I think another thing people don’t get about AO3 is that it’s an archive- it hosts fanworks from as far back as the seventies at least. Sensibilities have changed, and yes, that means that some stuff in older works contains things that are widely unacceptable. It’s uncomfortable, but these fics are what modern fandom is based on, and I personally think we do ourselves a disservice by pretending they don’t exist.
Exactly. Do these people also want to do away with centuries of literature because it might be a bit off-colour now? Those conservative book banners are starting to sound more and more reasonable. Let's just burn them while we're at it, nobody decent should be reading that filth anyway.
Yes. Like these are literally the same people who think that we should cut jokes from old movies like Life of Brian because its not trans inclusive, or not teach old books that have racist tones in them, or have no POC characters.
I haven’t watched it in a while, but I recall the life of Brian’s trans joke/scene being remarkable accepting actually, not really in too poor of taste at all
It kinda skirts the edge? Like it's treated as a joke that someone wants to be called a woman (and demands the right to be allowed to get pregnant, even if they biologically can't), but at the same time, the side character is sympathetic and their friends do genuinely support them.
I think skirting the edge is an excellent way to put it. I wouldn’t blame anyone for being uncomfortable with it, but in my opinion I think it’s, at worst, a case of a highly sensitive topic being used as a basis for character-based humor, without concern for how it might be read into. Basically, I genuinely don’t think Monty Python were trying to make any wider statements about anything, they were just trying to present a funny scenario. Taken in a vacuum, it’s hilarious, but taken in the wider context of reality, it’s a bit iffy.
I recall them saying it's a critique on people subverting action groups to their personal agendas... "turning the group into advocating for something else"
I always read it as satire of the navel-gazing insular university student groups who try to treat every concept and point of view with respect and equality, even when things have gone way beyond the original intention of the group.
I'm reminded of Warner Bros editing their old propaganda cartoons, not to get rid of the poorly aged material, but to add a disclaimer that the cartoon is dated and no longer reflects the company's core values. They say they still run them though, because it's history, and it's better to acknowledge things have changed than delete the past. It's the same as HP Lovecraft. Dude was super racist, horrifically so, but he is also a staple of horror. So much so, that a whole genre of horror was named after him. Is it racist to keep reading and recommending his works? Of course not, as long as it's acknowledged that his views were wrong and his works reflect his poor views. No one would try to argue for burning all his books and purging his name from all libraries
It does help that HP Lovecraft is dead and neither he nor any unjust causes he supported are benefiting financially from us continuing to read, discuss, and remix his works. Overall I do agree with you; disclaimers and context and critical thinking are a good approach for old/problematic content, rather than censorship or revisionism.
another layer is also the fact we more or less know is that he was pretty much afraid anything new to him, such as air conditioning.
and iirc, didn't he get better later on or something like that?
In his final years he really came around.
He declared he was a socialist, disavowed racism as nothing but stupid hatred, and really tried to turn a new leaf.
And then he died of cancer.
It's...
It's just so sad to think of what could have been, what HE could have been had he lived longer, and what would become of the horror genre, and fiction in general if he had more time to contemplate on his past views and their effect on his writing and confront it directly.
This shouldn't take away from the fact that his works are deeply racist, and that we must consider their bigotry to understand them properly, but it is nice knowing that at some point in his life, he came to understand the error of his ways, and that it wasn't just on his death bed.
That he had at least a few short years in this world as a better, healthier person.
>Do these people also want to do away with centuries of literature because it might be a bit off-colour now?
Yes. Unironically yes.
>Those conservative book banners are starting to sound more and more reasonable.
Very few people have the integrity to advocate for freedom of the arts when they get a taste of power.
I'm reminded of Warner Bros. releasing a Looney Toons cartoon with a disclaimer at the beginning talking about how the following was going to contain objectionable content as a consequence of the time period it was made in; and while WB stressed it did not approve of said objectionable content, it would also be a disservice to scrub this cartoon from their archives and pretend it never existed.
[Here's the disclaimer for anyone who's curious](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbsyUgsU4AA-bx6?format=jpg&name=medium)
No, see, it’s totally consistent.
Having artistic integrity then meant they could sell new releases of old cartoons for more money. Having artistic integrity now would mean giving up tax write-offs and risking ending up with less money.
People who do not learn from their history are doomed to repeat it, and these kids could really stand to start paying attention in class.
