I'm a Birdplaaane

Shit like the Great Purges and the Strikethrough of Livejournal eventually led to fans banding together to create A03, which I would have absolutely KILLED for when I was 15.

Back up ao3 was created by fans?

It’s…right on the main page. 

I love this because I will bet you that persefv has read that bit we are all so inundated with hyperbole and advertising that says that the consumer is somehow in charge of whatever product they are shilling that we all just assumed this was another sales tactic.

But we’re not even… selling anything…  *quiet sobs*

No ads. No subscriptions. No data selling.

We are the definition of “what it says on the tin.”

Is there any way to spread this info? 

THE OTW WAS CREATED BY FANS SO WE’D HAVE AN ARCHIVE THAT WASN’T SUBJECT TO CORPORATE REVIEW. 

Nonprofit, so that nobody could ever say, “this isn’t making enough money; it’s getting shut down.” (See: Geocities, Quizilla, Figment, G+.) With lawyers involved and a firm awareness of the legalities of fanfic, so nobody would decide “we’ve gotten a nasty letter from a megacorporation with lawyers, so we’re hiding because we can’t afford to face a lawsuit. (Jedi Hurtaholics, Trevizo’s Millennium site.) With teams, so that an argument between co-mods didn’t result in the destruction of a whole archive. (Gryffindor Tower, Detention.)

AO3 IS OUR SITE.

It is by fans, for fans. Fans do all the coding. All the legal paperwork. All the abuse/tos violation complaints. Fans make all the choices about policies. Fans decide how to run the fundraisers. Fans write the blog posts. All the volunteer staff are fans; all the people who train them are fans. Fans wrangle all the tags. 

(And the other OTW projects, too. Fans manage the entries at Fanlore. Fans run the Open Doors project. Fans publish Transformative Works and Cultures.)

EVERYONE WORKING FOR THE OTW LOVES FANDOM. Wants it to survive. Wants it to be awesome for everyone.

(Knows that it can’t be awesome for everyone; some approaches to fandom just clash hard. But they strive to minimize those clashes as much as possible, because they love fandom.) 

AO3 is not some company that decided, “we’ll make a site for fanfic and then…” I don’t know what people are thinking is the reason. Money? Data harvesting? Tax shelter? Amusement and pity?

Nope; AO3 was fans saying, “Livejournal sucks; we’re tired of this fucked-up ‘rebuild every three years’ garbage; WE NEED TO OWN THE DAMN SERVERS.”

That’s the “of our own” part of the name. OTW isn’t a “them” running the site “for us.” It’s “us” making places for “us” to share what we love with others of “us.” 

i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes

it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!

although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.

you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.

this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.

but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.

eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.

THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.

AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.

LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.

IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.

I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics.  They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross.  But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!”  Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it.  So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that?  No.

In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.

Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality.  And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.

Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?

1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse.  It was not meant to titillate or arouse.  It was meant to horrify.  It was seldom explicit.

2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.

3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half.  When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia.  Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex.  And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.

Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we?  I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too.  But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:

1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.

2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.

3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).

Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like.  And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them.  No, this was step one on a moral crusade.  If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands.  This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted.  It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit.  But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality.  Then anything with teen sexuality.  Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con.  Then whatever is next on their list.  It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.

Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service.  You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call).  You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising.  And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids.  Other than that?  It’s fair game.  You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge.  There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.

We’ve been down that road.  It doesn’t lead anywhere good.

Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.

During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.

If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.

reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.

AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.

This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.

^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary

Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received. 

tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.

This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.

And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).

You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!

I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!

People were terrified during Strikethrough.  I was there.  Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down.  People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ.  Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread.  Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.  

LJ was, for many people, central.  

It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.  

Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary.  People didn’t know who was next.  Every day, the list of stricken journals grew.  And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content.  Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest.  It was a bad time.

You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable.  Tagging is a thing.  And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience.  It is not right to expect it to be curated for you.  And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.

I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that.  If you get triggered, that’s upsetting.  That could be considered harm.  And I have sympathy for that.  I do.

I have run across fic that triggered me.  I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people.  Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this.  So I’ve been blindsided by it before.  And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.

That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation.  It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.

That was not the fault of the site!  The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.

That was not even my fault!  It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.

When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.

Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit.  My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship.  I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate.  She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That?  He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy.  (She was lucky to escape.  I have immense respect for her.)  And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it.  And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.

“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.

But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.

“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves.  You should learn to say those things!  It will help you!

But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.

And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected.  I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops.  I couldn’t talk about it before that.  Couldn’t!  And it was over 20 years ago!

I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic.  I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.

All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.

Fine, I don’t like it either!

But that fucked up shit?  That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today.  You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe.  It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on.  It doesn’t make me feel safe now.  I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was.  It actually makes it worse.

Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like.  It’s a skill, you get better with practice.  Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.

Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it.  Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids.  The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims.  The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim.  A g a i n.  

The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people.  The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault.   (It worked!  The neighborhood rallied!  He was arrested for violating parole!)

Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being.  Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it.  And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.

I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.

An author is not a perpetrator.  Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.

I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.

Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.

If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.

Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.

When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.

Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.

How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.

Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.

And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.

At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.

Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.

One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.

I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.

Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.

So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.

I like this last addition.

When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)

We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.

So we did.

Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.  

This thread keeps getting better.

It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over

Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y'all, so y'all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.

You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.

Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.

Also… maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kids’ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.

Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And it’s still up to this day, though it hasn’t been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.

Whooo, I guess it’s my turn to take a shot at this.

I’m a nold. I’m in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the “feminist sex wars”.  If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:

Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights by Nadine Strossen

A preview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though it’s not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!

I haven’t read “Defending Pornography” for a while – I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidth’s payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself – but here’s a quick summary, as I remember it.

1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like “The Joy of Gay Sex”, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense tbh.)

2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.

3. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding all their shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores.  Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men. 

Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.

Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) you’d go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases. Read more about their struggles.

(You know what businesses weren’t impacted and didn’t have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)

The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.

Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable. They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.

Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and what’s happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.

This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.

History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.

(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)

Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didn’t have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.

He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyone got them in the 19th century, you couldn’t walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.

There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like ‘yeah no condoms are not a crime,’ but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.

You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.

Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.

It’s been touched on a little before but really it’s hard to explain just how confusing and scary the crackdowns were. I was only a reader on FanFiction when the crackdown came but it felt like I was standing in a coal mine full of canaries. Canaries that were either silent or /screaming/.

Every where you looked, authors where posting warnings about how x stories were getting deleted. All of the warnings feeling rushing, panicked, most of them including notes about how they didn’t know how long they had before their warnings were taken down or they were deleted. It felt a bit like all the stars going out, everything just dying around you. Like a stampede of people had fled from some oncoming unnamed horror leaving silence in their wake. Finding AO3 later on was like finding a safe haven in a world gone mad.

Also FanFiction doesn’t really encourage socialisation aside from authors notes to readers on their chapters or homepage. Meanwhile all the warnings of the crackdown were really rushed and vague. So, as a not very sociable reader, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on at the time of the crack down and the confusion and uncertainty was almost the scariest part of the whole thing. (Not knowing if the authors should come back and if fanfics were gone for good was scarier.) It’s only years later, reading fanfic history posts that I’ve started to piece together what happened.

Also an interesting point was that during the crack down all I ever heard about was /gay/ stories being deleted. Perhaps this was just because I was reading gay stories but I didn’t even realise it was mature stories in general that was supposedly the aim of the crack down until much later.

Hot damn, this post just keeps going!

I very much second the rec about the feminist sex wars. Understand those, and you’ll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblr’s purity crusade.

If you haven’t been TOSsed you really don’t get it, imo.

If you haven’t spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really don’t get it, imo.

Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going “I really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.”

A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we don’t remember our past, remember why AO3 and many fandom spaces work the way they do now, we will be condemned to repeat it.

Please do not let us return to the dark ages of fear, censorship, and oppression in fandom.

Just to add my voice to the historical context here, but I was one of the main people blogging about the LJ strike through back in the day while it was all happening. I weirdly ended up being a centralized hub (hell, my LJ is even cited as a source on Fanlore, if you can believe it).

If you want a pretty good idea about the chaos and panic and how quickly it spun out of control, you can start with my post here, and then follow all of the links.

By the way, to this day, I was the only one in fandom who managed to get any kind of response out of the “Warriors for Justice,” a right-wing, Christian supremacist group who basically called anyone they didn’t like “pedos.” Their real main targets were LGBTQA. Pedophilia was really just a handy excuse.

Read and learn, young ‘uns. Not everything that squicks you out, not everything that makes you uncomfortable, is inherently bad. It’s your right to be squicked, it’s your right to be uncomfortable. But it’s also your responsibility to curate your own experience. Targeting people because you don’t like their fannish output puts you on the same side as the “Warriors for Justice.” You wind up hurting a lot of innocent people who never did anything to anyone outside of a fictional space.

And if that doesn’t convince you, do one thing for me. Look at the person to your virtual right. Look to the person on your virtual left. Then look in the mirror. Then realize this one simple fact:  sooner or later when you get that perfectly sterile and safe online experience you crave, someone, somewhere, is going to decide that it’s not sterile or safe enough. And that means that one of you, either the person on your right or the person on your left or even the person looking at you from the mirror is going to find themselves out in the cold.

It happens every single time. Every. Time.

