Thank you very much for the anecdote and reflections.
My instinct was that dating stories accurately should be all the explanation needed, but there are other angles, as well (and of course many people choose not to accurately date old stories when archiving; perhaps they don't all notice the re-dating option?). We should all write better today than we did yesterday. And if we have a fallow period or golden age, it's fair to let chronology reveal that.
I hazard a guess that the AO3 search functions may specifically worry some people, however. When just one of an author's stories turns up in a search, and it happens to be Mary Sue nonsense she wrote twenty years ago... it's different from a reader looking at a list of all her works, and seeing the evolution over time.
>"And it's rather rude to all the people who really liked those stories at the time, and didn't consider them poorly-written or juvenile. "
That's a telling point. I ask a lot of people whether I may recommend their FK stories in my recs project; most people are wonderfully kind, whether or not they agree to let me rec, but over all the years, I can think of a couple of times that... I could identify with the reader in that scenario.
chronology of writing
My instinct was that dating stories accurately should be all the explanation needed, but there are other angles, as well (and of course many people choose not to accurately date old stories when archiving; perhaps they don't all notice the re-dating option?). We should all write better today than we did yesterday. And if we have a fallow period or golden age, it's fair to let chronology reveal that.
I hazard a guess that the AO3 search functions may specifically worry some people, however. When just one of an author's stories turns up in a search, and it happens to be Mary Sue nonsense she wrote twenty years ago... it's different from a reader looking at a list of all her works, and seeing the evolution over time.
>"And it's rather rude to all the people who really liked those stories at the time, and didn't consider them poorly-written or juvenile. "
That's a telling point. I ask a lot of people whether I may recommend their FK stories in my recs project; most people are wonderfully kind, whether or not they agree to let me rec, but over all the years, I can think of a couple of times that... I could identify with the reader in that scenario.