It’s one thing if they wanted to start a dialogue about why such and such is racist etc, but to allow reader tagging? Good lord. My first response there very clearly said too many people don’t make a distinction between depicting a thing and actually being a thing. It’s why Huckleberry Finn keeps getting banned. And from the looks of it, doodlebug there would be heading the committee.
AO3 actually says this, in the TOS that every user agrees to:
it’s right there in the mission statement, y’all. This has been their policy since day one.
Most criticisms don’t say that’s their obligation, you all are really missing a lot of what the complaints are about. I feel like if you all actually read what people were saying instead of writing everything off as “oh they want ao3 to protect them and censor us” you wouldn’t see so much “discourse”. You have to admit that all of the moralizing and victimization being done in the name of this site is extremely obnoxious and winds up exaggerating what should be cut and dry.
@phoenix-ace “you must censor fics to protect people from upsettting and immoral content” describes 99% of every complaint I see about AO3, with the other 1% being “it shouldn’t take so much money to run the site”. Both of these have been extensively refuted, with tons of evidence to back them up. What are the other complaints you’re referring to, that are valid and being written off? If there are real concerns I’d like to hear them – I just haven’t seen a single one.
Rampant racism and homophobia in fics that people dont actually fucking tag so we cant just avoid it.
a part of me feels like this is like complaining about going on /b/ and seeing racism and homophobia. It says, in the guidelines, that they won’t remove offensive content, they don’t review for it, and you browse at your own risk of being exposed to it.
does that suck? Yes. Do some people probably need a safer browsing experience? Yes. It’s not going to be AO3. AO3 is a public, largely unmoderated, unscreened archive. They give you the tools to build moderated, screened archives with their software, but they aren’t one. They post all legal fanworks. That’s what they are. That’s what they have always been.
If you’ll reread what I said I’m not advocating for them to remove it. I want a way for readers to tag content so that the tag system is actually useful.
Most people arent gonna tag their racist and homophobic shit for racism and homophobia especially not in this community where casual racism and homophobia is rampant.
If they arent going to remove it (which I have feelings about by the way but is not the point of this conversation) the least that can be done is updating the tagging system.
And the whole they give you the tools bit… that does nothing for a bunch of us. I cant code and I dont have the time to learn to code.
Like the general sentiment is “dont like it dont read it” and “that’s what tags are for” both those sentiments are USELESS when people dont tag shit.
No system allows you to tag other people’s work, because that is a system that is so ripe for abuse and exploitation it’s ridiculous. Assholes would tear that feature apart within a week. Seriously, name another sites that lets you add a tag to the original post of someone’s post.
Ultimately, aside from the big four warnings, all tags on AO3 are discretionary and up for interpretation – if you’re just browsing the fandom direct on AO3. But there’s other options for curating content.
You can tag your bookmarks, recs, or collections that you add the fic to – so if, for example, you wanted to make a “RACIST BULLSHIT” list of fics and start adding them on there, that is within your power, and the author can’t stop you. Alternately, if you want to set up a shared collection with friends where you add and share fics that DONT contain those things, you can totally do that too and share it for others to use.
(I actually work on one of those, where there’s a very creepy character who’s often a fan favorite in fics, so myself and some other people who hate him set up a collection of fics which do not mention him at all, or only portray him as the slimeball he is.)
AO3 also has RSS feeds, so you could stream a certain kind of fic to somewhere else – say, a tumblr – and moderate from there, either by screening fics before they’re posted or by adding tags/warnings and deleting fics at your discretion or follower request. Streaming RSS feeds to tumblr blogs requires no code knowledge and can be set up in maybe half an hour.
So the current system where people dont tag racism and homophobia and all that other terrible stuff thus rendering filtering and avoiding that stuff useless and pretty hard to is fine but allowing people to tag something (which people can choose to ignore by the way) to make the tags more effective against racism and homophobia is a problem? Okay.
Also no one else does it so why should we is not a valid argument its actually pretty childish.
I’m glad there is all this extra and time consuming stuff that can be done but it is not to much to ask that avoiding racist homophobic etc content be as easy to avoid as it is for me to avoid a ship I dont like.
If AO3 is gonna be steadfast in not dealing with stuff that perpetuates racism and homophobia etc that’s the least that could be done.
Okay, cool, you use this hypothetical system to tag racism, and you always use it carefully, and people are better warned because of your tags, and everything is better. For….. oh, I’d give it 6 hours on the outside, after the update goes live.
Then somebody goes back and retaliates by tagging all of your posted fics with innacurate warnings or worse. Or tags all of your fics with racism back, regardless of how relevant it is. Somebody else goes through and tags every single fic with a certain ship with homophobia, or racism, or pedophilia, or incest, or abuse, because of a ship war. This renders your carefully curated tags irrelevant as somebody goes through and tags every fic that mentions or implies a ship as racist. Some troll tags a bunch of fics with slurs and nonsense tags. People start using tags to flame or discourage people from reading ships they don’t like. People start using tags to bash a specific author.
