olderthannetfic:

friendshiptothemax:

olderthannetfic:

olderthannetfic:

olderthannetfic:

I used the data people gave me on my post about user ID numbers plus some other recent users I found to track accounts over time.

This isn’t AO3 traffic. That jumped right away when FFN screwed the pooch, sending the invite queue from a wait of 24 hours to a wait of months. This is the actual user ID numbers accounts created at these different times had.

Closed beta started on 3 October 2008. As you can see that on that first image, a few accounts got made right at the beginning for coders and committee members (#87, baby!), and then tester accounts got made over the rest of hat time. (The dots are just examples in my sample. Accounts would have been made all through that period, climbing from around 100 to around 1000400.)

AO3 entered open beta on November 14, 2009. (Not Nov 15 like in that recent post, unless things got delayed a day and I’ve forgotten?) And then the first big bump in numbers came from Yuletide!

The first account in my sample is #8 — astolat — and the latest is #12,545,743, which was created on October 28th, 2021.

#wait your id is just straight up the number of people who joined before you???#huh#mine is just under 2 mil#bonkers

As far as I know, yes.

#there are 12 MILLION users on ao3 now?????#that’s insane#when i signed up it was only over a million and that was 6 years ago

Yes and no. Something like 12 million accounts have been made. That means that the real number of existing accounts is lower (some will have been deleted) and the real number of active accounts is much lower (many people make one and do nothing with it).

However, lots of people read on AO3 without making an account, so the true number of users in the sense of individual humans who use the site, must be way higher.

It seems to me like the big jump in 2014-2016 could be pegged to the collapse of Livejournal as a fan space. I didn’t really know anyone in fan communities from the mid-00s to the mid-10s who used ff.net, we were all posting our fics in comms on LJ. Self selecting group, I know, but around 2014 or so I feel like we all just kinda migrated away from LJ being our all-in-one fan space to instead Tumblr for social/rp/graphics and Ao3 for fic posting. I looked at LJ on wiki, it doesn’t seem like anything SPECIFIC happened in that time, but maybe we all just got tired of the increasing Russian behind the scenes stuff and the ads issues and everything else and we gravitated to the shiny new tumblr toy instead.

The biggest factor, per @zz9pzza, is that they changed how account numbers increment so it goes up by 3 instead of 1. I vaguely remember knowing this was true of work IDs but had forgotten it would apply to user IDs also.

That’s not the entirety of what was going on then though. The LJ exodus was well underway by 2012. My guess is that 2014-16 actually represents when AO3 was getting known enough for viral word of mouth across social groups who didn’t know each other.

2012 shook things up on FFN very badly, and it took most of the year for the initial wave of people who wanted AO3 accounts to be able to get them. I think that was the incident that really kicked off AO3 becoming more known, but it took a while for the full effects to be felt.

The thing about OTW’s beginning is that most of the people involved only knew each other. That first jump of open beta and then yuletide (the arrow for that should really go to the second jump) represent a lot of people whose social circles overlapped heavily. Once those few thousand people joined up, they’d more or less exhausted their groups of fandom friends. Word of mouth wasn’t going to do much after that, at least not very quickly. (And true, that wasn’t everyone on LJ, but it was a hefty chunk of certain circles there.)

It was really AO3 coming to the attention of unconnected randos on FFN or people googling their new fandom and stumbling across AO3 by accident that started word of mouth going outside of specific social circles. That was the other big factor, IMO: having enough time for new canons to come out, canons that didn’t have old fandoms that were already established on a prior site. Free! and Haikyuu!! are good examples, and later Yuri on Ice. The initial wave of AO3 users weren’t that into anime, and anime fandoms stayed way bigger on FFN for a few years. Old fandoms are still way bigger on FFN, but if you look at anime that came out post 2010, they start favoring AO3 more and more.

Also, fandoms that wanted weird formatting! Yes, I’m talking about Homestuck. Once Homestuck fans realized they could do that color coded chat stuff on AO3, they started heading there en masse. At AO3′s current size, one fandom won’t necessarily make that much difference, but a few popular fandoms heavily adopting it really helped spread the word back then.

I joined AO3 in 2011, and it still bothers me that I don’t actually remember how I first came across it xD I can only assume “word of mouth”, but I am pretty sure I was the first person in my friendship group who came across it because I remember giving invites to my boyfriend and close friends, as well as batch requesting invites for a couple of fic writing groups that I was in, sometime between 2012 and 2014. So I’m not sure who it was that I got the “word” from. I read fic in a couple of LJ communities but I didn’t really post; all of my fic publishing was on FF.net. And I remember those communities gradually dying down and going dark around 2010-11, but I didn’t know why until I read about Strikethrough and Boldthrough on Fanlore a few years later.

Looking at my list of fandoms on Fanlore (written closer to the time and apparently when my memory was better!) apparently I was getting into Doctor Who around 2011, so maybe it was that as a new-to-me fandom - I remember reading lots of Eleven/River fanfics on AO3, plus some other fandoms like Lie to Me which I wasn’t “in” firmly enough to make the list.

I do think it was around 2014 when I stopped bothering to cross-post to FF.net, so for about 4 years I was posting across both sites, before posting solely to AO3 from about 2015 onwards.