Now I’m not saying that Tumblr wasn’t allowing some fucked up shit, but there were ways to handle it properly. THIS IS NOT HANDLING IT PROPERLY.

It’s the beginning of the end, my Chili Babies. I’ve been in this movie before (hell, I had a significant supporting role in the previous movie). Tumblr will tick-tock along for awhile,but I guarantee people are feverishly looking for the next fandom thing beacuse Tumblr has now proven to be unsafe.

At least fanfic writers have AO3 at least. Right now it’s the fanartists who are pretty much screwed until the next new thing comes along.

I want to add as someone who was also there that a lot of unrelated malevolent actors poured into the strike through situation when it went down. *chan people showed up because there were queer folk and women to harass who did weird stuff that were supposed to be ashamed of. While all this stuff was going on between fandom and LJ a whole bunch of people were being brutally harassed, threatened, mocked, posted about on other sites, and being told to self harm. It was traumatic as shit and completely altered my way of being and feeling safe on the internet. About 90% of what happened during strike through was designed to cause actual harm to people just like you … and it did.

nothing pisses me off more than when i see a fic on ao3 talking about reach. "this ship isn't here but i added them for reach" "this fandom tag isn't necessary but i'm adding it for reach" "reposting for reach" STOP IT!!!! this is not tiktok this is not twitter this is an ARCHIVE this is not how it works!!!

i will not deal!!!! that is not how any of this works!!!!

if you see people doing this shit, report it. its against the terms of service.

genuinely. copy the link to the fic or series, and then scroll down to the bottom of the page:

click on policy questions & abuse reports which takes you to this page:

if you scroll down, youll be able to report the fic right there but you can also check for yourself that its against ToS

all you need to do is explain that theyre deliberately mistagging things which is just not a thing on ao3 because its an archive.

by posting your fic there, ao3, has the right to manually recategorise tags. its in the ToS:

you cant deliberately mistag stuff on ao3; it is an archive. you cant tag for reach, and this is likely gonna get pat tag wranglers because they deal mostly with form not content of tags and if theyre tagging for reach, its gonna be the more popular tags.

so report the fuck out of them for it. most likely, their fic will just have tags adjusted and their account will be fine.

and if they keep doing it and get suspended for it, its their own damn fault.

also thats not even getting into the fact that mistagging fics is kinda antithetical to their goal of reaching more people because youre not reaching the people who want to read your fic?

Okay fact check: It's not necessarily against the TOS to "mistag".

As the TOS FAQ explains:

What if a work has an incorrect category, relationship, character, or additional tag?

The Policy & Abuse committee will only evaluate the accuracy of tags in mandatory fields. We will not add, edit, or remove incorrect category, relationship, character, or additional tags. Our resources are limited and it would be challenging to impartially and fairly establish or enforce accuracy rules for these types of tags. However, our general policies against harassment and spam apply to all tags, as they do to any content posted on AO3.

Please only report wrong tags for Fandoms, Ratings, and Warnings fields. And even then, it is only under very select circumstances that the Policy and Abuse committee will require a change. I encourage you to review the Ratings and Warnings and Other Tags sections of the TOS FAQ before submitting the complaint.

Policy and Abuse is a small committee and they have a lot of tickets to get through. Don't waste time with reports that are not violations of the TOS.

looking for fics about your favorite character on ao3 be like:

dont care

dont care

dont care

what the actual fuck

dont care

ooh that sounds- what the fuck

unfinished

don't care

the best fic ive ever read in my life. this absolutely ruined me and ill never be the same ever again

dont care

Reblogging for the absolute brutal accuracy of this comment

And then you're like "fuck it, I'll make my own" and once you've done that you toss it into the goodwill bin to be someone else's prada or container of human teeth

And sometimes you gotta go with the container of human teeth purely out of morbid curiosity.

The container of human teeth is what I was looking for specifically. If you must know.

RIP Miss Lemon from Agatha Christie's Poirot, you would have loved Wikipedia.

AND ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN.

The fic is entirely peripheral in her mind. She's infatuated with the tagging system.

FEAR TAG WRANGLER FELICITY!

LMAO, that's the exact scene I was thinking of!

@gement

have you ever read a fanfic so good that you wanted to write a fanfic about that fanfic, but was too shy / too intimidated to ask for the author’s permission and too afraid that your writing wouldn’t be half as good as theirs and that it would be an insult to their work that was basically a literal masterpiece, so you just sat there fantasizing about their work and how beautiful it was and how you wished you could just eat it and how you wished canon could write your blorbos half as good as this writer did and how you just wanted to cry because you just loved that fic so much????

reblog if you are always ok with someone writing fanfic of your fanfic

My script for the support form:

“Hi! I noticed the "character a loves character c!!" tag is a synonym of "Character A/Character B." I believe it should be a synonym of "Character A/Character C" instead.