It would not just be you and yours who would get that power; it would be millions of people. It would be homophobes and racists having the power to post tags on the front page of your fics. It would be people who hate you having the power to affect how others see your work. This is a two way street; any power you gain over homophobes writing fic, they also gain over you and any fic you write.
You don’t trust people to tag their own racism, but you trust them to not exploit power that you give them? Why?
Does this person go to Barnes&Noble and throw tantrums about racist books there?
B&N sells Mein Kampf. It sells The Art of the Deal. It sells Ayn Rand’s entire bibliography. It sells books by misogynist “pick-up artists.” It also sells books on feminism, the civil rights movement, and novels by queer authors!
But, despite it having a variety of works by authors with greatly varying morals and politics, I’ve never seen anyone over the age of 4 get mad about bookstores existing.
^^^like i said before, if you are against sites like Ao3 existing, you are against libraries.
Given that so many of the people calling for these reader tags and other forms of archive ‘moderation’ ie censorship also equate plain old depiction with ‘romanticization’ and ‘fetishization’, I wouldn’t trust them the slightest with that kind of power. There’s a world of difference between ‘this fic portrays racism’ and ‘this fic is racist’. It’s a distinction they have proven themselves over and over unable to make.
How is asking for a better tagging system censorship? Like do yall even know the meaning of that word or is it just your catchall for stuff you dont like?
Reader tagging => dogpiling => hostile fic environment => driving writers off the site.
You know exactly where things would end up, don’t play innocent. You festering donkey cunts are the last people with any right to wail about the meanings of words.
Are you fucking joking me? I have not once mentioned pedophilia at all but you’re gonna be a little bitch right now? Yall are a bunch of little children mad that people are criticizing something you like to use.
Asking for a better tagging system isnt a form of censorship you dimwitted little shit. Stop throwing the word around.
Do you seriously think you’re important enough to be differentiated from all the other purity-wanking ass-pustules out there? Do, you, you smeg-sucking flatworm? Reader tagging would result in nothing less than social censorship on what is intended to be a censorship-free site.
YOUR BAD IDEA IS BAD. GET OVER IT.
Hey then how about instead of being a tantrum having little shitheel you care enough about the VALID FUCKING PROBLEM and do more than just shoot down ideas.
Real easy for you to sit there and just go “nope it sucks” but how about showing us you have an actual fucking brain instead of an empty space obviously filled with shit and come up with something
OTHERWISE WHEN PEOPLE COMPLAIN ABOUT THE RAMPANT RACISM AND HOMOPHOBIA ON THIS SITE SHUT YOUR DUMB WHINY ASS MOUTH UP YOU USELESS FUCKHEAD.
Not my fault you’re too stupid to see a difference between real people being racist and people depicting racism in fiction, you deformed dingo dick.
YELL MORE, I’M MAKING POPCORN!
Lol so using racist tropes isnt racism now?
Listen you dumb fuck nigga. Obviously there is a difference between having racist themes and having racist works and acting like people can’t write racist stories just shows me how deep you have your head in the asshole of these racist writers.
You’d rather show you’re a useless dumbass than admit there are racist stories on AO3. Its pathetic but not unsurprising from your lot.
You don’t know people’s motivations when they use a trope, you herpetic hyena crotch, and it’s not your bloody place to demand them. Learn to use the damn back button and stop expecting everybody else to pad the world for you.
And if you wanna fling words, the correct one would be ‘Paki’. I will also accept ‘Dothead’, you greasy invertebrate.
Oh so motivation determines racism? Lol you’re dumber than I thought. That’s not how racism works kid. Intent doesnt change impact. Grow some brain cells and figure that out and if I see people using anti Black racist tropes i will call them the fuck out and let them know about themselves which I am allowed to do.
Learn that people are allowed to critize stop and stop having a temper tantrum because they arent gonna let writers just slide by with their racist bullshit. Stop expecting people to pad the world for these dumbass writers.
Listen I’m black and I will use nigga if I want because it’s my word to use but unlike the rest of you I’m not cool with using other peoples slurs against them just because their a waste of space and their mother should have swallowed instead of giving birth to them.
You do what you feel the need to, you thin-skinned weasel. Your readership-assigned tagging idea is still flaming shit on a stick straight from Satan’s asshole, so very you.
Go on contributing nothing of value to fandom or the wider world, you pro-harassment bloodrag.
AO3 actually says this, in the TOS that every user agrees to:
it’s right there in the mission statement, y’all. This has been their policy since day one.
