Thoughts on Fanfiction Sites

#31 · June 22, 2025, 1:20 pm

The explosion of spam bots on ff.net is outrageous, more so the fact that since trying and failing to remove spam PMs in late 2024, the site staff have gone completely silent. Seriously wondering whether they want authors to vote with their feet and move elsewhere.

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#32 · June 23, 2025, 1:35 am

Not only PMs, I have been seeing a lot of spam bot reviews in the ffn of almost all the fics. And definitely there's a subtle shift of authors to other platforms with ffn's policies and non regulations.

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#33 · September 13, 2026, 4:30 am

Quote from DutchSlytherpuff on September 13, 2026, 4:30 am
Very late to this, but I have been on a few fanfiction sites over the years, or sites that also heavily feature fanfiction. The first of these I found was Quotev.com, back in 2014, though I found it through original fiction and not fanfiction and read original fiction on it for years before finding some fanfics. Back then I thought it was the best site in existence, and I have many good memories of staying up and reading on it. I like that it had social features as well back then, making it very easy to connect with writers and even form bonds with them. There were comments per chapter, dms, public and private groups, a newsfeed with updates and announcements you could comment on à la social media ... You could also make journal entries and quizzes and it was overall a great space. Sadly most of these features were very suddenly removed two years ago and I have all but left the site now. It turned out this social aspect was what truly set it apart: the quality of the stories isn't that good, and most authors that do have stories I enjoy are also on/have moved to either Archive of our own or WattPad. What I should say, though, is that their setup feels very intuitive: you create a book, create chapters within the book, can move everything around drag-and-drop-style, can create book covers on the site, etcetera. The statisics are also very extensive and easy to see and understand, and you can see what users viewed your work so you can maybe strike up a conversation or see what other stuff they read. Searching for books, however ... a disaster. They tried introducing tags but it just does not work. It's worse than any of the other sites I've tried. The best way to find new stuff was to get recs and look through people's libraries and see what others liked. This in itself was something that felt like a feature until they made it extremely difficult to do so; now it's just a bug. It has died a little, too. It was definitely more active pre-"update".

The next site I found, around 2016 ish, was fanfiction.net. I found this through fanfiction, of course, to read a specific fanfic. Then I discovered the rest of the site and well ... the rest is history. I still go to fanfiction.net very often, despite its flaws. The search function isn't that good but you can find what you are looking for with some practice. There is also the going through favourites method that carried over from Quotev for me so it feels natural. Also: forums and competitions, another very Quotev-similar experience that I have always appreciated. Though I do really miss the ability to reply to reviews. That is the most annoying part of fanfiction.net in my opinion. Oh, and it does glitch very often and I fear it is dying (participation is certainly dropping, authord are moving, forums are moving to Disocrd ...). And the ads. You need your browsers reading-mode to just be able to read anything these days. And the spam bots have been driving me crazy for years now, too. And still I find myself coming back time and time again to read, post, ineract ... Man, has it really been a decade?

WattPad I found around 2017/2018 ish. I liked it, mostly because some of my favourite authors on Quotev moved to WattPad. But it has never truly been my home. Especially not after they removed the social aspects a few years ago (three or four years?). It's impossible to get any reads now, the monetisation drives me mad, and it just doesn't feel like "my" space anymore. I only really use it to keep up with the stories of some of my favourite authors.

Archive of our own I discovered in maybe late 2019? I was surely on it before the pandemic, though I didn't create an account until December 2020. The search function is pretty great and the tags are really helpful, but I use it mostly as, well, an archive: I archive my stories there, put them up without really thinking about them afterwards. I don't check it often, in part because I feel there isn't much to check. There is no real way to communicate with others. Comments just aren't the same. I also agree with what has been said above: people over-tag things so much that it makes searching by tag very tedious because you need to weed out all the tags that actually have nothing to do with the story because the character is barely mentioned, for example. Limiting it like fanfiction.net is great and forces you to think about what characters are actually important. But I adore the option to download fics though and there are loads of fics on there, and I very much commend what they are doing for fanfiction as a whole.

I used/use a few more sites, but most aren't noteworthy compared to the above. I also have created my own site just for my own fanfic to be posted in case something happens to any of the sites I have my stuff on, and because I was getting tired of these sites limiting what I could do, so I made a neocities account and learnt some code. Now a year and a half in the making and my favourite by far, lol. But then I was able to create it all by myself, so of course I like it. Takes a lot of time, though.

