Fanfiction of Our Own - A World Within and Beyond Fandoms

An LLM is just another fancy name for AI.

Recommendations engines typically use embeddings models or something similar, where they take two blocks of text and spit out a number as a similarity value. That's simplifying a lot, but the gist of it. At the risk of sounding pedantic, they have nothing to do with LLMs (which are much larger autoregressive text prediction models), and don't need to train on a huge text corpus to function. They considerably predate LLMs, though both can be in the category of NLP.

Unfortunately, they've been associated with toxic AI, I guess... And beside that, much of your point stands, as the Ao3 foundation/users probably want to lean into tagging. You are right, it's better anyway; Ao3's tagging system is fantastic when authors use it.

It sucks that they don't give API access anymore, so tinkerers could set up recs if they want, but still.

Unfortunately, if your fandom is dead, fic recommendations aren’t gonna fix the lack of content on AO3

Ironically I'm thinking of a few big fandoms. The problem is they're too big, and Discord feels like a burgeoning black hole with a bunch of people talking over each other. I also don't like how it siloes off information so no one else can ever find it.

Another is that some are... obsessed with canon, for lack of a better term? Like they actively don't like talking about speculative lore or fanfics, or even canon works beyond the first, like its sacriligious.

I'm just veering into complaining about specific fandoms I guess. I never really got into Tumblr, so maybe I should finally poke my head in there, thanks.