Tulip

Dreamwidth cut tags are useful things for a variety of purposes. Content warnings, spoiler warnings (insofar as one considers those a distinct thing from content warnings), hiding long walls of text from people who don't specifically click into them, et cetera.

However, cut tags have three major downsides. First: they're JavaScript-dependent. Anyone who's locked down their browser's JavaScript functionality for security purposes will be unable to open or close them. Second: they're not usable in comments, only in entries, so anyone who wants to post a content-warning-warranting or spoiler-warning-warranting or long piece of content in a comment has no choice but to inflict said content on everyone. And third: they only appear in journal or reader view, not in directly-linked entries, so even top-level posts only get to point them at people reading said posts incidentally, not at anyone who's been specifically linked to the relevant posts.

As it happens, modern HTML has a solution to this set of problems: <details> and <summary> tags. These are supported in all modern browsers—according to Can I Use, approximately of 97% of browser-instances currently in use—and they work very similarly to cut tags, but in pure HTML, with no JavaScript required and no limit of being usable only in top-level posts viewed not-through-direct-links.

Side-by-side examples of the two, for purposes of comparison:

( This is a cut tag. )

This is a details/summary tag-pair.

This is some text within the details tag.

The source code of those two examples is, respectively:

<p><cut text="This is a cut tag.">
<p>This is some text within the cut tag.</p>
</cut></p>

...and...

<details>
<summary>This is a details/summary tag-pair.</summary>
<p>This is some text within the details tag.</p>
</details>

(If you use the casual HTML editor rather than the raw HTML editor, then you can skip the <p> tags, of course. Although then you'll have a bunch of extra line breaks added in which you probably don't want, both for the cut tag and for the details/summary tag-pair.)

So. The basic pattern is: the <details> tag marks its contents as requiring a click-through to read, same as a cut tag. If it contains a <summary> tag, its preview text will be the contents of said <summary> tag. If not, then, much as a cut tag without a text attribute will default to preview text of "Read more...", so a <details> tag without a <summary> tag will default to preview text of "Details". Overall the syntax isn't substantially more complicated than that of cut tags, just different. And, in return, you get to avoid all three of the previously-mentioned downsides! For most people, I suspect that details/summary tag pairs are, in fact, going to be the more useful of the two most of the time.

(I don't know the relative demographics, among Dreamwidth users, of people who keep JavaScript disabled versus people who use ancient browsers which lack support for these tags. But I don't expect the two groups to be too different in size, so I wouldn't expect there to be a substantial hit in accessibility from using these tags, either.)

And there we have it. For anyone who was previously unaware of <details> and <summary> tags' existence, or of their usability on Dreamwidth, now you know! Hopefully the information is helpful.

Despite plans to the contrary, my crossposting between dreamwidth and tumblr seems to mostly have stopped happening. It started because I got a couple tumblr asks to which I wrote effortpost-y answers, and asks as a format don't translate neatly into Dreamwidth; but now I just did a top-level post which I also don't feel like crossposting, so at this point I think I'm resigned to just no longer finding it worth the effort now that tumblr has somewhat stabilized. Sorry to anyone who'd been hoping to catch all my important content here in place of my tumblr. I may still crosspost here occasionally, but not with the consistency with which I'd previously planned to do so.

[This is a crosspost from my tumblr, where it's a reply-in-reblog of the following quoted text. Crossposted because, despite being a reblog, it stands pretty well even with minimal context.]

How do people usually find new fic they like? I somehow skipped getting really into fanfic growing up so I never developed a system, but I’ve recently started reading more in my free time and want to know how other people find stuff to read.

---

There are two broad clusters of answers here: fandom-general and fandom-specific. I’ll start with fandom-general before moving into fandom-specific stuff.

So there are pretty much three consistently-populated pan-fandom places you can use to find fanfics: Fanfiction.net, AO3, and TVTropes. Let’s go through each of their basics in order.

Fanfiction.net has the highest volume of fic for a given fandom a pretty large fraction of the time the time. The likelihood increases with the age of the fandom and with the action-orientedness of the source material. Inconveniently, it also has the lowest average-quality-per-story of the three sites. However, luckily, its rating system is vaguely okay and can compensate somewhat. While I certainly wouldn’t trust "has lots of favorites on FF.net" as a signal of quality all on its own, it’s much more of a signal of quality than AO3 kudos. As such, my recommended procedure for finding good fics on FF.net is the following:

First, browse to the page of a fandom of interest. Second, in the search filter box, set whatever criteria interest you. One specific filtering decision I highly recommend is to make sure to shift the searched-for fic ratings to include M-rated fics, because for some reason those are omitted from the default filtering. Then set it to sort by favorites, run the filter, and click into every remotely interesting-sounding story on the first page of results. Most of them will probably be relatively bad and easy to dismiss quickly on the basis of poor writing, incorrect character voicing, or the like; but there’s a decent chance that one or two will be good.