Thanks for all you do!”

Keep it sweet and simple, and don't stress too much! Feel free to add more information if it's relevant (maybe "Character C" is "Character B, Jr," and people often get them confused because of the similar name). But you don't need to write a five point essay.

On occasion, they will fix bigger things if they can and if there's a need! Big shoutout to the poor wrangler who successfully untangled all the "Daddy Deadpool" tags from the canonical "Parent Wade Wilson" 😅😅😅

From my tag wrangler friends, they love getting this kind of feedback so they can nerd out and fix it!

The true AO3 experience is trying to remember a very specific fic you read some time between 2013 and 2019 but you can only remember two of the characters, a vague idea of the plot outside of one specific scene, and you have no clue what the tags could have been.

[Image description in Alt Text.] [ID: Red, block text on a transparent background. The text reads: ‘Fanfic Author PSA’. The dark red Archive of Our Own logo is depicted on either side of the lettering. End ID.]

Many people who read fanfiction also require the assistance of text-to-speech or audio description software. Blind and visually impaired people are very much present in the fanfiction and fandom communities, but are so frequently disregarded or forgotten about.

If you are writing a work and like to utilise paragraph breaks, please do not use combinations such as the following:

[Image description in Alt Text. I have used an image to avoid what I will describe below.] [ID: Four examples of punctuation and icons that are disruptive when used as line breakers. The first line is a series of O letters. The second is a series of asterisks. The third is a series of dots, circles and stars. The last is a series of tildes. End ID.]

The software will read these combinations out loud letter for letter or symbol for symbol. For example; it would read to the user the word ‘asterisk’ six times in a row, or the word ‘tilde’ five times in a row.

This is unpleasant, confusing and often irritating for blind or visually impaired readers. If you would like a similar sample of what it would sound like, enter one of the above combinations into Google Translate and use the audio button.

Here is a post by @ao3commentoftheday​ that also details this difficulty and provides links to downloadable audio transcribers and fanfiction audio readers. These are also helpful for if you simply wish to listen to fanfiction but can’t find a podfic of the work.

Screen Reader Friendly and Screen Reader Compatible are AO3 tags that help visually impaired readers track and access fanfiction that is consciously created with their needs in mind. Please consider adding these tags to your works in order to expand the range of works that visually impaired readers can safely and confidently access.

Alternatives to these are:

Reminder: ‘liking’ this post does not spread awareness.

ao3′s orphaning option is cool and a good idea but mostly very fucking funny. i posted this work for fun when i was younger and i still want people to be able to come back to it if they liked it, but now im an adult professional and i dont want it attached to my name. whats the word for that? umm, anonymously posting? no. i want something that indicates i murdered this story’s parents 

technically the story’s parents faked their own death and disappeared to go have an office job, and that’s even funnier

Evergreen reminder: Change of ownership = backup your works/favorites

Because you never know what changes to the ToS the new owners will implement.

Good luck.

Good fucking luck indeed.

To elaborate now that I’m at a computer: this type of purchase often means a content purge is coming.  I don’t know enough about Naver to know whether they’re the type of company that will give people a warning and allow them time to save their works, or if Wattpad users will just wake up one morning to a “This content has been deleted” notice, or what, but I strongly suspect changes will be coming.  Historically, the types of content that are likely to be targeted are: 

1. RPF

2.  Any of the big ‘controversial’ subjects (underage, rape, incest, abuse, etc.)

3. Sexual content of all kinds but especially m/m

So to summarize: if you write or read any of those kinds of things, please back up your works.  AO3 is a good place to back things up, but even saving to your own computer is better than the pain of just having your works disappear into the void.

Learn from the past - please start backing your Wattpad works up now.  I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.

Also a good time to finish any Wattpad analysis/fandom stats you’ve been working on before things change :-/

(I’m far more concerned about the impact on authors and readers, of course… Far bigger impact. But if any acafans, data scientists, or hobbyists like me are in the midst of analyzing Wattpad, purges will affect that, too.)

If you want to migrate your works to AO3 and are waiting for an account, I have some invite codes. (As of 1/20/20.) DM if you want one.

People keep requesting to add my fic to collections and I don’t know if they know this, and I don’t know if people who allow their own stories know this, but once you add your story to a collection, the owner of the collection can perform fuckery with your story.

Like, I’m REALLY glad that collections exist, and I’ve put my work into some collections when I made those things specifically for those collectuons. Collections are a useful tool for things like bangs, where the stories need to be hidden until the reveal….. but that also means that the person in charge has the ability to hide your works from the public. Like, without you agreeing, because you already “agreed” to that by submitting to the collection. Which means works you previously had available suddenly disappear from where people can find them.

