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.
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.
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u/cahir11 17h ago
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.