AO3, although not quite as prone to having-the-most-fics-for-a-given-fandom as FF.net is, still often does. It’s particularly likely if the fandom is situated on Tumblr or if the source material is particularly shipping-conducive. AO3 has a much better tagging and filtering system than FF.net does; however, it makes up for it with an even worse rating system. (This bothers me. A single "I liked the fic" marker is not a good way to determine relative quality of fics, there are way too many things that can confound it as a metric.) So here are my recommendations for fic searches on AO3:

First, browse to the work page for whatever fandom you’re looking for fics of. In the "exclude" section of the block of filters, find the "crossovers" subcategory under More Options and check Exclude Crossovers; this lets sorting by kudos be at least a slight modicum of effective, rather than being thrown off by some fandoms having more readers and thus more people-able-to-give-kudos than others. Then set whatever other filter criteria you want. I’d mildly recommend filtering positively for at least one of the "categories" (F/F, Gen, et cetera), because there are a lot of discrepancies in readership between those categories even within a single fandom and that can throw things off nearly as much as crossovers can. Finally, set it to sort by kudos and go opening All The Tabs like on FF.net.

(As a side thing, I sometimes find that it can actually help to sort by word count rather than by kudos. I’m not sure if this is specifically a me-ism because I like relatively long fics or if it’s genuinely a good quality-filtering mechanism, but I recommend giving it a shot at some point if you feel dissatisfied with the kudos-based listing. It lets you relax on some of the filters that I recommend when sorting by kudos without the negative effect you’d get if you let up on them while sorting by kudos, and I feel like there’s a slight tendency for the long fics to have a higher volume of well-written stuff for some reason, maybe due to selection effects on who’s inclined to write them and then retains enough interest to actually follow through.)

A common thread of good search technique on both FF.net and AO3, as well as on any other archive you might look through, is that, if you find a notably-good fic, you should check what else the author has written; while often the first thing of theirs you read is going to be your favorite, since it’s the one that fit your search criteria well enough for you to find it in the first place, often the same general degree of writerly competence will be exhibited in their other fics.

Finally, TVTropes. It’s not a fanfic archive like the other two are, but it has lots of links to fanfics. Some works, if popular enough, will get FanficRecs subpages on TVTropes. They don’t actually, as far as I’ve found, have a better hit rate quality-wise than the products of a well-filtered search on FF.net or AO3; but they are another listing, and relatively low-effort to find, so I recommend them nonetheless. But they’re not my primary recommendation for how to find good fanfics on TVTropes. Instead, I’ve got two alternatives.

First: much as some works have FanficRecs sub-pages, so some works have FanWorks subpages. These, rather than listing fanfics that TVTropes users found worth recommending, list fanfics (and other fanthings, but fanfics are the ones of interest here) that TVTropes users found worth making TVTropes pages for. This turns out to be a much better selector for quality, presumably due to the notably-greater effort involved in making a whole page for the fic than for just writing up a brief summary on the recommendations page. So then open up all the fics linked on the FanWorks page, and from there read their descriptions and click through to all the interesting ones as normal.

Second: often, a fic can slip through the cracks of an initial search, sounding relatively uninteresting based on its description despite actually being good. To the extent that you’re in the habit of browsing TVTropes’ trope pages (as opposed to work pages), get into the habit of looking at examples from fanfics when they’re listed; there’s a decent chance you’ll run into some fics which keep being mentioned in interesting contexts. When this happens, click through and try reading the fic even if its description sounds less interesting than your usual threshold, because there’s a moderate chance that it’ll actually be a good story, just badly described.

As a final note on fandom-general stuff: recommendations from friends. Much harder to get in a systematic way, of course, but if you happen to have a friend who reads a bunch of fic in a fandom you’re interested in or of a genre you’re interested in, or you’re in a social group with vaguely-psychologically-similar-to-you people who discuss fanfics sometimes, pay attention to which fics they recommend, discuss, or link. They’re overwhelmingly likelier to be good than even the products of well-filtered searches are.

Such is the state of generalized techniques which can be applied across most fandoms. Not necessarily all fandoms—a few are too small to have much fanfic—but this will, broadly speaking, put you in a position to encounter at least some good fanfic to the extent that there’s any to encounter.

However. Often, for specific fandoms, it’s possible to do significantly better than any of this advice except for the getting-recommendations-from-friends part. It’s obviously hard to summarize this part in full, since I’m only in so many fandoms and different fandoms handle things differently on this front, but in terms of general clusters of worthwhile fandom-specific things to look for, I’m going to say there are basically two of note: unusual archives, and unusual places for finding recommendations.

