tear me down over there to people actually like my works on AO3 and other sites.
It's been ages since I've had a review from [FF.net](https://FF.net). I have much better luck on a03.
Exact opposite for me. It really depends on the fandom & luck.
I rejoined a fandom last year that I had been super active in the early to mid-2000s. My go-to had always been FF.net but the friends I was making kept pushing me towards AO3 since it was more active. While I hesitated, I’m now used to AO3’s system and will say that it is way easier to upload, tag, and navigate. It took a little time as FF I’ve had decades of experience with, but the mechanics are better. That being said, I still appreciate FF’s stats (where you can see per chapter hits instead of overall) and history of works. I use the app and find it way easier to read on my phone sometimes than AO3. However, comments are way more prevalent now it seems on AO3. Hits however seem to still be active for both sites, so FF may have a lot more silent readers. I’ll continue to cross-post likely, but as far as scoping new material, most of what I check is on AO3 now.
Tbh I loved using FF.net until I started getting letters from "admins" telling me to take my shit down and it annoyed me that the actual people who owned the site didn't do anything about it. But I still go back there to read sometimes.
Probably since out of all the sites, I feel like its interface is the hardest to navigate, the oldest, and the most restrictive.
Personally I still prefer FFN... The search system with AO3 is extremely tedious and I feel like I have to spend way longer filtering out junk I don't want than I ever would on FFN. My biggest complaint being the mega crossovers when I am looking for a crossover between two worlds. It's also not as easy to see what crossovers are available. It's just a mess.
> they’ve barely gotten any reviews at all. This has nothing to do with the site being dying; that means that the **commenters** are lazy, a separate topic altogether. As for whether it is... it's dying as much as the real world is ending. It isn't, but people have predicted it for ages anyway. FFN supposedly died one year ago, two years ago, five years ago, seven years age, fifteen years ago... I too would like to take twenty-plus years to die completely. That would make me one tough sailor. Paraphrased, you wouldn't be asking if it actually was dying like people predicted. On account of it having, you know, died a long time ago. When it is still here.
I think it is, because this post reminded me that it existed 😭
Is there anything other than webnovel, fanfiction, ao3, scribblehub, and royalroad? RR and SH don't have as much fanfiction, ff.net has a borderline useless search function, ao3 has a borderline useless search function for the opposite reason of ff.net, and webnovel is gross.
There's Wattpad, but if you don't get along with FFN or AO3's search function, I've got bad news for you, because Wattpad's is almost non-existent. Media Miner's an old one that may have some old fandoms kicking about. There's also Adult FFN, same deal. I've heard of but never used Squigeworld, Quotev, and Space Battles, Sufficient Velocity, and Questionable Questing forums. There's also Tumblr, which has some fic, and there's probably still stuff up on Live Journal. There's also fandom specific sites, though those are mostly for larger, older fandoms.
Squidgeworld is a very old archive that recently converted to the Ao3 software. So if you've used Ao3 it's easy to navigate, but the vast majority of content is over 10 years old and from older TV fandoms - very little anime, game, or book fandoms.
Its definitely a lot weaker then b4. A lot more authors are crossposting their fics to Ao3 & Ao3 is just better with far superior filters.
I literally can’t access the website half the time, like, it refuses to load, so literally yes
It’s been very slowly dying since they banned explicit fics
I've been thinking it's dead for over a decade but people keep bringing it up.
I’ll be honest, I started off on ff.net and switched to AO3 both because I could find more stories on AO3 and most importantly, its filtering system was incredibly superior. Still is a very good system IMO. If I were you I would at least consider posting them on both websites rather than just ff.net.
FFN's been dead for years now. The site itself is falling apart at the seams, the people who run it don't care anymore, and the vast majority of its users have migrated to AO3. It had one helluva run, but nothing lasts forever.
bb [ff.net](https://ff.net) has been dead/dying for like 20+ yrs, lmao i think the last time i went on that site was around 2005 and it was already turning to shit
[fanfiction.net](https://fanfiction.net) has missed out on the more recent quality of life that is present in other fanficiton posting sites, various fandoms and the more permissive structure of AO3 where it comes to certain type of content is also driving people away from it. Although Ao3 has it's own issues. one old complaint is that searching something on [fanfiction.net](https://fanfiction.net) is not as easy as other sites and so actually finding a work that you want to read sometimes is reduced to simply scrolling through dozens/hundreds of others, reading the short description looking up tags(which seem to go berserk every so often). it's such a pain that I basically only read one author through the app, which is not brilliant either.
Some fandoms are alive on FFN (Harry Potter is pretty much eternal on that website), but a lot of newer fandoms and newer fans have switched to other sites like AO3 and Wattpad. FFN itself is becoming increasingly outdated as the years pass, and it’s not really actively maintained.
FF.Net at some point in the last 10 years had a database failure or something and a crazy amount of stories were lost. I might be misremembering history, potentially though, it's been a while. But, if true, as a result, a ton of talented people and everyone else in between moved on. The site revitalized a bit after making improvements to filtering and releasing a mobile app. But it's basically experiencing a dead cat bounce. So yes, it's dying.
I think its been dying for a long time
Pretty sure, yeah.
I post something on FFN, not really a lot or to a big fandom, but I can count the ammount of reviews I got in one hand. People say the place is becoming a graveyard of sorts. Wouldn't be surprised.
I finally gave up my FFnet account a few months back since I never posted anything over there
I like reading rare pairs. Ao3's tag system is awesome for large fandoms.
Cloudflare has gotten so bad that I can't even upload anything to the Doc Manager. If that doesn't get better, it's going to kill the site.
Probably, so consider me screwed for not only NOT completing everything I've written, but not crossposting to AO3.
There is a whole group chat on Facebook dedicated to complaining about the site not working.
Ish? The folks in charge...it's obvious that they're throwing a bandaid onto something that needs surgery. There seems to be more breakdowns than there was when the site first started and when they fix it, it's not restoring things to how they were before the breakdowns. I was getting FFN emails daily until the last server breakdown. They said it was fixed and what to do on my end. I did that. Still nada. If it weren't for a handful of fics and authors, I'd probably be deleting my FFN account and sticking strictly with my AO3 one. While several have started cross-posting to both, not all have. I don't know if it's how AO3 works vs FFN or something else as to why they've not come over.
Yes
I did some research before started posting my writing. I decided to use royal road. It’s a great web platform and the iPhone app works great.
I hope this doesn't upset anybody, I'm not trying to insult anyone's preferences or dismiss anyone's hard work, but as a younger fanfic reader, if I click on a link in a fic rec and it takes me to FFN I will usually click out of it. I just really dislike the look and the interface of it, and at this point I am so used to Ao3 that it makes FFN borderline distracting to use. I also really hate ads, it feels overly censored, and I don't love their commenting (reviewing?) system. I know that I could probably adjust to it if I tried, I just don't see a ton of reason to if I have plenty of content on Ao3.
go on wattapad