Most criticisms don’t say that’s their obligation, you all are really missing a lot of what the complaints are about. I feel like if you all actually read what people were saying instead of writing everything off as “oh they want ao3 to protect them and censor us” you wouldn’t see so much “discourse”. You have to admit that all of the moralizing and victimization being done in the name of this site is extremely obnoxious and winds up exaggerating what should be cut and dry.
@phoenix-ace “you must censor fics to protect people from upsettting and immoral content” describes 99% of every complaint I see about AO3, with the other 1% being “it shouldn’t take so much money to run the site”. Both of these have been extensively refuted, with tons of evidence to back them up. What are the other complaints you’re referring to, that are valid and being written off? If there are real concerns I’d like to hear them – I just haven’t seen a single one.
Rampant racism and homophobia in fics that people dont actually fucking tag so we cant just avoid it.
a part of me feels like this is like complaining about going on /b/ and seeing racism and homophobia. It says, in the guidelines, that they won’t remove offensive content, they don’t review for it, and you browse at your own risk of being exposed to it.
does that suck? Yes. Do some people probably need a safer browsing experience? Yes. It’s not going to be AO3. AO3 is a public, largely unmoderated, unscreened archive. They give you the tools to build moderated, screened archives with their software, but they aren’t one. They post all legal fanworks. That’s what they are. That’s what they have always been.
If you’ll reread what I said I’m not advocating for them to remove it. I want a way for readers to tag content so that the tag system is actually useful.
Most people arent gonna tag their racist and homophobic shit for racism and homophobia especially not in this community where casual racism and homophobia is rampant.
If they arent going to remove it (which I have feelings about by the way but is not the point of this conversation) the least that can be done is updating the tagging system.
And the whole they give you the tools bit… that does nothing for a bunch of us. I cant code and I dont have the time to learn to code.
Like the general sentiment is “dont like it dont read it” and “that’s what tags are for” both those sentiments are USELESS when people dont tag shit.
No system allows you to tag other people’s work, because that is a system that is so ripe for abuse and exploitation it’s ridiculous. Assholes would tear that feature apart within a week. Seriously, name another sites that lets you add a tag to the original post of someone’s post.
Ultimately, aside from the big four warnings, all tags on AO3 are discretionary and up for interpretation – if you’re just browsing the fandom direct on AO3. But there’s other options for curating content.
You can tag your bookmarks, recs, or collections that you add the fic to – so if, for example, you wanted to make a “RACIST BULLSHIT” list of fics and start adding them on there, that is within your power, and the author can’t stop you. Alternately, if you want to set up a shared collection with friends where you add and share fics that DONT contain those things, you can totally do that too and share it for others to use.
(I actually work on one of those, where there’s a very creepy character who’s often a fan favorite in fics, so myself and some other people who hate him set up a collection of fics which do not mention him at all, or only portray him as the slimeball he is.)
AO3 also has RSS feeds, so you could stream a certain kind of fic to somewhere else – say, a tumblr – and moderate from there, either by screening fics before they’re posted or by adding tags/warnings and deleting fics at your discretion or follower request. Streaming RSS feeds to tumblr blogs requires no code knowledge and can be set up in maybe half an hour.
So the current system where people dont tag racism and homophobia and all that other terrible stuff thus rendering filtering and avoiding that stuff useless and pretty hard to is fine but allowing people to tag something (which people can choose to ignore by the way) to make the tags more effective against racism and homophobia is a problem? Okay.
Also no one else does it so why should we is not a valid argument its actually pretty childish.
I’m glad there is all this extra and time consuming stuff that can be done but it is not to much to ask that avoiding racist homophobic etc content be as easy to avoid as it is for me to avoid a ship I dont like.
If AO3 is gonna be steadfast in not dealing with stuff that perpetuates racism and homophobia etc that’s the least that could be done.
Okay, cool, you use this hypothetical system to tag racism, and you always use it carefully, and people are better warned because of your tags, and everything is better. For….. oh, I’d give it 6 hours on the outside, after the update goes live.
Then somebody goes back and retaliates by tagging all of your posted fics with innacurate warnings or worse. Or tags all of your fics with racism back, regardless of how relevant it is. Somebody else goes through and tags every single fic with a certain ship with homophobia, or racism, or pedophilia, or incest, or abuse, because of a ship war. This renders your carefully curated tags irrelevant as somebody goes through and tags every fic that mentions or implies a ship as racist. Some troll tags a bunch of fics with slurs and nonsense tags. People start using tags to flame or discourage people from reading ships they don’t like. People start using tags to bash a specific author.
It would not just be you and yours who would get that power; it would be millions of people. It would be homophobes and racists having the power to post tags on the front page of your fics. It would be people who hate you having the power to affect how others see your work. This is a two way street; any power you gain over homophobes writing fic, they also gain over you and any fic you write.
