One odd complaint I’ve seen is that “AO3 hasn’t changed”. First, if something is well designed and working, it shouldn’t need to change constantly (does anyone actually like it when Tumblr makes random changes to things? no.)
Second, even at a cosmetic level, it’s just… not true? Not unless you haven’t been around very long.
AO3 in 2008 – the first decent cap from the Wayback Machine.
AO3 in 2009. Still in closed beta. About 5500 works.
AO3 opens for general signups! 2010. Also, our logo makes its appearance :3
2011 – the tabs appear at the top of the page. Things looking generally more tidy and less squished.
2012 – a more chipper intro page. Things shifted around a bit as well.
2013 – looking a little more classy now. Tweets available on the main page.
2014 – some more subtle changes, including adding the number of works and fandoms in a prominent place. 1.2 million works at that point…
2015 – look how much it’s changed! The categories move to the front page for ease of access. Recent news updates also on display. Nearing 2 million works…
2016 – I admit I picked this one because of the news update about buying a new server “after holding together mail with sticks and strings”. Nearing 2.7 million works.
2017 – cosmetically few changes but look at the works number – 3.3 million works. This was just about a year ago (October 2017) and the current number today is about 4.2 million. You can also see from the news post that this was when we were in the middle of upgrading to HTTPS, which was a difficult but important process.
And here we are at more or less the present – 2018 (September to be precise). I agree fully that if you joined the site in the last 3 years, you might not have seen a lot of cosmetic/interface changes, but that’s because people – volunteers – spent the previous 5-6 years hashing those out to get them into their present state.
More importantly, you might not have noticed the under the hood changes that necessarily come with going up by roughly a million works a year. You might not have noticed the updates to site security that came with HTTPS, and maybe you didn’t even notice the huge changes to searching and filtering over the past few months. I get that it’s easy to say “nothing has changed”. That’s because there’s a team of volunteers who are working hard to make sure pages keep loading quickly, downloads keep working as expected, searches find you what you’re looking for, and downtime is kept to a minimum. Without them, I guarantee you would notice a lot more changes at this rate of growth, and not for the better.
