As far as I could tell (I do have a well-curated dash), the discussion was roughly 1% sincere antis, 4% wankers, and 95% people talking at length about why the antis were wrong or liking those responses. The posts boosted the drive if anything (and made me personally verklempt to read all the lovely posts talking about how much the AO3 has made people happy. :’)
Anyway, the board, the volunteers, and the members & donors of the OTW are the ones who actually keep the AO3 up, and they are all choosing to give their time and money to support the mission of the org. Antis can’t stop them doing that no matter how loud they yell.
Even if the AO3 stopped being popular, that wouldn’t make it go away. The OTW is not trying to make a big score going public or have a super flashy site. We never wanted to build the one and only archive for fanfic. For-profit companies want monopolies to have the power to squeeze customers. We have no such incentive. We’re eager to have as much fic as possible on the AO3, because that lets us do whatever we can to preserve it, but we don’t want it to be the only place where fic exists. That would make the AO3 a single point of failure for fandom. And a wonderful part of fandom has always been its decentralized nature.
The AO3 isn’t perfect, either in absolute terms or for every user, and never will be. There’s lots that could be improved (and many awesome people actively working on improving it – I highly encourage anyone who can to please make the effort to volunteer).
But what does make the AO3 special is that it cares a lot about fannish history and its preservation and preserving your access to it, and not at all about generating hits or profits or harvesting your personal data, and central to that is maximal inclusiveness of content. It is fundamental to the entire project. It’s literally the first line in the Terms of Service that you agree to when you get your account.
If someone sincerely cannot accept that policy, then they shouldn’t agree to the TOS (which on the AO3 unlike most sites is human-readable), and they shouldn’t use the AO3.
For everyone else, even if you don’t like using the AO3 for your everyday reading for whatever reason, do consider cross-posting your stories there. Because if nothing else, it means that when the site you do like goes away, or becomes inhospitable, you’ll have a backup site with all your stories on it where you can download copies easily to be imported.
Within a generation of genuinely good reform that makes things better for particular groups, there will be a backlash from people who weren’t yet alive way back when and don’t remember what it was like in the bad old days, but are sure something about the reform is a scam.
This is true for major things, like vaccines, or women being able to have their own bank accounts, paying jobs, maternity leave, and the vote. And it’s just as true for smaller things like a fan-run Archive of Our Own (so named, after Virginia Wolfe’s famous feminist essay, for a reason)
that makes fanfiction available for free with a mandate to legally protect it as long as it conforms to the Terms of Service.
The current backlash against the OTW I’m seeing all over my dash is completely unsurprising, because we’re at that point in the organisation’s life. There are now fans who weren’t in fandom yet when we made the OTW and AO3, and who have no idea what fandom used to be like.
The fact the backlash is riddled with right wing vocab and lack-of-fact-checking laziness is just as predictable. I doubt most of it is even said with genuine worry – it’s just concern trolling. It’s another face of the usual efforts by the right to suppress the work of women, queers, and other minorities. And yes, I’m being serious. Both right wing trolls and Russian trolls infiltrated fandom conversations, where they overlapped with social justice movements, during the USA’s 2016 election, and they haven’t gone anywhere. Fandom is a nice juicy target for that kind of propaganda effort, because we tend to skew left and be full of minority-identifying people.
This anti-AO3 push is not just wank. It’s propaganda, and it’s attempting to sow discord, distract from important issues, and do harm.
Thanks to those of you who have taken the time to point out those posts are rubbish.
Note: The OTW is a charity, run by fans for fans. I was one of the original Board members, but I’m not currently doing any work with them.
hey no offense but the age gap between usagi and mamoru is Gross and usagi should have been in a wholesome relationship with rei, dammit
Just Anti Things: and so it begins
I KNEW IT WAS GOING TO START, I JUST DIDN’T KNOW WHEN…
Unless it’s been drastically rewritten …
Wasn’t Ray the abusive asshole? Like, she stole Serena’s stick and often tried to usurp her and regularly insulted her … they fought physically, fell out often … never trusted one another … how is that preferable to a person that respects her, supports her, and often comes to her aid? They seemed healthy to me.
Rei was indeed the primary “good guy” character to have the most animosity with Usagi. Haruka and Michiru had the whole “are you really our princess?” thing, but the outright meanness came from Rei. This is coming from someone who actually enjoys Rei’s character.
