Huh. I don't see the willful misunderstanding? The old fic archives I was on back in the early 2000s had interchangeable bookmark/favorites features, and if they were public, I always assumed they were for marking your favorites, and if they were private, they were just for you. Other people may have used them differently, but the way I always used, say, ff.net (not the only fic site I used, but obviously the most cross-fandom one) was to go through the fandom till I found a fic I liked, then read that author's favorites, then read the favorites of those authors, etc. etc. That was literally how I found any good fic at all in a given fandom.
I took that experience to AO3 and I do the same thing, and it has served me well. That's just...how I find things that are worth my time on big sites. Find my favorites' favorites.
If there's a mark for later function and bookmark function (as there was when I started using the site so long ago), it seemed to me that one was for my personal use and one was for public use.
However, the recommendation function does complicate all of that, because now there are three ways to mark a fic. If you use the mark for later as it's intended to be used, and then you use the rec feature as it's intended to be used, then...what is just a regular bookmark with no rec for? It certainly becomes confusing!
Or maybe it's all purposefully designed to let people have multiple options for each different kind of "marking."
[eta] I'm getting the feeling that you're mad at me, and I'm not sure why? Did I imply that you shouldn't use the site the way you want to use it? If so, I apologize--that was not my intention and I should have written more carefully. I feel no judgment about it. It just honestly hadn't occurred to me until the past few weeks (when I saw a similar discussion on Tumblr) that people use it differently than I do. I was just trying to explain my reasoning.
no subject
I took that experience to AO3 and I do the same thing, and it has served me well. That's just...how I find things that are worth my time on big sites. Find my favorites' favorites.
If there's a mark for later function and bookmark function (as there was when I started using the site so long ago), it seemed to me that one was for my personal use and one was for public use.
However, the recommendation function does complicate all of that, because now there are three ways to mark a fic. If you use the mark for later as it's intended to be used, and then you use the rec feature as it's intended to be used, then...what is just a regular bookmark with no rec for? It certainly becomes confusing!
Or maybe it's all purposefully designed to let people have multiple options for each different kind of "marking."
[eta] I'm getting the feeling that you're mad at me, and I'm not sure why? Did I imply that you shouldn't use the site the way you want to use it? If so, I apologize--that was not my intention and I should have written more carefully. I feel no judgment about it. It just honestly hadn't occurred to me until the past few weeks (when I saw a similar discussion on Tumblr) that people use it differently than I do. I was just trying to explain my reasoning.