# Archive of Our Own (AO3)

11 Hacker News commenters recommended Archive of Our Own (AO3) and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a free, community-run fiction archive with a strong tagging system and no algorithmic feed; critics object to some hosted content.

## Why people recommend it

- Preserves a large body of fan fiction (3 comments): "AO3 continues the human tradition of retelling stories, and we should celebrate that." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50171226)) "a highly concentrated collection of art created simply out of passion" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50305670)) "is where a tremendous amount of such fiction is archived" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120393))
- Detailed tagging instead of algorithmic feed (2 comments): "AO3 is brilliant, which it is: give people a way to ontologize themselves and the result is amazing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47047073)) "praise be for AO3 having no news feed/algorithm, and instead an incredibly intricate tagging system" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50170315))
- Run by people who care (2 comments): "This is our space to do our thing, precisely because if it was someone else's space sooner or later they, at least ostensibly for good reasons, prioritize something else over our thing and it's destroyed." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46122809)) "It's nice to have a place where the people who run it actually care." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50173591))
- Resists censorship and outside priorities (2 comments): "This is our space to do our thing, precisely because if it was someone else's space sooner or later they, at least ostensibly for good reasons, prioritize something else over our thing and it's destroyed." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46122809)) "It was founded precisely because LiveJournal started censoring sexually explicit fanfiction" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50172450))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [SCP Foundation](https://hackerapproved.com/p/scp-foundation.md): 9 recommend
- [Royal Road](https://hackerapproved.com/p/royal-road.md): 6 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://archiveofourown.org/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Archive of Our Own (AO3)", https://hackerapproved.com/p/archive-of-our-own/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).