Very late to this, but I have been on a few fanfiction sites over the years, or sites that also heavily feature fanfiction. The first of these I found was Quotev.com, back in 2014, though I found it through original fiction and not fanfiction and read original fiction on it for years before finding some fanfics. Back then I thought it was the best site in existence, and I have many good memories of staying up and reading on it. I like that it had social features as well back then, making it very easy to connect with writers and even form bonds with them. There were comments per chapter, dms, public and private groups, a newsfeed with updates and announcements you could comment on à la social media ... You could also make journal entries and quizzes and it was overall a great space. Sadly most of these features were very suddenly removed two years ago and I have all but left the site now. It turned out this social aspect was what truly set it apart: the quality of the stories isn't that good, and most authors that do have stories I enjoy are also on/have moved to either Archive of our own or WattPad. What I should say, though, is that their setup feels very intuitive: you create a book, create chapters within the book, can move everything around drag-and-drop-style, can create book covers on the site, etcetera. The statisics are also very extensive and easy to see and understand, and you can see what users viewed your work so you can maybe strike up a conversation or see what other stuff they read. Searching for books, however ... a disaster. They tried introducing tags but it just does not work. It's worse than any of the other sites I've tried. The best way to find new stuff was to get recs and look through people's libraries and see what others liked. This in itself was something that felt like a feature until they made it extremely difficult to do so; now it's just a bug. It has died a little, too. It was definitely more active pre-"update".

The next site I found, around 2016 ish, was fanfiction.net. I found this through fanfiction, of course, to read a specific fanfic. Then I discovered the rest of the site and well ... the rest is history. I still go to fanfiction.net very often, despite its flaws. The search function isn't that good but you can find what you are looking for with some practice. There is also the going through favourites method that carried over from Quotev for me so it feels natural. Also: forums and competitions, another very Quotev-similar experience that I have always appreciated. Though I do really miss the ability to reply to reviews. That is the most annoying part of fanfiction.net in my opinion. Oh, and it does glitch very often and I fear it is dying (participation is certainly dropping, authord are moving, forums are moving to Disocrd ...). And the ads. You need your browsers reading-mode to just be able to read anything these days. And the spam bots have been driving me crazy for years now, too. And still I find myself coming back time and time again to read, post, ineract ... Man, has it really been a decade?

WattPad I found around 2017/2018 ish. I liked it, mostly because some of my favourite authors on Quotev moved to WattPad. But it has never truly been my home. Especially not after they removed the social aspects a few years ago (three or four years?). It's impossible to get any reads now, the monetisation drives me mad, and it just doesn't feel like "my" space anymore. I only really use it to keep up with the stories of some of my favourite authors.

Archive of our own I discovered in maybe late 2019? I was surely on it before the pandemic, though I didn't create an account until December 2020. The search function is pretty great and the tags are really helpful, but I use it mostly as, well, an archive: I archive my stories there, put them up without really thinking about them afterwards. I don't check it often, in part because I feel there isn't much to check. There is no real way to communicate with others. Comments just aren't the same. I also agree with what has been said above: people over-tag things so much that it makes searching by tag very tedious because you need to weed out all the tags that actually have nothing to do with the story because the character is barely mentioned, for example. Limiting it like fanfiction.net is great and forces you to think about what characters are actually important. But I adore the option to download fics though and there are loads of fics on there, and I very much commend what they are doing for fanfiction as a whole.

I used/use a few more sites, but most aren't noteworthy compared to the above. I also have created my own site just for my own fanfic to be posted in case something happens to any of the sites I have my stuff on, and because I was getting tired of these sites limiting what I could do, so I made a neocities account and learnt some code. Now a year and a half in the making and my favourite by far, lol. But then I was able to create it all by myself, so of course I like it. Takes a lot of time, though.

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#34 · September 14, 2026, 8:19 pm

@dutchslytherpuff ...I hope you get a lot of positive feedback for your old-fashioned writing style. It made me nostalgic for books I read as a kid.

It's got to take guts to put your work out there...My hat is off to you--to all of you...I could never do it myself. I'm too thin-skinned.

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#35 · September 14, 2026, 8:43 pm

My first (and most likely last) foray into the world of fan fiction was these past few months. I read HP and started searching for Snape and Lily romance fics, which lead me to AO3 and this site. I am pretty myopic in my interests & obsessions, so I never checked out any other sites.

AO3 and this site, however, instead of drawing me deeper into fanfiction, ended up taking me down an entirely different rabbit hole: the mysterious mechanics and driving forces behind fanfic ''hits", fansite traffic, and what the hell are the all the bots doing. I'm really, really naive...I live under a rock...so this was all entirely new to me...