Let’s start with unusual archives. So, for most fandoms, most of the stuff written is going to be on FF.net or AO3 or both, and to the extent that exceptions exist they’re likely to be scattered across a billion hard-to-search platforms like Tumblr and Dreamwidth and so forth. But some fandoms resist this tendency, and instead have large chunks of writing centered in some other archiving site. Two specific examples that come to mind for me are the My Little Pony fandom, the vast majority of whose fic is on Fimfiction rather than one of the big sites, and the Worm fandom, large fractions of whose fic is on the writing forums of Spacebattles and its sort-of-sister sites Sufficient Velocity and Questionable Questing rather than on one of the big sites.

There are two major benefits to finding whatever unusual archives are popular in a given fandom. First, there’s just more fic there, such that you’ve got more stuff to search through. Second, there are often archive-specific things going on that make it easier to find good fics. So, in the case of Spacebattles and company, there seem to be writerly selection effects, such that the median quality per story thread is much higher than median quality on the big sites for reasons that I still haven’t distinguished with confidence but which I suspect are a product of the sites’ user demographics in some fashion, making it so that randomly clicking into stories even without filters is actually effective as a means of finding decently-written stuff, given a couple tries. In the case of Fimfiction, there’s (a) a significantly better search system than either FF.net or AO3 have (it has an actually good rating system with both upvotes and downvotes and reasonable weighting thereof, it’s beautiful) and (b) a large number of on-site blogs and groups dedicated to highlighting particularly-good stuff. So, overall, finding archives like this can be hugely helpful to the extent that they exist. And, even more conveniently, if you look through recommendations on TVTropes you’ll likely be alerted to the existence of such archives without the need for extra searching, just because the recommendation links will point to the archives.

Then, separate from unusual archives (which you might say play similar roles to FF.net and AO3), there are also unusual recommendation engines (which you might say play similar roles to TVTropes). These are, sadly, much harder to find than unusual archives, because you won’t get pointed to them by TVTropes. I don’t have much generalized advice on how to find them; but, if you poke around fandom spaces, sometimes you’ll get lucky and stumble into one.

When you find one, though, it’s wonderful. Examples I’ve found are the aforementioned Fimfiction blogs and groups dedicated to highlighting good fics (where, generally, the optimal usage procedure is "find a blogger or group whose tastes seem to match your own, and then look through their curated lists to find good things"), and the HPFanfiction and WormFanfic subreddits (where, generally, the optimal usage procedure is "open up threads where people ask for recommendations of something that interests you, and click interesting-looking links, or occasionally make a thread asking for recommendations yourself"). I’m sure there are others, following other formats, which have different optimal usage procedures.

So yeah. It’s hard to offer advice on the fandom-specific stuff the way I can with the fandom-general stuff, since it’s so idiosyncratic, but to the extent that it exists it often works significantly better than the fandom-general stuff does, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for it.

Finally, something that I haven’t touched on much: non-fandom-specific searches. Most of my focus here has been "there’s a specific fandom you want to read fics for, here’s how to find good ones". If you’re less focused on a specific fandom and more on just Finding Good Fanfic, though, multi-fandom archives or recommendation engines with everything just sort of tossed together are a thing too. Examples of this mentioned in my post are TVTropes trope pages and Spacebattles-and-its-sort-of-sister-sites, both of which, although I mentioned them in the context of fandom-specific searches, can be very easily used for more-general purposes. Others include the Glowfic Constellation (if you want to poke your head into glowfic, which is a whole other ball of complicated), and various communities on Dreamwidth (none of which I know well enough to recommend specifically, unfortunately).

...so yeah. Hopefully some of this is helpful. If I went by anything too quickly and was unclear, or if you need clarification on anything for some other reason, feel free to ask.

[Epistemic status: very low confidence in all predicting-the-future I do herein, to the point where it's probably better to treat it as worldbuilding than as genuine prediction]

It seems plausible that, some time within the next few decades, there will be machine learning systems capable of generating genuinely-good works of fiction, with levels of character consistency, thematic consistency, interesting worldbuilding, and so forth which make them viable competition to human-written novels. Once such systems exist, they're likely to thoroughly outcompete humans within the domains they know how to write in, given their vastly-greater ease of producing a high volume of content in a short time. Which isn't to say that humans will stop writing things, of course, but I expect it to make a major dent in humans writing with the expectation of becoming well-known or financially-successful.