What I’m saying is please stop random requests to random people to be in your random collections. I know you probably don’t have ill intentions, but there’s no way to tell. And if you’re getting requests to be part of random collections, please be aware that if you approve them, you won’t be the only one in control of some elements of your posted stories, including whether or not they “exist” to the average reader. If they mark the collection as “unrevealed,” you story stops being accessible to the public. And they have the option to mark the collection “anonymous” which I’m pretty sure turns the author from being You to being Anonymous.

And I say all of this because I have seen this happen to people. I have had friends whose stories “disappeared” because they approved a random collection invite and the collection owner turned everything “unrevealed” (likely without even knowing or understanding that it would hide it for EVERYONE not just hide the collection so no one would see they had it, it’s not like a private bookmark). And while I haven’t seen anyone do this maliciously (at least none I can prove) I can see where it could be USED maliciously. So please, just be careful out there.

I wish AO3 had a way to auto decline collection invites- they gave us a way to auto-accept, so I don’t understand why the opposite isn’t true. If I wanted my story to be part of a collection, I’d submit it myself.

Uhh okay, so someone replied to this that they didn’t know how to remove a work from a collection. 

Copy and past the following link, and where it says “yourusernamehere” type in your AO3 pseud.

https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourusernamehere/collection_items?approved=true

This should take you to a page where your works that have been approved for collections resides. You can remove your works from collections by selecting “rejected” instead from the drop down menus.

If the direct link doesn’t work: go to your AO3 dashboard, click “collections” on the side bar, click “manage collected items” button at the top right, click “approved” button at the top right, and you’ll be at the right page to remove your works from collections.

hey! so from someone who tried her hand at making a collection to collect fics centered around a specific theme, I found out a super cool thing! you can create collections of bookmarks.

want to add a fic you love to that super-specific collection you made for Fics With Werewolves Set In London? bookmark it and add the bookmark to your collection! 

no fuss, no muss, no permission required from the author (since it’s YOUR bookmark), no chance of fucking up their fic (since it’s YOUR bookmark), presto chango, you have a collection that rocks but doesn’t rock a poor fic writer’s boat!

Thank you for this info, this is very valuable (and relieving) knowledge.

So please, as readers, this is a MUCH BETTER option!!

Drat, I hadn’t thought about the weaponized hiding option. It’s a shame, because I’d love to make it more common to see collection links on works which lead to finding of similar fics. But not at the expense of this exploit issue (which would be tricky to shut off without borking that anonymous and hidden functionality for things like Yuletide).

Update!

kedreeva said: @gement​ Shortly after this post went around, AO3 did implement a change so that folks get notified if their previously-available work gets made anon or hidden.

How a racism on AO3 convo went down in 2018

I dug up a conversation from May 2018 about AO3′s racism problem and how it might be dealth with. 

This is kind of a lot, so I’ll give you an abbreviated version:

The OP in the thread is Stitch, who talks about the AO3 “censorship” and “Make your own space” debate (read the whole thing).

I respond, mentioning that if AO3 refuses to remove racist fanwork, that work should have a warning, since AO3 prides itself in giving readers informend consent via its warning/tag system.

Author N.K. Jemison(!) replied that she was 100% in favor of a content racism warning.

Now that a major science fiction author has chimed in, someone involved with AO3 appears (a guy who ran for AO3 Board of Directors in 2016, posting under the name zz9pzza). zz9pzza posts an answer he gave to a question on racsim on the platform during an election Q&A. It begins with “As a white, middle aged male,” and ends with some platitudes like “AO3 is for everyone” and “Creators have no responsibility to make the world better, but they do have the opportunity.”

I respond saying AO3 isn’t for everyone. Since he was coming off like he might have some pull, I tell him that tagging racist fics is needed, and that to reduce abuse, there will need to be a review panel to decide whether a flagged fic gets tagged, with the caveat that the panel has to be ALL fans of color, primarily Black fans.

zz9pzza doesn’t address the idea of an all FOC review panel. Instead, he suggests that the abuse team responds to racism reports by … changing the warning on the fic from “No Archive Warnings Apply” to “Chooses Not To Use Archive Warnings,” and deadass asks me if that would be sufficient.

It took me a bit to get it, so here’s the reasoning: If a fic says no archive warnings apply, you should be safe from encountering any of the things AO3 has warnings in place for: graphic depictions of violence, major character death, rape/non-con, and underage sex. If it says “Chooses Not To Use Archive Warnings,” you are basically entering at your own risk and could encounter anything. So, by this logic, changing the status should be considered a warning for racist content. Even though racism isn’s one of the archive warnings to begin with.

Anyway, I didn’t dignify that with an answer, but I did link to a case where a fic was deleted because it satirized fandom racism and said: “If people see racism content warnings – not deletions, warnings – as taking away their right to be free on AO3, if the idea of Black fans having a say in what content on AO3 is racist is seen as a step too far, there’s a racism problem.”

