Reading Wired's Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online...
At a time when we're trying to figure out how to make the internet livable for humans, without exploiting other humans in the process, AO3 (AO3, to its friends) offers something the rest of tech could learn from.
... mostly served to remind me of how far the story was to some extent just echoing the story that Maciej Cegłowski told several years ago about the beautiful moment when Pinboard met fandom...
[In the wake of the owners of Del.icio.us deciding to redesign their user interface in such a way as to render Del.icio.us useless to a small but very important segment of fandom.] Being a canny businessman, I posted a gentle reminder that there was still a bookmarking site that let you search on a slash tag.
So fandom dispatched a probe to see if I was worth further study. The emissaries talked to me a bit and explained that my site was missing some features that fans relied on.
In my foolishness I asked, "Could you make me a list of those features? I'll take a look, maybe some of it is easy to implement."
Oh yes, they could make make a list.
I had summoned a very friendly Balrog.
Honestly, the full article/talk is very much worth reading.
[Via BrettTerpstra.com]