Take your fake-woke hands off my childhood, OP.
See, this is where the nonsensical anti, tumblr-baby checklist approach to relationships leads; spitting on actual growth and compatibility, blinding oneself to the potential for unhappiness and even abuse, and cramming incompatible characters together meet this rigid cookie-cutter, completely inexperienced impression of what makes a ‘healthy, wholesome, Pure ™’ relationship.
Look, younger ones, ship whatever you want, but ffs, stop buying this idea that relationships with no age gap are automatically healthy, and that gay relationships are automatically better than straight ones. Please. Do it before you start dating. Because the longer you keep these Pure ™ sparkly blinkers on, the harder it will be for you to recognize when you’re in danger in your supposedly perfect relationship, and there are enough people in the emergency room and the damn morgue from that already.
New She-Ra’s Scorpia is such a fun dorky sweetheart, omg, I love her. And given that she’s an elemental princess in her own right we may be looking at a heel-face turn to mirror Entrapta’s single-minded switcheroo.
SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.
AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.
I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.
It doesn’t matter.
Once upon a time – in the era before anyone had heard of google – if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.
GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.
And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on – it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space – but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.
Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history – a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.
(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)
And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…
Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.
And watch as the flames take everything.
Brush the ash from their hands.
Walk away.
Once upon a time – in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” – fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon – or as many years late – as you wanted to.
Because there was a tagging site – del.icio.us – that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.
They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it – many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.
It is like fandom suffered – collectively – a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.
We have never yet recovered.
Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.
I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.
I do not think Yahoo is “bad” – I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.
But they are, historically, bad for US.
And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.
…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.
i forgot that yahoo was the one that destroyed both de.li.cious and geocities too, dang. But yes – tumblr is a loss and the writing is on the wall. Yahoo won’t run this site purely for charity reasons, so unless something wildly changes, tumblr’s days are numbered.
(Maybe now is a good time to check out pillowfort.io …)
I have been involved in online fandom since AOL was new, and yes, I witnessed the destruction when Geocities went dark. It was a real loss. The Wayback Machine saved some pages, but not all.
But I think it’s wrong to blame Yahoo. They weren’t the only ones. And they won’t be the last. It might seem like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are here to stay, but that once seemed true of AOL, Geocities, MySpace, etc. If it stops being profitable, it goes away…or becomes a useless shadow of what it used to be.
AOL still exists as a company, but the fannish message boards, filled with discussion and fanfic, are gone forever. So are all the personal webpages where fans used to archive their stories. Free mailing lists at Yahoogroups, Onelist, and Egroups were once the heart of fandom – where people posted discussion and fanfic, and expected them to be archived forever. Yahoogroups ended up absorbing the rest, then put Draconian limits on posting and archiving that basically made the mailing lists useless for fannish purposes.
Usenet is still around, but the archiving services (Remarq, DejaNews, etc.) mostly went away. Because of the nature of Usenet, it was pretty useless without multiple archives (posts tended to get lost, they were only available for a couple of weeks, and you couldn’t depend on one ISP or one archive to get them all – a pain if you were trying to read a 30-part story).
So, I am wondering how long Tumblr will be a viable platform for fandom. Yahoo recently sold off Flickr, and the new owner is making huge changes. You used to get 1 terabyte of space for photos; now you only get 1,000 photos, no matter what size they are. If you don’t buy a membership for $50/year, they will start deleting your photos until you are under the limit, oldest first. If they decide to sell Tumblr as well, who knows what the new rules will be.
Many Flickr users are upset at the changes. They expected their photos to be archived there forever. Now that won’t be the case, even if they pay – since once you die and stop paying the fee, your photos will be deleted.
I fear that applies to fannish works as well. Switching to Pillowfort.io or Dreamwidth isn’t really a solution. They are likely to face the same pressures Yahoo, etc. faced. Any commercial service can’t be relied on.
I’m reminded of something a biographer of Steve Jobs said. He writes a lot of biographies, and said Jobs was difficult, because his early journals were on magnetic tape and other obsolete media, written with software that is no longer readily available. Leonardo da Vinci was easier, because his handwritten notebooks can still be read. I guess there’s something to be said for dead-tree fanzines.
