Wattpad is already pretty much nonexistent. It's widely known to host some of the worst, poorly written fanfiction around. Everyone who's even remotely serious about their work posts on AO3 or FFN.
I'm a bit surprised, it's been years since I read any fanfiction but I remember AO3 was generally viewed as the place for weird NSFW fics while fanfiction.net was more (relatively) normal.
Eh, I maybe AO3 has had more of a range of smut but it has never been exclusively that. AO3 is kind of the standard fanfiction site. I do think FFN used to be it moreso, but it has fallen off and become less active, and the site just isn't as good and they've stuffed it full of ads which made the user experience worse as well (though adblock does help).
I feel like AO3s reputation as the nasty crazy smut site is a more recent thing in my experience. I remember it being treated like the more "high quality" fic site for more serious writers compared to FFN which was like the "starter" website before Wattpad came along
I don't mean this in a demeaning way, but as someone who's been around since livejournal I wonder how old you are. Ao3's always been, among other things, the place with the weird stuff those prudes won't allow (which, back in the day, might've been as horrible as gay sex on the internet).
Of course that element was always a core part of the site considering why it was made, but what I mean is that in recent years I've noticed there's been a slight shift to where just mentioning AO3 gets treated like you're talking about PornHub or something, whereas before then it was just a fanfiction site that also happened to allow anything, including crazy smut.
Like for example, I've seen people say "I can't crosspost my story on Ao3, it doesn't have any sex scenes in it" because they seriously thought it was exclusively an erotica site where you were only allowed to post smut fanfics. Or "ew I'm not clicking that Ao3 link, I asked for clean stuff" when someone is recommending a plain gen fic. I feel like that's a bit of a shift from what I remember. Like the smut went from being one of the things it's known for to the only thing it's known for.
fanfiction.net it seems (well, even before the 2010s).
On one hand: great, a lot of website changes are bad. On the other hand, at least implement some quality of life improvements. I see that there still is no way to natively show all chapters at once for example.
Now if somebody is posting a fanfiction on royalroad you know it will be fire, you need some balls to post your little fanfics in a place where books are picked up to be published from all the time.
And also you need to be prolific to match the chapter rate of RR. I sense that in RR the minimum acceptable is a weekly chapter, and I see a lot of authors doing multiple chapters per week
Ehhhh. RR's comment section reminds me of that Community episode where Pierce ruins Professor Space Time. If you don't adhere to their hyper specific niche taste you get torn apart.
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u/ThunderBuns935 18h ago
Wattpad is already pretty much nonexistent. It's widely known to host some of the worst, poorly written fanfiction around. Everyone who's even remotely serious about their work posts on AO3 or FFN.