Then someone else jumps in to ask why racsim, because of course.

If you want to get really deep into this whole coversation, it went off into all different directions, not just this one thread. Ultimately someone did reach out to discuss trying to do something. They sent me and Stitch a hugely long wall of text email (which I should still have somewhere) basically laying out how incredibly complicated it would be to even get started. It was, basically, a roadblock. 

A huge part of the problem with fandom is its adherence to revisionist history.

Everyone LOVES citing LJ Strikethrough as the origin of Ao3 and why its so crucial, but everyone either conveniently forgets or else doesn’t even know, that fandom did NOT up and abandon LJ en masse after Strikethrough. Not even CLOSE. The second it was over, fandom stuck around in LARGE quantities for a good TWO YEARS AFTER IT…..including once Ao3 existed.

The breaking point for fandom? The point where the MASS exodus began?

Was with the Racefail debacle on LJ. When fans of color began speaking out in large numbers to fandom AND professional sf/f writers on the subject of racism in fantasy and sci-fi works, both published and fanfic.

THAT was when (white) fans began migrating to Ao3 in HUGE numbers…..because Ao3 promised protection from criticism of ALL kinds.

Including condemnations of racism in a work.

Protection against racism-critical conversation has ALWAYS been part and parcel of Ao3′s appeal to fandom, from the beginning.

And anyone who says otherwise either doesn’t know THEIR fandom history, or is lying about it.

Racefail was HUGELY impactful on the course fandom took over the last decade, and that impact was fandom’s commitment to avoiding acknowledging it at all costs.

This really should be more acknowledged as a reason AO3 blew up.

Hmm. Racefail took place from approximately Jan-May 2009, and AO3 didn’t enter open beta until Nov 2009. So I don’t really see how people could have begun a mass exodus from LJ to AO3 during Racefail, unless they waited a few months? 

Yeah, I just took a look at my AO3 account creation date and it’s Nov. 2009. I don’t think I was one of the earliest adopters but I jumped on about as soon as it was possible to do so. (I had remembered it being slightly earlier than this, but not a whole lot.) Racefail was early 2009. 

Maybe people talking so much about Strikethrough in the context of AO3 makes everyone remember AO3 being open much earlier than it was? But it had to be built. The early discussions happened in 2007; the archive itself didn’t go live ‘til a couple of years later. 

Also - and I mean, this isn’t meant to speak to the entire question of whether AO3 culture as a whole is hostile to POC fandom (of course it is, it has to be, the culture in general is), but I was there for Racefail and it wasn’t an issue of Livejournal deleting content for being racist. This was strictly a thing that was happening between fans. LJ didn’t care. Leaving LJ for AO3 for that reason alone made no sense under those circumstances, because  LJ actually offered stronger controls (locking posts, blocking people, screening or disallowing comments) to avoid the comment-based dogpiling that reactionary fans were worried about, and therefore, the way I remember it, LJ was where reactionary fandom tended to stay. Going to AO3 to get away from the more SJ-minded faction of fandom didn’t really make sense because so many of the early AO3 adopters were those people, and were very active there. 

This seems to be framing AO3 as the primary destination for fandom leaving LJ, and I’m pretty sure that’s not what happened? AO3 isn’t a social site like Livejournal or Dreamwidth or, and this is the one I’m wondering where it fits into the phase of fannish history under discussion, Tumblr.

Maybe, though, we should get back to the discussion of tagging?  Because regardless of how we got here, fans of color are now telling us that AO3 is unsafe for them due to a lack of flagging for racism.  And I truly believe that is an issue that can, and should, be fixed.  Maybe we should start a writing campaign to the devs?  Put together a petition? If you’re a fan of color working on this issue, I’d like to be able to support you.

I’m a member of the OTW, and I am fully in support of adding racial, LGBTQ+, sex and gender based, and any other kind of discrimination to the list of archive warnings. It’s not difficult to implement from a coding perspective, and from a database perspective - that’s up to the authors.

Our job is to give people the option to be responsible and kind. If they choose not to, that’s not on us. But it is on us to make sure they have the option in the first place.

I appreciate this and hope you are saying it to the board, if you have that access.

Without offering my opinion, because I haven’t fully formulated it yet, one potential issue I see is authors who frankly lack the self-awareness to recognize the racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia/ableism/anti-semitism/etc in their stories. For authors who are including it deliberately, there are already tags for all of the above, as well as tags for “canon-typical racism/etc” if it’s something already seen in the originating work. I don’t see those authors as an issue for a bigotry warning system. But if the writer doesn’t see it to tag it, what do you do? How do you have that conversation with that writer in a constructive way (that their writing itself is full of those hurtful elements, many of which are more subtle and pervasive throughout a work than a clear-cut scene of graphic violence/character death/etc) if you’re relying on reporting the work to flag it and compel the warning? How do you help that writer fix the issue instead of penalizing them for their cluelessness, or for biases they may not know they have because they’re cultural? I don’t have these answers, just thinking out loud.

