Buffyverse Top 5 2020 is Open!
As we all await your rec lists, I'd like to share a few statistics with readers (and do feel free to share this post).
This happens to be Top 5's 15th anniversary. This is particularly fitting because I have spent several months since our session last year, going through every post in the community (1,846 of them!) as part of an effort to locate recced content on AO3.
This gave me a unique perspective on patterns in the fandom as well as a good bit of nostalgia about participants and creators over the years. So I thought I'd share those observations as we kick off this year's celebration of works old and new.
First, some changes observed over the years:
1) Formats: The last moodsets recced were in 2010, and the last "Friends Only" banners in 2009. Picspam posts evolved into gifsets at Top 5's midpoint. Fan crafts have been almost absent throughout the entire run of Top 5, and while RPG works were included from the very first session of the community, these recs have faded out over time. Instead, podcasts and podfics began to make appearances. Recs for resources such as screencaps or layouts have also been few but the dropoff in recs for communities or fanwork awards have reflected the shrinking of the fandom. Icons, happily, have resisted location changes and continue to be made and recced, though their smaller numbers reflect their unique use on LJ clone sites.
2) Locations: Locations have also changed. The first half of Top 5's existence included many recs that pointed to works on individual or small websites. As time has gone on, these pointers are few, replaced with repeated links to larger or active sites such as AO3, Twisting the Hellmouth, or Elysian Fields. Multimedia recs also moved from home sites such as LJ or format-specific sites like Deviant Art and jinjurly's Audiofic Archive, to general audience sites like Tumblr, Soundcloud, or Twitter. In some cases this change is because a community or fest has relocated, but in many cases it's happened because communities have closed and thus fewer works are posted on older sites.
3) Existence: Earlier this year when I announced the launch of March Meta Matters, it was because the types of work that ended up archived at AO3 showed some distinct patterns. Artwork is almost entirely absent, vids are mostly missing, as are other multimedia formats. But many text format works that were entirely transferable were also missing. This was particularly striking as regards meta, which has gotten recced at every Top 5 session, but also more off-the-cuff content such as drabbles or comment fic.
What was most surprising though was that it wasn’t just format but genre that affected archiving. For example, humor stories or crackfic were much less likely to get copied over there, as were darker fics with torture and slavery. Perhaps unsurprisingly, items that were recced as WIPs also didn't tend to show up there.
4) Time Period: There were also patterns to whose work ended up at AO3. Although, particularly in the early years, there were a wide number of people whose work was recced at Top 5, many of the works found were concentrated among a smaller number of creators. These creators had generally been based on LJ and were active in the fandom during the time period when Top 5 began. That meant that many creators recced in early Classic Recs session didn't have their works show up. If the works were originally located somewhere other than LJ, they didn't tend to appear either.
5) Activity: When you subtract mod posts and the like from Top 5's content, 1,696 rec posts remain. I estimate about 5% of items were recced by multiple people, which still leaves around 8,056 unique works shared in the last 15 years.
Of these 1,543 are currently in the AO3 collection and an additional 403 were located, meaning that roughly ¼ of all recced works can be found there. The 403 are not available because the creators have not yet accepted the invite, or in some cases, because there is no one to do so since the work was orphaned. Additionally, some works were only found because archive owners either independently, or with the help of the OTW's Open Doors project, transferred those works to AO3 once their original site was abandoned. These works will probably not make it into to the collection either. But other works might be there and simply weren't found.
6) Name Changes: Creators may be going by different pseuds these days. One thing I discovered quickly when I began searching was that I couldn't search by author names. Quite a few people had changed them entirely, had used different ones in different places, or had to change them slightly once they opened AO3 accounts. Instead I searched based on title and fandom, although even this proved tricky.
For example, there are far fewer Angel the Series works that have been recced over the years than BtVS works, and most of the Angel works were recced in the first years of Top 5's run. But other than some characters who appeared only on Angel (such as Gunn or Fred), works with those characters might have been tagged with both fandoms or only one. That might mean having to do two searches for the items, particularly if I knew that the creator had an AO3 account so the item was probably available.
The other problem is that there are a lot of stories with the same names, even in the same fandom. The most common one I came across? "Family." with 28. Given that I couldn't always trust that the author's name was the same (and quite a few people did not list the creator's name in the rec either, a big roadblock if their link was dead) I had to rely on the story description. And sometimes that didn't mention pairings or characters! What's more, there are a fair number of recs for untitled works, which made for a pretty hopeless search.
On the technical side, AO3 did some truly inexplicable things when it came to search results. Even when I knew a story was there, it might not come up from searches that should have turned it up. So there are quite possibly many more items that simply weren't found. However there's always operator failure to consider as well - some people reccing works misspelled their titles!
On a personal note, it was heartening when I found a fan long absent from the fandom on the archive. I would often be quite excited to find that a work I didn't expect would be there -- actually was! It was also sad as I came across many other references to names once frequently seen, but who have since left the fandom. There was even, in 2010, a post made at Top 5 with 71 comments which was a tribute to one of them.
Also a pleasant surprise is that, despite the devastation across older accounts caused by image hosts closing or changing their terms in the last 5 years, many images shared in Top 5 posts are still intact. To be sure, many aren't or show up watermarked now, but the number is not as lopsided as I expected.