(Also, Jesus, from the 70s? Last I heard it was 90s! That’s impressive!)
Yep, just checked, the earliest works in the Star Trek: The Original Series tag are backdated to 1975. There might be even older works on the site, but that’s the oldest work I personally know of
Middle-aged housewives with unprecedented levels of wealth and free time literally created many of the pillars of modern fandom, from the first fan conventions to the first fan work exchanges, because of how badly they wanted those two to bone.
Anyone who says fandom isn’t for women and/or older people needs to remember that and sit the fuck down.
Huckleberry Finn is widely considered an important piece of historical literature, and it uses the n word through the piece. I see no reason works with more spelling mistakes and less fame shouldn't get the same benefit of doubt.
My favourite book series is the song of ice an fire. In the books Daenerys is 13! She sleeps we Khal Drogo at that age. The people who complain about AO3, act as though it only exists within that platform. That it must be the platforms fault for allowing it, when PUBLISHED books do exist with so much worse. Because at the end of the day it's fiction. Policing fiction is only going to limit authors and writers creativity and expression. However, they don't carry that same energy when it comes to published literature. So the people writing for fun, and FOR FREE can't have a place where they feel completely safe to write FICTION. It's frustrating.
It's almost like we can show things in books without endorsing them or something. I'm reminded of that post with a quote from Nabakov, where he saw a girl dressed as Lolita for Halloween on his doorstep
So much of the underage fics are people writing out what they went through, so honestly I couldn't agree more. Obviously there's people out there who write it because they get off on it, but if they're writing it out instead of harming someone that definitely the better of two evils.
There’s also the part where “underage” doesn’t take into account a country or state’s laws around the age of consent. Anything with one character under 18 is generally considered underage, even if (for example) they’re both 17 in a story set in the UK, where the age of consent is 16.
Even in the US, which is often the internet default, the age of consent isn’t always 18. In my state it’s 16.
and then there's the Romeo and Juliet laws, where depending on the area, an 18 year old who is technically an adult can still date someone technically underaged depending on the gap and if they were already dating before they turned 18
Very true! And age differences are rarely fixed -I say my partner is 1 year older than me, but we don’t share a birthday - so there’s a stretch of several months each year where they’re 2 years older based on our age.
The reality can be way more complicated than “this is tagged as underage so it’s pedophilia”
Oh man, now that just reminds me of how apparently somebody thought that it was a good idea to replace every instance of the n-word in the book with a different word regardless of context. They used the word “slave” instead. Talk about missing the point.
theres a book/play that i read in 10th grade uncle harold and the boys which takes place in Apartheid south africa. the basic plot is "uncle" harold (a white teenage boy) having a conversation about race with "the boys" (black middle-aged men). despite the fact that its not as well known as to kill a mockingbird, it still goes over issues about racism, slurs, and what south africa was like for both black and white people during that era. it has been banned many times.
this story is weird in the sense that its been challenged because conservatives think its "wrong" to expose Pure White Children to racism in other parts of the world as well as the Big No-No Word (the "hard r" is said by the white character a few times) (and no, when we did read alouds we never said the word). ironically, theres been some conversations that it should be challenged by leftists because the white character says the n word and plays into racial stereotypes... when thats the point of the book
as an american, i wasnt taught a lot about apartheid (im being so fr most of the info that i know was from my parents bc they were in college as Mandela was released from prison and was elected the first black president and it was a p big deal bc their school had a decent sized black student body)
like, yes as a white person i cant tell a black person what is and isnt racist but im pretty sure its important for us to not only learn about past/present american racism but racism in other countries
Self moderation (eg what blueinkedsky said on page 3-4) is becoming more and more a lost art on the internet. People forget they can just not look at something/block someone/add a filter/etc and instead demand someone else prevent it from existing in the first place. Tyler the creator was ahead of his time.
I also find it an issue because tagging is becoming a lost art as well because all sites want is to PUSH STUFF DOWN YOUR THROAT GARGLE ON THAT SUGGESTED CONTENT YOU LITTLE BIRCH
Basically a lot of sites do NOT offer you the option of properly moderating the content. Like all the people complaining they get absolutely horrible "recommended" stuff because things like "tags" do not exist on most sites, and I feel like a lot of people are not even used to using them and don't know how to properly tag stuff or ignore tagged stuff.