Framing it as penalizing them and making it about educating the author is centering the person causing harm. IMO, and I know this is extremely unpopular, it needs to prioritize impact over intention.

Other trauma survivors aren’t expected to have a conversation about why they should be able to give informed consent before reading triggering content. A survivor of sexual violence (regardless of race) doesn’t have to justify why they should be given a choice not to expose themselves to content that is harmful to them. It’s given because it is accepted that those experiences are trauma.

The fact that authors are aware of it when they create content that could be triggering to survivors of sexual violence but not racial trauma highlights the racial empathy gap. And that empathy gap is one of the most insidious forms of racism. It leads to things like police violence against Black people that gets swept under the rug. It’s harmful. And, because it exists, not only in larger institutions but in fandom as well, Black people need to be able to identify it to protect other Black people. The feelings of creators who create content harmful to Black fans should not be prioritized over the feelings of the people who are harmed by racist content.

Now if I’m being completely honest, I know damn well our feelings are not going to be prioritized on AO3. I’m still gonna push for an impact over intention strategy, because maybe, just maybe, it will get some fans to think. That doesn’t mean I don’t expect something to be done.

Is the push for racism warnings a “slippery slope”? Might it lead to consideration for the feelings of fans experiencing homophobia, transphobia, ableism, antisemitism, islamophobia and other forms of discrimination in fandom to be prioritized? Shit, I hope it does.

I’ll add that not everyone knows when they’re writing sexual assault either. Which is creepy as hell every time I stumble across it, but here we are. “Oh, it was a little dubcon I guess? But they didn’t say no, so...”

But because there is an archive warning requirement, I’m also in good standing to have the conversation with them in the comments, and if they don’t respond by tagging appropriately, to report it to someone who knows what non-con means to get their story moved to Chose Not To Warn if they won’t listen to staff either.

I’ve often wished there were some kind of example article saying “here are things that are non-con” so people can understand what the point (and edges) of the warning is. If we expanded the warning subjects and it’s not just “tag for slurs” (which would be deeply insufficient), I think we could do with more explanatory material, and we’d need a plan for the decade of legacy works.

With all that said, I absolutely think it’s worth doing. As a white queer person, I’m honestly fine with leaving the queer stuff to individual discretion. If we get to add one, add racism.

I have one (1) person I call my First Reader and I’ve seen other people call a cheer-reader (like cheerleader, get it?). They say “write for yourself,” but basically every project I’ve ever been motivated on, it’s been because I knew a specific friend who would just. eat. it. up. So the fic was basically a gift for them.

I can feed the feedback demon by going to my cheer-reader for brainstorming or excruciatingly detailed talk-throughs of the latest thing I wrote. I try to hold off until I’m at a good stopping spot, so they get a nice chunk all at once and I’m motivated to push to the next milestone, but then I get one pure dose of instant gratification, with a guaranteed repeat available the next time I finish a chunk.

When I want to get a bunch done before I put it up in public, telling my cheer-reader takes the edge off and lets me write more before I sidetrack myself with the endless cycle of refreshing the page to see if there are new comments. When I get zero comments on a chapter in the first 48 hours, I can go to them and say, “Whyyyy,” and they say, “Because they have no taste, darling, it’s a great chapter.”

I haven’t found my cheer-readers via fandom; they’ve been my existing friends who happened to share fandoms with me. If you’re an entirely solitary fan but in a fairly large fandom, you might find a cheer-reader on Discord; I’ve been dabbling in Discord servers focused on specific fandoms or pairings lately, and several have been active and supportive. (For best results, don’t just hop on and have your introduction be, “Hello, please start a relationship with me.” Make conversation, get a feel for the place and the personalities of the frequent contributors, then make a request wherever people usually put up beta requests.)

For me, just one #1 fan meets about 3/4 of my burning hunger for attention. Good luck!

When I leave kudos, I’m tending to mean “I read this and I liked it, and I’m also running short enough on either time, typing capacity or spoons that I can’t leave a proper comment for the author saying as much” (although it may also be down to “I read this, I liked it; I can’t quite articulate why I liked it so writing a comment is going to be … difficult; so here, have some kudos while I think it over”).  But then, I date back to the Bad Old Days of Livejournal, where leaving comments to let an author know you liked something was the Standard (like all IT standards, the beautiful thing about LJ standards was there were so many to choose from) and I’m also autistic and disthymic enough that I have to write out my feelings to be able to figure out what they actually are.

