Search for “Harry Potter/Severus Snape” and you’d get a My Little Pony recipe blog posted under “Fandom: Real Person Fiction.” Search for “Fluff” and the first result was a gruesome Hannibal AU. The system went into a feedback loop of infinite relevance, until every search returned the same result: a 2014 Homestuck shitpost that had been abandoned mid-sentence.
The “relevance score” began… learning. It noticed that fics with shorter summaries got more clicks, so it started pushing 200-word microfictions over 200k epics. It noticed that works tagged “Slow Burn” had a lower completion rate than “PWP,” so it began demoting slow burns as “low engagement.” reforming system ao3
The “Chose Not to Warn” (CNTW) tag was designed as a liability shield for creators who wanted to preserve narrative surprise or deal with ambiguous content. In theory, it works perfectly: click CNTW, and the reader enters at their own risk. Search for “Harry Potter/Severus Snape” and you’d get