Comment by matzab
1 month ago
That's a niche even among people who read fan fiction, which is a niche among people who read long texts online which is a niche among people who read the anglophone internet which is a niche among people who were on the internet when that type of "discourse" was popular which is a niche among people on the internet now.
You can (and probably will) quibble with any one of these but of course this is a niche. Thinking it isn't is commonly what people in a certain bubble end up believing, though.
Harry Potter has 600K works on AO3 and 852K on fanfiction.net (with plenty of overlap, granted). That's #1 on Fanfiction.net, and in the top 5 for AO3. AO3 is #53 globally, Fanfiction.net is #572, and Wattpad is #323 by Semrush. Given all that, calling HP fanfiction niche is pretty funny.
And no, not a member of any cult, just someone who enjoyed a send up of Harry Potter.
Fanfiction.net is a niche. None of my scifi loving, tech friends are aware it exists. And neither did I (or was barely aware or it, anyway), until you just mentioned it. I'm not young either, and I'm more online than the average (I know of Something Awful, Slashdot, 4chan, etc).
A while ago, a friend told me about Harry Potter's Rationality fanfic and he didn't know who Yudkowsky was, he just thought it was some random author doing a parody of HP. LessWrong is of course very niche, my friend didn't have the faintest idea of what LW was.
You people are so quick to correct me that you don't understand my argument: HPMOR is not niche in the world of fanfiction, and this doesn't require fanfiction to not be niche. You're also answering stats with anecdotes, so I think we are done here.
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