I didnt want to derail a review thread, but TheWisetomato made what I thought was a very interesting comment there. Namely:

I certainly do the same thing, but I never thought about it much. It got me thinking... are there any fanfic authors out there whose taste (based on favorites/bookmarks) you like a lot? Like people who you found not only did you enjoy their story... but you found all sorts of other stories through them?

 

I don't really use that method, to be honest. I think I've found some stories through accounts that had favorited them, but I don't judge people on that because it might be something they think of as a guilty pleasure.

 

I can't judge people based on their favorites list, because my FFN favorites list is a fucking wasteland of trash I liked over the course of the last decade and change, and the UI is so obnoxious to use that I simply never bothered to delete anything from it. It's far too much work to clean up the list, so I really don't ever expect anyone to maintain a "proper" favorites list anywhere.

 

I don't judge people by their favorites list. Many people have accounts that over a decade old, maybe nearing two decades at this point. I certainly have stories on my favorites list back from when I was 12 or 13. What I do judge, however, is it they have something like MoR on there...

 

I'll check what kind of stories are on someone's favorite list if their story summary sounds somewhat interesting but also like it could be terrible.

 

I occasionally finish a fic and decide I wanna read more in that fandom and so go into the author's favorites and see if I can find anything worthwhile. It rarely turns up anything good, but I've found a few guilty pleasures and the like, so I keep doing it.

 

I don't look at favorites lists to determine author skill, but I use author skill to determine whether it's worth looking at their favorites list.

 

We had someone do that once upon a time.

Raven's also done some work on a recommendation engine powered by Scryer, so that's something I'm looking forward to.

 

This was how I did the majority of my fanfic browsing - find a fic I enjoyed, and then go through the author's fave list for more. Repeat the process with each fic found on their fave list and its author, and then repeat again, until the swarm of tabs had been depleted.

Being a good author doesn't guarantee good taste, and not being able to write doesn't imply bad, but if an author is writing marriage contract Hermione/Snape that is 90% angst with a much touted Snape/Hermione/Lucius scene....I'm not going to be all that eager to check out their favourites list. Similarly, if a fave list is full of fics of a certain trope and I despise that trope, I'm less likely to give their work a chance.

 

My favourites list is just my way of keeping track of stories (follow results in email spam) so people should definitely not assume the presence of a fic there means I think it's good.

 

I use it more the other way: when I like a story, I peak at the author's favorites list to see if I can find something similar. I used to do it with people putting my story in fav, but then every other time I fell into a heap of trashy Snarry and/or Harry Crow-level trash and I cried wondering exactly what those people liked in my story. I saved myself the existential crisis and stopped caring.

And yeah, all the people using the fav list as something other than a true fav list kinda mess up the process anyway.

 

I don't judge the authors for what's there, but I've been using Favorite Lists as a way to find new stories for years and years. Every time I finish a story, I check out the author's favorites. If they wrote something I enjoyed, higher chances that they like stories that are similar and/or of good quality.