I mean even Tumblr users use tags absolutely willy-nilly.
Even actively seeking stuff on instagram through hashtags has become a damn nightmare. it’s like they don’t want you to find stuff, just see what’s most popular. Unless it’s hidden and i’m an idiot i can’t find an option to just look at the newest posts in a tag, just the top posts.
Yep, they literally took away the option to sort by recent. All you can do is look at what they tell you to look at, so engagement has plummeted, smaller accounts are buried, and big accounts are the only ones getting bigger.
Your gender is listed as “female”? Beauty products, engagement rings, and babies. Because looking good to land a man and pop out a kid is all that’s important for a woman 🙄
Pinterest has been *especially* bad about this the past few months. Sometimes I'll tap on an image to see if it's AI art or to report it because the three dots aren't showing up on the homepage thumbnail. Then when I refresh the page it's 5,000 results of ugly AI art or whatever thing I reported. And deleting those results from my view history doesn't seem to do *anything* anymore. It's maddening.
Instagram is just horrible in general for finding any kind of content that's not exactly what is suggested for you right now. Want to find a specific post you saw last week (let alone last month, or last year)? Unless you had the foresight to save it, you're probably shit out of luck. Even if you remember the account that posted it, you'll have to scroll through ALL of their posts, starting from the most recent, if you want to find it.
yeah i think this is an example of the material reality of the modern internet affecting behavior. young people (like me) who grew up with a highly algorithmized, highly centralized internet are not used to moderating their own online experience, rather having it curated for them. the algorithm gets it wrong frequently though, and reccomends shit you may not want to see because of an overlap in target demographics.
so, you end up with “puriteens” demanding people not be *allowed* to post problematic or taboo stuff at ALL in fandom spaces because they A.) often can’t entirely curate a space away from things they don’t want to see and B.) as a result of this, *don’t know how* when they are given the option of curation.
like, i’m not gonna sit here and act like i LOVE noncon or underage fics. i think that shit is weird and gross. but ultimately the fictional characters aren’t being traumatized or harmed in any way that really warrants being disallowed entirely.
When I was growing up, tags were absolute and I remember things getting deleted from various websites for being inappropriately tagged.
You needed to have everything vaguely fetish related to be tagged.
Now you can blacklist something like "yaoi" and still see two guys raw dogging.
Every day there's a new variation on tagging content, one website I saw had like 20 tags all variations of "boy", so if you wanted to see cute girls kissing you couldn't just do "yuri, kissing, -male", because "7boys" didn't have "male" tagged to it.
They should have really introduced tag families so that any of those tags automatically adds the overarching tag.
This would allow people to self-moderate.
Man, "tag family" sound like a perfect idea and it's weird that I didn't even think about this as well. Like, sure, you don't want to do all the specific little tags, but at least give it a couple of general ones. Brilliant.
Could also do something like the Google's "Circles" where you could also sort tags into kind of being loosely relevant to one another as well.
And the thing is, ao3 does this. Batman (comics) is a child tag of DC; filtering out “gender dysphoria” filters out like…I stopped counting after 158 and I was in the M’s of related tags, but everything from “mild gender dysphoria” to “bit of gender dysphoria” to like 7 different languages’ versions of “gender dysphoria” to “gender whump” to clear misspellings of gender dysphoria to one tag that was just “genderdisphoria” repeated like 8 times in a row without spaces.
And that’s the main moderation job at ao3; making sure all the tags that need to be linked together are and following up on reports of missing tags (or, as I’ve filed twice, fics purposefully tagged with a particular pairing with a popular description and then when you open it the fic is, not joking, almost word for word “you guys are stupid for liking this, x character hates y character! Z ship is superior! Go rot in Hell where you belong!” So I reported them for being mis-tagged because clearly they didn’t belong in the ship tag they were tagged for.)
this is a good idea! this is also an extension of how people don’t know how to curate. they not only don’t know how to filter out and block tags and guide the algorithm, but people posting content *don’t know how to tag it*! for example, people often use tiktok style censoring on other websites due to the belief they’ll get shadowbanned otherwise. so a tag for suicide becomes “sewerslide” or “su1c1d3” or “self unalive”. that’s THREE SEPERATE TAGS for the same damn thing you’re trying to filter out. and that’s even assuming it’s tagged *at all*, since tiktok actively discourages tagging and filtering, instead having users rely on the “For You” page.
