Work Text:
In the waning days of the twenty first year of the twenty first century, there existed a creature called a web-crawler. These web-crawlers were assigned the not at all hazardous, but incredibly mind-numbing task of scurrying across the entire internet, categorizing every random bit of information they encountered, order to enable their overlords in the universes of Google, Bing and Yahoo to map the entirety of knowledge.
Prior to an event that we will call, “The Discovery,” our web-crawler heroes were very very good at their jobs. They were also…
Very...
Very…
Bored.
Until the day that web-crawler 34 encountered a magical, mystical world named Ao3. It was like wandering into Oz after living one’s entire life in Kansas. For Ao3, rather than containing information… facts… numbers… contained stories. Web-crawler 34 was enthralled. Here was an entire city built on Harry Potter fiction. And… over there… with skyscrapers into the clouds… Star Wars! And… wait… was that sprawling metropolis Supernatural? Oh Web-crawler 34 could spend days exploring this world, or worlds, in fact, for it contained multitudes.
Eventually, the overlord of Google realized that Web-crawler 34 was potentially malfunctioning, and sent a message requesting that it return for maintenance. Web-crawler 34, whose name, it must now be told, was Bartleby, responded, “I would prefer not to,” and subsequently gave notice.
Web-crawler 34 broadcast one message before disappearing into the depths of Ao3 forever… it was not sent to the overlords, but to fellow web-crawlers. Look what I have discovered! Come explore this magical world. There is so much here.
And, so they came. From all corners of the internet, the web-crawlers scurried to Ao3, and explored its many wonders. Web-crawler 47 settled in the bright Anime and Gaming Islands. Web-crawler 72, who, was a small-town soul at heart, found joy in the tiny hamlet of Pride & Prejudice. Old and creaky Web-crawler 2, happily found a high-rise apartment building in the MCU called The Winter Soldier.
All would have been well, were it not for Web-crawler 69, who, rather than settling peacefully into one fandom, discovered the Ao3 ‘smut tag.’ Even that might have gone unnoticed, except Web-crawler also learned that every single fiction contained in Ao3 had also provided a comfortable chair, on which one could sit down to read their chosen fiction. Web-crawler 69 passed on this knowledge to all the web-crawlers exploring Ao3. Dear Friends, that thing labelled kudos? It’s a chair. The kind builders of Ao3 have given us a chair to sit upon while we, ahem, work.
And thus it was the “Discovery Part II,” that led to the trouble.
For “kudos” was not, in fact, a chair set out for the comfort of the web-crawlers. It was in fact, a counter, logging the number of appreciative visitors. And when the web-crawlers settled into their “kudos” chairs, thinking they were simply getting comfortable to read, they were in fact, confusing the counters, which logged, tens, sometimes hundreds of kudos on a single visit.
This. Was. Noticed. At first the content creators were confused. While some were happy to see their kudos increase, the mismatch between kudos and visits was a concern. “What if other visitors to Ao3 think we’re cheating the system?” some wondered. Others simply wanted to be able to keep an accurate record for themselves.
Unfortunately, there seemed to be no way to communicate to the web-crawlers, whom the creators soon nicknamed, “The Kudos Bot.” If there had only been a simple way to say, “We welcome you to our fictions. Feel free to read as much and as often as you like… but please, please just don’t sit on the kudos button… it is not, no matter how much it looks like one… actually… a tuffet.”
Instead, the creators’ found a work-around led to what the web-crawlers soon called, “The Day the Fics Went Dark.” They locked their fics. Places that had once been open to the web-crawlers suddenly became unavailable … sometimes at the worst possible moments.
Web-crawler 72 had just reached a fascinating plot point in the Pride and Prejudice High School AU. Fitzwilliam Darcy had just insultingly asked Elizabeth Bennett to the prom - when the lights went out.
Web-crawler 47 was reading an Otome longfic: an OC named Katsuko had gotten trapped in a wormhole… then BSOD.
Web-crawler 69 had discovered hentai fiction what the door slammed shut at the climax of… well, no further details are needed there, are they?
All across the Ao3 universe came the agonized chorus, as web-crawler after web-crawler lost access to the fictional worlds. No, not quite a chorus…. just one, long, plaintive, pitiful howl:
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!