Anyhow. A question, for those of you who post fanfic: How many versions/sites do you maintain? I have a personal site and a AO3 account, I'm trying to decide if keeping up with my fanfic.net account as well is worth it. The formatting at FF sort of drives me insane.
I pretty much post only on AO3 these days. I left ffnet years ago and have been toying with posting there again, but their formatting and internal organization is still... really frustrating. The site is almost twenty years old now and still very much feels like handling a 90's geocities archive, with that file manager system of theirs. There is exposure there from an audience that doesn't know AO3 (ffnet is the first thing on any search engine when you look for "___ fanfiction" so every new generation of fans will look there first before they branch out to other sites), but they also have the issue of feedback being very flaky there. AO3 at least has the Kudos system, that lets you know people are enjoying your stuff even if they don't have a lot to say about it.
R2 mentioned tumblr, and that's a great place to get quick exposure by posting links to your fics on more permanent archives, but I really don't recommend using it as a permanent home for your writing. Not only there is no reasonable way to search for anything on tumblr, the easy and volatile nature of how people change their usernames at a moment's whim makes it impossible to bookmark/archive/recommend links to fics posted there. I was cleaning dead tumblr links on my delicious account this week, and of about ~400 fics from a certain fandom I was in only one or two years ago, only about 10-15 of them can still be traced back to a working link. Everything else is gone, or impossible to find now. So there's never any sense of legacy there, there's never that same feeling as when you look through a tag on AO3 or ffnet and find a fic from two, eight, ten years ago that is still amazing and rocks your world. Use it for exposure if you want to reach a different audience that doesn't frequent forums, but don't make it your only archive.
All in all, AO3 is still my favorite place to post, but also specially to read fic at. It's really easy to find anything you want, read it the way you want (adaptable font size, custom styles if you can't read on white background, downloadable formats if you want to read on your Kindle or phone later); it's easy to give feedback, bookmark, recommend... and there's never background music or rotating gifs to distract you either (*cough*tumblr*
).