The more I learned and observed, I alternately became morbidly fascinated, disillusioned, depressed...and finally, accepting. This is the reality of the internet.

Now it's time for me to go back to my life as a new mom with a baby and anxiously wonder what things will look like when he grows up...For now mainly I'm just trying to give him more love than Severus Snape prolly got as a kid.

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#36 · September 14, 2026, 9:20 pm

I meant to add...I'll always feel grateful to this site for getting me through a difficult/sad time after I gave birth.

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#37 · September 15, 2026, 1:13 pm

Quote from Shell Cottage on September 14, 2026, 9:20 pm

I meant to add...I'll always feel grateful to this site for getting me through a difficult/sad time after I gave birth.

Congratulations for being mother :)!!

I want to add that this forum is safe haven for snape fans. To escape from Many negative pointview towards snape. Snape is not nice and gentle,but he does not mean a bad person especially one of the worst person in series.

And There are many fanfic stories that is good. I rather have little bit sadness becauss snily fanfic ive ever read is the moment it began by sindie (who became professional author of His own original novel) and I jujust realized my standard of good stories is becoming high after reading it

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#38 · September 17, 2026, 3:38 am

Quote from SnapDragon on September 17, 2026, 3:38 am

Quote from Shell Cottage on September 14, 2026, 8:43 pm

My first (and most likely last) foray into the world of fan fiction was these past few months. I read HP and started searching for Snape and Lily romance fics, which lead me to AO3 and this site. I am pretty myopic in my interests & obsessions, so I never checked out any other sites.

AO3 and this site, however, instead of drawing me deeper into fanfiction, ended up taking me down an entirely different rabbit hole: the mysterious mechanics and driving forces behind fanfic ''hits", fansite traffic, and what the hell are the all the bots doing. I'm really, really naive...I live under a rock...so this was all entirely new to me...

The more I learned and observed, I alternately became morbidly fascinated, disillusioned, depressed...and finally, accepting. This is the reality of the internet.

Now it's time for me to go back to my life as a new mom with a baby and anxiously wonder what things will look like when he grows up...For now mainly I'm just trying to give him more love than Severus Snape prolly got as a kid.

I've been reading and writing fanfic for a little more than a year now. I still have no clue of how hits and kuods works. I've even posted different kinds of fics simultaneously to follow how the numbers grow with different taggings... and my only conlusion is that hits kudos and comments are absolutely no guarantee of good writing, or intreaguing plot. But that is the charm of reading fanfic I guess... You never know what you will come across, some pearls just have a handfull of hits and are discareded at the bottom of the goodwill bin, hidden under other crap forever. Other fics are maybe not so great but once they get momentum they feed themself and continue growing... And then there are the absolute treasures that deserve all praises they get.

Anyway, being a mother is hard, and reading fanfic is the perfect rabbit hole to slip into when you're too tierd to think and have too little time to do anything useful. Take care of yourself, you're doing a great job!

Quote from Shell Cottage on September 14, 2026, 8:43 pm

My first (and most likely last) foray into the world of fan fiction was these past few months. I read HP and started searching for Snape and Lily romance fics, which lead me to AO3 and this site. I am pretty myopic in my interests & obsessions, so I never checked out any other sites.

AO3 and this site, however, instead of drawing me deeper into fanfiction, ended up taking me down an entirely different rabbit hole: the mysterious mechanics and driving forces behind fanfic ''hits", fansite traffic, and what the hell are the all the bots doing. I'm really, really naive...I live under a rock...so this was all entirely new to me...

The more I learned and observed, I alternately became morbidly fascinated, disillusioned, depressed...and finally, accepting. This is the reality of the internet.

Now it's time for me to go back to my life as a new mom with a baby and anxiously wonder what things will look like when he grows up...For now mainly I'm just trying to give him more love than Severus Snape prolly got as a kid.

I've been reading and writing fanfic for a little more than a year now. I still have no clue of how hits and kuods works. I've even posted different kinds of fics simultaneously to follow how the numbers grow with different taggings... and my only conlusion is that hits kudos and comments are absolutely no guarantee of good writing, or intreaguing plot. But that is the charm of reading fanfic I guess... You never know what you will come across, some pearls just have a handfull of hits and are discareded at the bottom of the goodwill bin, hidden under other crap forever. Other fics are maybe not so great but once they get momentum they feed themself and continue growing... And then there are the absolute treasures that deserve all praises they get.

Anyway, being a mother is hard, and reading fanfic is the perfect rabbit hole to slip into when you're too tierd to think and have too little time to do anything useful. Take care of yourself, you're doing a great job!