You don’t trust people to tag their own racism, but you trust them to not exploit power that you give them? Why?
Does this person go to Barnes&Noble and throw tantrums about racist books there?
B&N sells Mein Kampf. It sells The Art of the Deal. It sells Ayn Rand’s entire bibliography. It sells books by misogynist “pick-up artists.” It also sells books on feminism, the civil rights movement, and novels by queer authors!
But, despite it having a variety of works by authors with greatly varying morals and politics, I’ve never seen anyone over the age of 4 get mad about bookstores existing.
^^^like i said before, if you are against sites like Ao3 existing, you are against libraries.
Given that so many of the people calling for these reader tags and other forms of archive ‘moderation’ ie censorship also equate plain old depiction with ‘romanticization’ and ‘fetishization’, I wouldn’t trust them the slightest with that kind of power. There’s a world of difference between ‘this fic portrays racism’ and ‘this fic is racist’. It’s a distinction they have proven themselves over and over unable to make.
How is asking for a better tagging system censorship? Like do yall even know the meaning of that word or is it just your catchall for stuff you dont like?
Reader tagging => dogpiling => hostile fic environment => driving writers off the site.
You know exactly where things would end up, don’t play innocent. You festering donkey cunts are the last people with any right to wail about the meanings of words.
Are you fucking joking me? I have not once mentioned pedophilia at all but you’re gonna be a little bitch right now? Yall are a bunch of little children mad that people are criticizing something you like to use.
Asking for a better tagging system isnt a form of censorship you dimwitted little shit. Stop throwing the word around.
Do you seriously think you’re important enough to be differentiated from all the other purity-wanking ass-pustules out there? Do, you, you smeg-sucking flatworm? Reader tagging would result in nothing less than social censorship on what is intended to be a censorship-free site.
YOUR BAD IDEA IS BAD. GET OVER IT.
Hey then how about instead of being a tantrum having little shitheel you care enough about the VALID FUCKING PROBLEM and do more than just shoot down ideas.
Real easy for you to sit there and just go “nope it sucks” but how about showing us you have an actual fucking brain instead of an empty space obviously filled with shit and come up with something
OTHERWISE WHEN PEOPLE COMPLAIN ABOUT THE RAMPANT RACISM AND HOMOPHOBIA ON THIS SITE SHUT YOUR DUMB WHINY ASS MOUTH UP YOU USELESS FUCKHEAD.
Not my fault you’re too stupid to see a difference between real people being racist and people depicting racism in fiction, you deformed dingo dick.
YELL MORE, I’M MAKING POPCORN!
Lol so using racist tropes isnt racism now?
Listen you dumb fuck nigga. Obviously there is a difference between having racist themes and having racist works and acting like people can’t write racist stories just shows me how deep you have your head in the asshole of these racist writers.
You’d rather show you’re a useless dumbass than admit there are racist stories on AO3. Its pathetic but not unsurprising from your lot.
You don’t know people’s motivations when they use a trope, you herpetic hyena crotch, and it’s not your bloody place to demand them. Learn to use the damn back button and stop expecting everybody else to pad the world for you.
And if you wanna fling words, the correct one would be ‘Paki’. I will also accept ‘Dothead’, you greasy invertebrate.
AO3 actually says this, in the TOS that every user agrees to:
it’s right there in the mission statement, y’all. This has been their policy since day one.
Most criticisms don’t say that’s their obligation, you all are really missing a lot of what the complaints are about. I feel like if you all actually read what people were saying instead of writing everything off as “oh they want ao3 to protect them and censor us” you wouldn’t see so much “discourse”. You have to admit that all of the moralizing and victimization being done in the name of this site is extremely obnoxious and winds up exaggerating what should be cut and dry.
@phoenix-ace “you must censor fics to protect people from upsettting and immoral content” describes 99% of every complaint I see about AO3, with the other 1% being “it shouldn’t take so much money to run the site”. Both of these have been extensively refuted, with tons of evidence to back them up. What are the other complaints you’re referring to, that are valid and being written off? If there are real concerns I’d like to hear them – I just haven’t seen a single one.
Rampant racism and homophobia in fics that people dont actually fucking tag so we cant just avoid it.
a part of me feels like this is like complaining about going on /b/ and seeing racism and homophobia. It says, in the guidelines, that they won’t remove offensive content, they don’t review for it, and you browse at your own risk of being exposed to it.
does that suck? Yes. Do some people probably need a safer browsing experience? Yes. It’s not going to be AO3. AO3 is a public, largely unmoderated, unscreened archive. They give you the tools to build moderated, screened archives with their software, but they aren’t one. They post all legal fanworks. That’s what they are. That’s what they have always been.
If you’ll reread what I said I’m not advocating for them to remove it. I want a way for readers to tag content so that the tag system is actually useful.