However, it seems likely that their domains of effectiveness will start out somewhat limited genre-wise. In particular, I'd expect them to be very bad at making use of narrative devices and techniques which are neither common in the corpus of stories on which they were trained nor easy to invent just by combining those common devices together. So, for example, I'd expect them to take much longer to figure out Unsong-style TINACBNIEAC-isms, and especially to figure out how to actually tie them into the worldbuilding as Unsong does, than to figure out quasi-old-timey narration and soft magic as featured in Lord of the Rings and its hordes of imitators.

As such, I don't think that humans writing with fame or money as goals will be outcompeted all at once. Rather, they'll be driven from the more-formulaic genres into the less-formulaic genres as the machine-learning systems take over the more-formulaic genres. And that's going to make for a really interesting shift, when it happens. Even relatively early on, it won't be enough to just write weird genre mashups like magical girl pirate spy thriller, because "combine these disparate elements into a unified picture" is the sort of thing that machine learning systems are good at; instead, the name of the game is going to be inventing new story-elements (or at least making use of little-used ones which don't yet comprise a good pool of training data). Unusual plot structures, or novel worldbuilding elements, or distinct styles of narration, or new character archetypes; just, in general, finding things which the machine learning systems can't generate merely by permuting the data they already have.

Now, if I wanted to continue going down the speculation-about-future-society path, there would be a bunch of interesting stuff here. You'd get the traditional publishers collaborating to avoid releasing too many stories containing any given element, for fear that the machine-learning systems would learn to generate those elements given an overly-large corpus and thus hijack yet another chunk of market-space. You'd get new-style publishers specializing in generating particularly-good things with the systems. You'd get a rise in weird medium-bending stories like Homestuck whose formats make them harder to imitate. It's generally a pretty interesting scenario to think about.

But of far more interest to me is asking: what will those new AI-dodging stories be like? What new depths of story-space will be explored in the process of keeping the writing-for-money industry alive? I'd expect the pressure to lead people to come up with lots of new interesting story ideas, in a way that current incentives don't push towards to nearly the same extent. But, even if the incentive isn't there for us, it's still just fun to speculate: how might I put together a story which would (a) not be easily imitable by a story-bot and (b) remain actually good and not throw out the narrative baby with the bathwater?

(And, of course, if I get any particularly cool ideas, there's no need to wait for the story-bot apocalypse before writing them up; novel story ideas are good even outside of the hypothetical future where the publishing industry is incentivized to reward them.)

About a year and a half ago, I finally read The Lord of the Rings for the first time. Previously I'd known some things about it through osmosis and through reading Silmarillion fanfic, but I'd never actually read through the whole thing myself. And, when I started, it felt like kind of a slog. Tolkien's writing style required me to read more slowly than usual in order to not miss anything, and the plot moved slowly even aside from stylistic concerns, and I kind of had to force myself to keep going with it at first.

That changed when I was midway through the second volume, not due to any change that I can recall in the story's style or pacing, but because of a thought I had: "this story's genre isn't actually fantasy in the modern sense; its actual genre is old-timey epic saga. It has more in common with the Iliad than with Mother of Learning." After thinking that, suddenly I enjoyed the story a lot more. Of course it had slow-to-read flowery language; that's how those old epics are, or at least how the translations of them that I've read are. Of course it had slower pacing than I'm used to; that's similarly part of the genre.

A couple years ago, I watched Star vs. the Forces of Evil for the first time. The show was midway through its second season, I think? Not that far in by current standards, but still a relatively substantial time commitment. And for the first couple episodes I had trouble with it, because like... there was no overarching plot, that early in? It set up an interesting premise in the first episode and then just turned into action/slice-of-life antics. But then I remembered a comment a friend of mine had made about the show earlier, that its major point of strength was in its very fun episode-level plots. And so I started viewing it that way, and proceeded to very much enjoy the show even before the metaplot showed up. (Although the episodes which advanced the metaplot were still generally my favorites, once I got to them.)

These two incidents point at a broader trend, I think: enjoyment of a given piece of media is dependent, not just on the combination of the media's content and the viewer's tastes, but also on how the viewer is looking at it. Changing one's model of What The Story Is Doing can change one's enjoyment of it, even given no further changes either to one's own tastes or to the content of the story itself.

This has two implications of note, I think. First, for someone consuming a highly-recommended bit of media and not finding it to click with them, it might be worth trying different framings of What It's Doing and seeing if any of those framings make it suddenly work. (Or just ask whoever recommended it to them what its points of particular quality are; that can be a useful shortcut a lot of the time.) Second, for someone making media recommendations, it can be worth going out of one's way to ensure that those recommendations convey how one views the recommended bit of media, at least to the extent that it can be conveyed to its target audience without unwanted spoilers; because that way the recommendee has a head start on finding the optimal framing as discussed earlier in this paragraph.