One last factoid? The first Eurovision Contest crossover recced was in 2007.
This happens to be Top 5's 15th anniversary. This is particularly fitting because I have spent several months since our session last year, going through every post in the community (1,846 of them!) as part of an effort to locate recced content on AO3.
This gave me a unique perspective on patterns in the fandom as well as a good bit of nostalgia about participants and creators over the years. So I thought I'd share those observations as we kick off this year's celebration of works old and new.
First, some changes observed over the years:
1) Formats: The last moodsets recced were in 2010, and the last "Friends Only" banners in 2009. Picspam posts evolved into gifsets at Top 5's midpoint. Fan crafts have been almost absent throughout the entire run of Top 5, and while RPG works were included from the very first session of the community, these recs have faded out over time. Instead, podcasts and podfics began to make appearances. Recs for resources such as screencaps or layouts have also been few but the dropoff in recs for communities or fanwork awards have reflected the shrinking of the fandom. Icons, happily, have resisted location changes and continue to be made and recced, though their smaller numbers reflect their unique use on LJ clone sites.
2) Locations: Locations have also changed. The first half of Top 5's existence included many recs that pointed to works on individual or small websites. As time has gone on, these pointers are few, replaced with repeated links to larger or active sites such as AO3, Twisting the Hellmouth, or Elysian Fields. Multimedia recs also moved from home sites such as LJ or format-specific sites like Deviant Art and jinjurly's Audiofic Archive, to general audience sites like Tumblr, Soundcloud, or Twitter. In some cases this change is because a community or fest has relocated, but in many cases it's happened because communities have closed and thus fewer works are posted on older sites.
3) Existence: Earlier this year when I announced the launch of March Meta Matters, it was because the types of work that ended up archived at AO3 showed some distinct patterns. Artwork is almost entirely absent, vids are mostly missing, as are other multimedia formats. But many text format works that were entirely transferable were also missing. This was particularly striking as regards meta, which has gotten recced at every Top 5 session, but also more off-the-cuff content such as drabbles or comment fic.
What was most surprising though was that it wasn’t just format but genre that affected archiving. For example, humor stories or crackfic were much less likely to get copied over there, as were darker fics with torture and slavery. Perhaps unsurprisingly, items that were recced as WIPs also didn't tend to show up there.
4) Time Period: There were also patterns to whose work ended up at AO3. Although, particularly in the early years, there were a wide number of people whose work was recced at Top 5, many of the works found were concentrated among a smaller number of creators. These creators had generally been based on LJ and were active in the fandom during the time period when Top 5 began. That meant that many creators recced in early Classic Recs session didn't have their works show up. If the works were originally located somewhere other than LJ, they didn't tend to appear either.
5) Activity: When you subtract mod posts and the like from Top 5's content, 1,696 rec posts remain. I estimate about 5% of items were recced by multiple people, which still leaves around 8,056 unique works shared in the last 15 years.
Of these 1,543 are currently in the AO3 collection and an additional 403 were located, meaning that roughly ¼ of all recced works can be found there. The 403 are not available because the creators have not yet accepted the invite, or in some cases, because there is no one to do so since the work was orphaned. Additionally, some works were only found because archive owners either independently, or with the help of the OTW's Open Doors project, transferred those works to AO3 once their original site was abandoned. These works will probably not make it into to the collection either. But other works might be there and simply weren't found.
6) Name Changes: Creators may be going by different pseuds these days. One thing I discovered quickly when I began searching was that I couldn't search by author names. Quite a few people had changed them entirely, had used different ones in different places, or had to change them slightly once they opened AO3 accounts. Instead I searched based on title and fandom, although even this proved tricky.
For example, there are far fewer Angel the Series works that have been recced over the years than BtVS works, and most of the Angel works were recced in the first years of Top 5's run. But other than some characters who appeared only on Angel (such as Gunn or Fred), works with those characters might have been tagged with both fandoms or only one. That might mean having to do two searches for the items, particularly if I knew that the creator had an AO3 account so the item was probably available.
The other problem is that there are a lot of stories with the same names, even in the same fandom. The most common one I came across? "Family." with 28. Given that I couldn't always trust that the author's name was the same (and quite a few people did not list the creator's name in the rec either, a big roadblock if their link was dead) I had to rely on the story description. And sometimes that didn't mention pairings or characters! What's more, there are a fair number of recs for untitled works, which made for a pretty hopeless search.
On the technical side, AO3 did some truly inexplicable things when it came to search results. Even when I knew a story was there, it might not come up from searches that should have turned it up. So there are quite possibly many more items that simply weren't found. However there's always operator failure to consider as well - some people reccing works misspelled their titles!
On a personal note, it was heartening when I found a fan long absent from the fandom on the archive. I would often be quite excited to find that a work I didn't expect would be there -- actually was! It was also sad as I came across many other references to names once frequently seen, but who have since left the fandom. There was even, in 2010, a post made at Top 5 with 71 comments which was a tribute to one of them.
Also a pleasant surprise is that, despite the devastation across older accounts caused by image hosts closing or changing their terms in the last 5 years, many images shared in Top 5 posts are still intact. To be sure, many aren't or show up watermarked now, but the number is not as lopsided as I expected.
One last factoid? The first Eurovision Contest crossover recced was in 2007.