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#39 · September 17, 2026, 5:51 pm

Quote from Shell Cottage on September 17, 2026, 5:51 pm

Quote from SnapDragon on September 17, 2026, 3:38 am

Quote from Shell Cottage on September 14, 2026, 8:43 pm

My first (and most likely last) foray into the world of fan fiction was these past few months. I read HP and started searching for Snape and Lily romance fics, which lead me to AO3 and this site. I am pretty myopic in my interests & obsessions, so I never checked out any other sites.

AO3 and this site, however, instead of drawing me deeper into fanfiction, ended up taking me down an entirely different rabbit hole: the mysterious mechanics and driving forces behind fanfic ''hits", fansite traffic, and what the hell are the all the bots doing. I'm really, really naive...I live under a rock...so this was all entirely new to me...

The more I learned and observed, I alternately became morbidly fascinated, disillusioned, depressed...and finally, accepting. This is the reality of the internet.

Now it's time for me to go back to my life as a new mom with a baby and anxiously wonder what things will look like when he grows up...For now mainly I'm just trying to give him more love than Severus Snape prolly got as a kid.

I've been reading and writing fanfic for a little more than a year now. I still have no clue of how hits and kuods works. I've even posted different kinds of fics simultaneously to follow how the numbers grow with different taggings... and my only conlusion is that hits kudos and comments are absolutely no guarantee of good writing, or intreaguing plot. But that is the charm of reading fanfic I guess... You never know what you will come across, some pearls just have a handfull of hits and are discareded at the bottom of the goodwill bin, hidden under other crap forever. Other fics are maybe not so great but once they get momentum they feed themself and continue growing... And then there are the absolute treasures that deserve all praises they get.

Anyway, being a mother is hard, and reading fanfic is the perfect rabbit hole to slip into when you're too tierd to think and have too little time to do anything useful. Take care of yourself, you're doing a great job!

thanks, that means a lot : )

edit: I know I said ''last foray" (because I figured I won't have time)...but haha, yeah, who am I kidding, fanfiction is like crack--I'll be back lol

Quote from SnapDragon on September 17, 2026, 3:38 am

Quote from Shell Cottage on September 14, 2026, 8:43 pm

My first (and most likely last) foray into the world of fan fiction was these past few months. I read HP and started searching for Snape and Lily romance fics, which lead me to AO3 and this site. I am pretty myopic in my interests & obsessions, so I never checked out any other sites.

AO3 and this site, however, instead of drawing me deeper into fanfiction, ended up taking me down an entirely different rabbit hole: the mysterious mechanics and driving forces behind fanfic ''hits", fansite traffic, and what the hell are the all the bots doing. I'm really, really naive...I live under a rock...so this was all entirely new to me...

The more I learned and observed, I alternately became morbidly fascinated, disillusioned, depressed...and finally, accepting. This is the reality of the internet.

Now it's time for me to go back to my life as a new mom with a baby and anxiously wonder what things will look like when he grows up...For now mainly I'm just trying to give him more love than Severus Snape prolly got as a kid.

I've been reading and writing fanfic for a little more than a year now. I still have no clue of how hits and kuods works. I've even posted different kinds of fics simultaneously to follow how the numbers grow with different taggings... and my only conlusion is that hits kudos and comments are absolutely no guarantee of good writing, or intreaguing plot. But that is the charm of reading fanfic I guess... You never know what you will come across, some pearls just have a handfull of hits and are discareded at the bottom of the goodwill bin, hidden under other crap forever. Other fics are maybe not so great but once they get momentum they feed themself and continue growing... And then there are the absolute treasures that deserve all praises they get.

Anyway, being a mother is hard, and reading fanfic is the perfect rabbit hole to slip into when you're too tierd to think and have too little time to do anything useful. Take care of yourself, you're doing a great job!

thanks, that means a lot : )

edit: I know I said ''last foray" (because I figured I won't have time)...but haha, yeah, who am I kidding, fanfiction is like crack--I'll be back lol

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#40 · September 30, 2026, 9:41 pm

I've been on Archive or Our Own since they first started.

And I started with Fanfiction net and Live Journal when I started writing fanfiction. I can't seem to upload anything on Fanfiction these days, because it doesn't support what I am using or something like that. There is a New FanFiction Net and it is supposed to have the same database of stories. But I had no luck getting in. Has anyone tried it or know anything about it.

I still go to Life Journal to look for stories in old exchanges. Especially SS/HG and LESS which is Snily.

I know some of the older sites closed down but I saw that these were still up.

https://ashwinder.sycophanthex.com/

Which might be closing down in June 2027.

https://thepetulantpoetess.com/stories

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