Most people arent gonna tag their racist and homophobic shit for racism and homophobia especially not in this community where casual racism and homophobia is rampant.
If they arent going to remove it (which I have feelings about by the way but is not the point of this conversation) the least that can be done is updating the tagging system.
And the whole they give you the tools bit… that does nothing for a bunch of us. I cant code and I dont have the time to learn to code.
Like the general sentiment is “dont like it dont read it” and “that’s what tags are for” both those sentiments are USELESS when people dont tag shit.
No system allows you to tag other people’s work, because that is a system that is so ripe for abuse and exploitation it’s ridiculous. Assholes would tear that feature apart within a week. Seriously, name another sites that lets you add a tag to the original post of someone’s post.
Ultimately, aside from the big four warnings, all tags on AO3 are discretionary and up for interpretation – if you’re just browsing the fandom direct on AO3. But there’s other options for curating content.
You can tag your bookmarks, recs, or collections that you add the fic to – so if, for example, you wanted to make a “RACIST BULLSHIT” list of fics and start adding them on there, that is within your power, and the author can’t stop you. Alternately, if you want to set up a shared collection with friends where you add and share fics that DONT contain those things, you can totally do that too and share it for others to use.
(I actually work on one of those, where there’s a very creepy character who’s often a fan favorite in fics, so myself and some other people who hate him set up a collection of fics which do not mention him at all, or only portray him as the slimeball he is.)
AO3 also has RSS feeds, so you could stream a certain kind of fic to somewhere else – say, a tumblr – and moderate from there, either by screening fics before they’re posted or by adding tags/warnings and deleting fics at your discretion or follower request. Streaming RSS feeds to tumblr blogs requires no code knowledge and can be set up in maybe half an hour.
So the current system where people dont tag racism and homophobia and all that other terrible stuff thus rendering filtering and avoiding that stuff useless and pretty hard to is fine but allowing people to tag something (which people can choose to ignore by the way) to make the tags more effective against racism and homophobia is a problem? Okay.
Also no one else does it so why should we is not a valid argument its actually pretty childish.
I’m glad there is all this extra and time consuming stuff that can be done but it is not to much to ask that avoiding racist homophobic etc content be as easy to avoid as it is for me to avoid a ship I dont like.
If AO3 is gonna be steadfast in not dealing with stuff that perpetuates racism and homophobia etc that’s the least that could be done.
Okay, cool, you use this hypothetical system to tag racism, and you always use it carefully, and people are better warned because of your tags, and everything is better. For….. oh, I’d give it 6 hours on the outside, after the update goes live.
Then somebody goes back and retaliates by tagging all of your posted fics with innacurate warnings or worse. Or tags all of your fics with racism back, regardless of how relevant it is. Somebody else goes through and tags every single fic with a certain ship with homophobia, or racism, or pedophilia, or incest, or abuse, because of a ship war. This renders your carefully curated tags irrelevant as somebody goes through and tags every fic that mentions or implies a ship as racist. Some troll tags a bunch of fics with slurs and nonsense tags. People start using tags to flame or discourage people from reading ships they don’t like. People start using tags to bash a specific author.
It would not just be you and yours who would get that power; it would be millions of people. It would be homophobes and racists having the power to post tags on the front page of your fics. It would be people who hate you having the power to affect how others see your work. This is a two way street; any power you gain over homophobes writing fic, they also gain over you and any fic you write.
You don’t trust people to tag their own racism, but you trust them to not exploit power that you give them? Why?
Does this person go to Barnes&Noble and throw tantrums about racist books there?
B&N sells Mein Kampf. It sells The Art of the Deal. It sells Ayn Rand’s entire bibliography. It sells books by misogynist “pick-up artists.” It also sells books on feminism, the civil rights movement, and novels by queer authors!
But, despite it having a variety of works by authors with greatly varying morals and politics, I’ve never seen anyone over the age of 4 get mad about bookstores existing.
^^^like i said before, if you are against sites like Ao3 existing, you are against libraries.
Given that so many of the people calling for these reader tags and other forms of archive ‘moderation’ ie censorship also equate plain old depiction with ‘romanticization’ and ‘fetishization’, I wouldn’t trust them the slightest with that kind of power. There’s a world of difference between ‘this fic portrays racism’ and ‘this fic is racist’. It’s a distinction they have proven themselves over and over unable to make.
How is asking for a better tagging system censorship? Like do yall even know the meaning of that word or is it just your catchall for stuff you dont like?
Reader tagging => dogpiling => hostile fic environment => driving writers off the site.
You know exactly where things would end up, don’t play innocent. You festering donkey cunts are the last people with any right to wail about the meanings of words.
Are you fucking joking me? I have not once mentioned pedophilia at all but you’re gonna be a little bitch right now? Yall are a bunch of little children mad that people are criticizing something you like to use.