When I leave kudos, I mean what the word means and what the Archive designed the function to mean:

Glory, praise, achievement. Kudos means well done, respect, nice work, you deserve appreciation for this. It’s a thumbs up, it’s a literal 💗

I can’t help it (or know about it) if people use it in some entirely different way. So when people leave kudos on my stuff, that’s what I assume they mean too; Well Done.

I want authors to know I read a fic and enjoyed it. So I kudos it. The most disheartening thing I’ve found when leaving comments is getting a stock ‘thanks for reading’ reply. If I leave kudos it means the same as whatever comment I’ve left that only warranted the ‘thanks for reading’ reply, but I don’t have to put in as much effort to psych myself up to leave some kind of feedback.

It’s a simple way of saying, I read your fic, I liked your fic, but i’m not going to waste more of either of ours time with worrying about replying etiquette.

I think the problem with comments is that it’s anxiety inducing for both parties. I try to leave comments on other authors fics and I try to reply to comments on my own fics. But sometimes replying to comments is like ‘oh my god. Oh my god’ so most of my replies are the standard ‘thank you so much for reading!’ because I’ve literally psyched myself to just get to that point. Kudos is easy, though. Bookmarking is just as easy and if I bookmark your fic it means I loved it enough that I want it archived somewhere I can find it easily in future to read again (if it’s finished), if it’s unfinished, it means it has kept my attention and I’m happy to read any future updates…

Kudos: I liked this enough to give a thumbs up to the author, and I recommend it to others by "upvoting" it for people who sort by kudos. (I routinely sort by kudos.)

Comment: I had something specific that I was excited about or was really impressed, and wish to give the author a gold-plated present. (Writing comments takes effort!)

Bookmark: I want to keep track of this work of genius FOREVER.

If I just want to know what I've read, I use the History function in the account menu.

People keep requesting to add my fic to collections and I don’t know if they know this, and I don’t know if people who allow their own stories know this, but once you add your story to a collection, the owner of the collection can perform fuckery with your story.

Like, I’m REALLY glad that collections exist, and I’ve put my work into some collections when I made those things specifically for those collectuons. Collections are a useful tool for things like bangs, where the stories need to be hidden until the reveal….. but that also means that the person in charge has the ability to hide your works from the public. Like, without you agreeing, because you already “agreed” to that by submitting to the collection. Which means works you previously had available suddenly disappear from where people can find them.

What I’m saying is please stop random requests to random people to be in your random collections. I know you probably don’t have ill intentions, but there’s no way to tell. And if you’re getting requests to be part of random collections, please be aware that if you approve them, you won’t be the only one in control of some elements of your posted stories, including whether or not they “exist” to the average reader. If they mark the collection as “unrevealed,” you story stops being accessible to the public. And they have the option to mark the collection “anonymous” which I’m pretty sure turns the author from being You to being Anonymous.

And I say all of this because I have seen this happen to people. I have had friends whose stories “disappeared” because they approved a random collection invite and the collection owner turned everything “unrevealed” (likely without even knowing or understanding that it would hide it for EVERYONE not just hide the collection so no one would see they had it, it’s not like a private bookmark). And while I haven’t seen anyone do this maliciously (at least none I can prove) I can see where it could be USED maliciously. So please, just be careful out there.

I wish AO3 had a way to auto decline collection invites- they gave us a way to auto-accept, so I don’t understand why the opposite isn’t true. If I wanted my story to be part of a collection, I’d submit it myself.

Uhh okay, so someone replied to this that they didn’t know how to remove a work from a collection. 

Copy and past the following link, and where it says “yourusernamehere” type in your AO3 pseud.

https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourusernamehere/collection_items?approved=true

This should take you to a page where your works that have been approved for collections resides. You can remove your works from collections by selecting “rejected” instead from the drop down menus.

If the direct link doesn’t work: go to your AO3 dashboard, click “collections” on the side bar, click “manage collected items” button at the top right, click “approved” button at the top right, and you’ll be at the right page to remove your works from collections.

hey! so from someone who tried her hand at making a collection to collect fics centered around a specific theme, I found out a super cool thing! you can create collections of bookmarks.

want to add a fic you love to that super-specific collection you made for Fics With Werewolves Set In London? bookmark it and add the bookmark to your collection! 

no fuss, no muss, no permission required from the author (since it’s YOUR bookmark), no chance of fucking up their fic (since it’s YOUR bookmark), presto chango, you have a collection that rocks but doesn’t rock a poor fic writer’s boat!

Thank you for this info, this is very valuable (and relieving) knowledge.

So please, as readers, this is a MUCH BETTER option!!

Drat, I hadn't thought about the weaponized hiding option. It's a shame, because I'd love to make it more common to see collection links on works which lead to finding of similar fics. But not at the expense of this exploit issue (which would be tricky to shut off without borking that anonymous and hidden functionality for things like Yuletide).