A good post to revive!
I don’t think it’s the commercial nature of a site by itself that’s the issue. DW never really took off like a lot of us hoped and never created that second era of LJ-style fandom, but it has been chugging happily along ever since. Its ambitions were modest and its business plan sound.
The problem is that most commercial sites are venture capital startup nonsense that does not have a clear business plan that will be sustainable in the long run. The aim is to drive users to the site in such numbers that they feel unable to abandon it, then inflict advertising or new fees on them after they’re stuck. “We’ll figure it out later” is a key feature of all of these, but the assumption that lots of users mean lots of ways to monetize isn’t always valid.
Squidge-style sites also don’t usually have good long-term plans. (IDK about Squidge in particular though.) The ones that last are the ones run by fans with deep pockets and good offline fannish support networks. Many others die when the owner forgets to renew the domain name or gets tired of paying or can’t pay any longer.
Look at the Smallville Slash Archive: it was one of many fannish sites that Minotaur hosted. When he died unexpectedly, his many fannish friends stepped in to save his work. SSA ultimately got imported to AO3 to preserve it. This worked because he had plenty of actual friends in fandom–people he saw offline at cons too–and not just casual acquaintances who followed him on social media. It’s true that donation drives can be signal boosted on social media, but all of the liking and goodwill in the world won’t do jack if nobody has access to the hosting/business side of a site to use those donations to keep it open.
This is one reason a lot of older fans I know have started talking about fannish estate planning. All those paper zines are a better archival format than any computer drive, but they also often get thrown in the trash by clueless relatives. Out of an original print run of a couple hundred, how many are extant?
AO3 is distinctive in that it has an entire organization in place to make sure it continues. (So while nothing is forever, AO3 is about as solid as it gets.) But I’d probably trust DW second most, and I’d trust it over many single-owner not-for-profit fannish spaces.
Not to hijack the thread, but this is Walter from Squidge.org. Yes, we’re still out here, though we’re such a small part of fandom now as opposed to the early 90s when we started. Squidge has a future, I think, and I’m looking at replacing several of current sites (Peja’s WWOMB, NCISFiction.com, and a couple more eFiction sites) with a single AO3-based archive.
And as for the future, yes, we’re all getting older. I have a will that bequeaths Squidge.org fandom sites to the OTW (the folks that run AO3). My husband has instructions, and OTW has been told of my wishes.
Great to hear you’re around! I used to read WWOMB so often–and again whenever I get into a new-to-me old fandom. There are so many fics on older archives that aren’t crossposted anywhere else.
Once in a blue moon I will recall I once wrote a series of FFVII+The Muppet Show crossover drabbles and they weren’t half bad, I really ought to put them on AO3, if only so I can find them easily again.
Not to get controversial or anything but can we stop with making fun of women being abused by their husbands and playing it off as ‘straight culture’
I lost 10 followers for saying we shouldnt make fun of domestic abuse victims.
can we also please stop making fun of men being abused by their wives thanks
Good addition
Can we also stop acting that domestic abuse is just a “straight” thing?
It’s literally teaching our baby gays that any same sex relationship their going into is safe and they don’t need to be worried about being abused and controlled.
You deserve to be safe, regardless of how you choose to ship fictional characters. Teenagers and young adults exploring their sexuality safely through art and writing should not be made afraid to do so.
Shippers (many of whom are minors) should not be suicide-baited, threatened, falsely accused of being “pedophiles”, or had their lives genuinely placed in danger because of what they draw or write.
Antis need to stay out of fandom tags COMPLETELY if they’re so inept in using the blocking and filtering features given to them. They have ALWAYS had the ability to AVOID what they don’t wish to see. If they cannot take part in fandoms without harassing others, they do not belong in fandoms–PERIOD.
Antis should also not participate in fandoms where the creators themselves hold values they don’t agree with. Antis are primarily the ones responsible for harassing the crew members (and families of crew members) for the shows they claim to enjoy. Antis have even gone so far now as to PHYSICALLY endanger others over fan art/fanfiction. That is NEVER, EVER OKAY.
It is the job of antis to look out for THEMSELVES, the same way it is the job of you or I to avoid the things in life that make US uncomfortable. I don’t like deep, dark water–so I don’t fucking scuba dive.
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