Asking for a better tagging system isnt a form of censorship you dimwitted little shit. Stop throwing the word around.
Do you seriously think you’re important enough to be differentiated from all the other purity-wanking ass-pustules out there? Do, you, you smeg-sucking flatworm? Reader tagging would result in nothing less than social censorship on what is intended to be a censorship-free site.
YOUR BAD IDEA IS BAD. GET OVER IT.
Hey then how about instead of being a tantrum having little shitheel you care enough about the VALID FUCKING PROBLEM and do more than just shoot down ideas.
Real easy for you to sit there and just go “nope it sucks” but how about showing us you have an actual fucking brain instead of an empty space obviously filled with shit and come up with something
OTHERWISE WHEN PEOPLE COMPLAIN ABOUT THE RAMPANT RACISM AND HOMOPHOBIA ON THIS SITE SHUT YOUR DUMB WHINY ASS MOUTH UP YOU USELESS FUCKHEAD.
Not my fault you’re too stupid to see a difference between real people being racist and people depicting racism in fiction, you deformed dingo dick.
AO3 actually says this, in the TOS that every user agrees to:
it’s right there in the mission statement, y’all. This has been their policy since day one.
Most criticisms don’t say that’s their obligation, you all are really missing a lot of what the complaints are about. I feel like if you all actually read what people were saying instead of writing everything off as “oh they want ao3 to protect them and censor us” you wouldn’t see so much “discourse”. You have to admit that all of the moralizing and victimization being done in the name of this site is extremely obnoxious and winds up exaggerating what should be cut and dry.
@phoenix-ace “you must censor fics to protect people from upsettting and immoral content” describes 99% of every complaint I see about AO3, with the other 1% being “it shouldn’t take so much money to run the site”. Both of these have been extensively refuted, with tons of evidence to back them up. What are the other complaints you’re referring to, that are valid and being written off? If there are real concerns I’d like to hear them – I just haven’t seen a single one.
Rampant racism and homophobia in fics that people dont actually fucking tag so we cant just avoid it.
a part of me feels like this is like complaining about going on /b/ and seeing racism and homophobia. It says, in the guidelines, that they won’t remove offensive content, they don’t review for it, and you browse at your own risk of being exposed to it.
does that suck? Yes. Do some people probably need a safer browsing experience? Yes. It’s not going to be AO3. AO3 is a public, largely unmoderated, unscreened archive. They give you the tools to build moderated, screened archives with their software, but they aren’t one. They post all legal fanworks. That’s what they are. That’s what they have always been.
If you’ll reread what I said I’m not advocating for them to remove it. I want a way for readers to tag content so that the tag system is actually useful.
Most people arent gonna tag their racist and homophobic shit for racism and homophobia especially not in this community where casual racism and homophobia is rampant.
If they arent going to remove it (which I have feelings about by the way but is not the point of this conversation) the least that can be done is updating the tagging system.
And the whole they give you the tools bit… that does nothing for a bunch of us. I cant code and I dont have the time to learn to code.
Like the general sentiment is “dont like it dont read it” and “that’s what tags are for” both those sentiments are USELESS when people dont tag shit.
No system allows you to tag other people’s work, because that is a system that is so ripe for abuse and exploitation it’s ridiculous. Assholes would tear that feature apart within a week. Seriously, name another sites that lets you add a tag to the original post of someone’s post.
Ultimately, aside from the big four warnings, all tags on AO3 are discretionary and up for interpretation – if you’re just browsing the fandom direct on AO3. But there’s other options for curating content.
You can tag your bookmarks, recs, or collections that you add the fic to – so if, for example, you wanted to make a “RACIST BULLSHIT” list of fics and start adding them on there, that is within your power, and the author can’t stop you. Alternately, if you want to set up a shared collection with friends where you add and share fics that DONT contain those things, you can totally do that too and share it for others to use.
(I actually work on one of those, where there’s a very creepy character who’s often a fan favorite in fics, so myself and some other people who hate him set up a collection of fics which do not mention him at all, or only portray him as the slimeball he is.)
AO3 also has RSS feeds, so you could stream a certain kind of fic to somewhere else – say, a tumblr – and moderate from there, either by screening fics before they’re posted or by adding tags/warnings and deleting fics at your discretion or follower request. Streaming RSS feeds to tumblr blogs requires no code knowledge and can be set up in maybe half an hour.
So the current system where people dont tag racism and homophobia and all that other terrible stuff thus rendering filtering and avoiding that stuff useless and pretty hard to is fine but allowing people to tag something (which people can choose to ignore by the way) to make the tags more effective against racism and homophobia is a problem? Okay.
Also no one else does it so why should we is not a valid argument its actually pretty childish.
I’m glad there is all this extra and time consuming stuff that can be done but it is not to much to ask that avoiding racist homophobic etc content be as easy to avoid as it is for me to avoid a ship I dont like.
If AO3 is gonna be steadfast in not dealing with stuff that perpetuates racism and homophobia etc that’s the least that could be done.
Okay, cool, you use this hypothetical system to tag racism, and you always use it carefully, and people are better warned because of your tags, and everything is better. For….. oh, I’d give it 6 hours on the outside, after the update goes live.
Then somebody goes back and retaliates by tagging all of your posted fics with innacurate warnings or worse. Or tags all of your fics with racism back, regardless of how relevant it is. Somebody else goes through and tags every single fic with a certain ship with homophobia, or racism, or pedophilia, or incest, or abuse, because of a ship war. This renders your carefully curated tags irrelevant as somebody goes through and tags every fic that mentions or implies a ship as racist. Some troll tags a bunch of fics with slurs and nonsense tags. People start using tags to flame or discourage people from reading ships they don’t like. People start using tags to bash a specific author.
It would not just be you and yours who would get that power; it would be millions of people. It would be homophobes and racists having the power to post tags on the front page of your fics. It would be people who hate you having the power to affect how others see your work. This is a two way street; any power you gain over homophobes writing fic, they also gain over you and any fic you write.
You don’t trust people to tag their own racism, but you trust them to not exploit power that you give them? Why?
Does this person go to Barnes&Noble and throw tantrums about racist books there?
B&N sells Mein Kampf. It sells The Art of the Deal. It sells Ayn Rand’s entire bibliography. It sells books by misogynist “pick-up artists.” It also sells books on feminism, the civil rights movement, and novels by queer authors!
But, despite it having a variety of works by authors with greatly varying morals and politics, I’ve never seen anyone over the age of 4 get mad about bookstores existing.
^^^like i said before, if you are against sites like Ao3 existing, you are against libraries.
Given that so many of the people calling for these reader tags and other forms of archive ‘moderation’ ie censorship also equate plain old depiction with ‘romanticization’ and ‘fetishization’, I wouldn’t trust them the slightest with that kind of power. There’s a world of difference between ‘this fic portrays racism’ and ‘this fic is racist’. It’s a distinction they have proven themselves over and over unable to make.
How is asking for a better tagging system censorship? Like do yall even know the meaning of that word or is it just your catchall for stuff you dont like?
Reader tagging => dogpiling => hostile fic environment => driving writers off the site.
You know exactly where things would end up, don’t play innocent. You festering donkey cunts are the last people with any right to wail about the meanings of words.
Are you fucking joking me? I have not once mentioned pedophilia at all but you’re gonna be a little bitch right now? Yall are a bunch of little children mad that people are criticizing something you like to use.
Asking for a better tagging system isnt a form of censorship you dimwitted little shit. Stop throwing the word around.
Do you seriously think you’re important enough to be differentiated from all the other purity-wanking ass-pustules out there? Do, you, you smeg-sucking flatworm? Reader tagging would result in nothing less than social censorship on what is intended to be a censorship-free site.
AO3 actually says this, in the TOS that every user agrees to:
it’s right there in the mission statement, y’all. This has been their policy since day one.
Most criticisms don’t say that’s their obligation, you all are really missing a lot of what the complaints are about. I feel like if you all actually read what people were saying instead of writing everything off as “oh they want ao3 to protect them and censor us” you wouldn’t see so much “discourse”. You have to admit that all of the moralizing and victimization being done in the name of this site is extremely obnoxious and winds up exaggerating what should be cut and dry.
@phoenix-ace “you must censor fics to protect people from upsettting and immoral content” describes 99% of every complaint I see about AO3, with the other 1% being “it shouldn’t take so much money to run the site”. Both of these have been extensively refuted, with tons of evidence to back them up. What are the other complaints you’re referring to, that are valid and being written off? If there are real concerns I’d like to hear them – I just haven’t seen a single one.
Rampant racism and homophobia in fics that people dont actually fucking tag so we cant just avoid it.
a part of me feels like this is like complaining about going on /b/ and seeing racism and homophobia. It says, in the guidelines, that they won’t remove offensive content, they don’t review for it, and you browse at your own risk of being exposed to it.
does that suck? Yes. Do some people probably need a safer browsing experience? Yes. It’s not going to be AO3. AO3 is a public, largely unmoderated, unscreened archive. They give you the tools to build moderated, screened archives with their software, but they aren’t one. They post all legal fanworks. That’s what they are. That’s what they have always been.
If you’ll reread what I said I’m not advocating for them to remove it. I want a way for readers to tag content so that the tag system is actually useful.
Most people arent gonna tag their racist and homophobic shit for racism and homophobia especially not in this community where casual racism and homophobia is rampant.
If they arent going to remove it (which I have feelings about by the way but is not the point of this conversation) the least that can be done is updating the tagging system.
And the whole they give you the tools bit… that does nothing for a bunch of us. I cant code and I dont have the time to learn to code.
Like the general sentiment is “dont like it dont read it” and “that’s what tags are for” both those sentiments are USELESS when people dont tag shit.
No system allows you to tag other people’s work, because that is a system that is so ripe for abuse and exploitation it’s ridiculous. Assholes would tear that feature apart within a week. Seriously, name another sites that lets you add a tag to the original post of someone’s post.
Ultimately, aside from the big four warnings, all tags on AO3 are discretionary and up for interpretation – if you’re just browsing the fandom direct on AO3. But there’s other options for curating content.
You can tag your bookmarks, recs, or collections that you add the fic to – so if, for example, you wanted to make a “RACIST BULLSHIT” list of fics and start adding them on there, that is within your power, and the author can’t stop you. Alternately, if you want to set up a shared collection with friends where you add and share fics that DONT contain those things, you can totally do that too and share it for others to use.
(I actually work on one of those, where there’s a very creepy character who’s often a fan favorite in fics, so myself and some other people who hate him set up a collection of fics which do not mention him at all, or only portray him as the slimeball he is.)
AO3 also has RSS feeds, so you could stream a certain kind of fic to somewhere else – say, a tumblr – and moderate from there, either by screening fics before they’re posted or by adding tags/warnings and deleting fics at your discretion or follower request. Streaming RSS feeds to tumblr blogs requires no code knowledge and can be set up in maybe half an hour.
So the current system where people dont tag racism and homophobia and all that other terrible stuff thus rendering filtering and avoiding that stuff useless and pretty hard to is fine but allowing people to tag something (which people can choose to ignore by the way) to make the tags more effective against racism and homophobia is a problem? Okay.
Also no one else does it so why should we is not a valid argument its actually pretty childish.
I’m glad there is all this extra and time consuming stuff that can be done but it is not to much to ask that avoiding racist homophobic etc content be as easy to avoid as it is for me to avoid a ship I dont like.
If AO3 is gonna be steadfast in not dealing with stuff that perpetuates racism and homophobia etc that’s the least that could be done.
Okay, cool, you use this hypothetical system to tag racism, and you always use it carefully, and people are better warned because of your tags, and everything is better. For….. oh, I’d give it 6 hours on the outside, after the update goes live.
Then somebody goes back and retaliates by tagging all of your posted fics with innacurate warnings or worse. Or tags all of your fics with racism back, regardless of how relevant it is. Somebody else goes through and tags every single fic with a certain ship with homophobia, or racism, or pedophilia, or incest, or abuse, because of a ship war. This renders your carefully curated tags irrelevant as somebody goes through and tags every fic that mentions or implies a ship as racist. Some troll tags a bunch of fics with slurs and nonsense tags. People start using tags to flame or discourage people from reading ships they don’t like. People start using tags to bash a specific author.
It would not just be you and yours who would get that power; it would be millions of people. It would be homophobes and racists having the power to post tags on the front page of your fics. It would be people who hate you having the power to affect how others see your work. This is a two way street; any power you gain over homophobes writing fic, they also gain over you and any fic you write.
You don’t trust people to tag their own racism, but you trust them to not exploit power that you give them? Why?
Does this person go to Barnes&Noble and throw tantrums about racist books there?
B&N sells Mein Kampf. It sells The Art of the Deal. It sells Ayn Rand’s entire bibliography. It sells books by misogynist “pick-up artists.” It also sells books on feminism, the civil rights movement, and novels by queer authors!
But, despite it having a variety of works by authors with greatly varying morals and politics, I’ve never seen anyone over the age of 4 get mad about bookstores existing.
^^^like i said before, if you are against sites like Ao3 existing, you are against libraries.
Given that so many of the people calling for these reader tags and other forms of archive ‘moderation’ ie censorship also equate plain old depiction with ‘romanticization’ and ‘fetishization’, I wouldn’t trust them the slightest with that kind of power. There’s a world of difference between ‘this fic portrays racism’ and ‘this fic is racist’. It’s a distinction they have proven themselves over and over unable to make.
How is asking for a better tagging system censorship? Like do yall even know the meaning of that word or is it just your catchall for stuff you dont like?
Reader tagging => dogpiling => hostile fic environment => driving writers off the site.
You know exactly where things would end up, don’t play innocent. You festering donkey cunts are the last people with any right to wail about the meanings of words.
I think if a murderer wanted to lure me out of my room all they’d have to do is turn off my wifi cause sure as shit I’m gonna go see why it isn’t working
touch my wifi you asshole and i wont be the one whos getting murdered tonight
Ardwynna's Place 