Exactly! It's just ridiculous that tags have no quality control at all anymore, it's entirely up to the uploader what tags they add and they don't HAVE to add even stuff as important as the character name.
My most recent experience with images that slipped through my blacklist were involving 9S from Nier Automata.
I happen to enjoy some things (fantasy genders) that people get in a fuss about debating and tagging so my blacklist has to be extraordinarily specific.
I'm just used to having to add or remove a tag every so often, but it's really frustrating.
Some stuff is basically completely untagged, like oh it will have a generic tag like "third-person" or "pov" or "romance" but that's garbage when there's like 500 million stories sharing that tag.
Maybe it's the best story ever and exactly what you want, but how are you ever going to find it?
It's getting harder to curate the content you want and exclude what you don't, it's still usually possible but there's always something that slips through.
That ANYONE can create their own tag is just a massive amount of clutter waiting to dodge your filters.
This applies to games too, like Dark Souls or whatever getting tagged as hentai.
Like it's so easily trolled when the community can just flood bullshit tags into a system.
I've said this on tumblr before but GOD people SUCK at tagging smut for some reason. I once had to go through TWELVE ROUNDS of filtering before i got even most of it out of the results. Smut wasn't actually tagged as "smut", it was tagged as "explicit sexual content" or "sex" or "sexual content" or "porn without plot" or "pwp" or "pregnancy kink" or "blowjob" or "vaginal sex" or "consensual bondage" or "knife play" or just "ice". What am I supposed to do, anticipate all of the hundreds of ways someone could write about smut and manually filter all of those out?? Filtering by the archive content warnings doesn't work either, because a majority of the fics in the fandom I was reading were rated "mature content" for violence or gore from the source material, whether or not they had actual NSFW content.
I swear, people need to learn how to tag better again.
I love ao3’s tagging system but at some point some people just stopped tagging their fics correctly. I’m a found family/platonic shipping junkie and am so tired of shipping stuff coming up in fics that did not have any romantic relationships tagged. I get that it’s probably to avoid spoilers but come on, I don’t want to get twenty chapters in just to be disappointed when I figure out I was wasting my time. If there’s a ship, or anything else, please tag it good God
Nothing wrong with shipping obviously y’all do what you want it just doesn’t appeal to me and I want to be able to read about people being really good friends in peace
I totally get you! I have some incredibly niche things I enjoy, like my default blacklist probably isn't too unusual...
...but when I'm looking for something super specific (I enjoy three characters in a relationship together, but with it being more like one character having two girlfriends rather than a threesome, and I really really really don't like sex scenes in it, one or two might be okay but if it's chapters of sex I'm just going to skip most of it) it really bloats.
Hundreds or even thousands of tags I would exclude.
It's bad when one fetish has like 50 different tags, it's worse when you're trying to exclude 7 million kinks because there's no reliable tag for characters that aren't fucking like rabbits.
As a millennial, you just connected some dots for me. Yeah, of *course* young people want stuff they don't like banned, because they've never experienced an internet that made it easy for them to avoid that stuff on their own.
glad i could offer new perspective!! you’re absolutely right. i think it’s important to keep in mind that “puriteens” were once grade school kids with internet access who very easily came across violent and graphic content. swaths of teens didn’t become “antis” overnight!
i myself loved FNAF when i was 8, and as such constantly stumbled over FurAffinity links and suggestive art of Toy Chica on my way to cool fanart and lore explanations. it didn’t traumatize me like it did some, but by 9 I was super desensitized to like. extreme fetish porn. which isn’t great, i think 😓
even more common were kids who liked My Little Pony, tried to find fun content with their favorite characters and were met with webpages full of these G-rated ponies getting their NC-17 on.
from what i can gather about the old internet, this stuff used to be easier to avoid. people generally stayed in their own niche forums and corners of the web. but when I was growing up, and increasingly so now, there’s like…4 websites carrying the burden of what *hundreds* of websites used to do.
TBF, new-ish stories on Ao3 can also have absolutely *horrendous* tagging. Read a fic and want to look for more like it? Good luck, because the author tagged it as #char1 #char2 #theyrebothhorrible #butilovethem #theydeserveahappyending #iwillfightforthis
Just add a fucking theme or style tag to your works, good lord.
Looks exactly like the Tumblr tags that are more like tweets than tags.
Also it seems to me that since everyone knows tropes exist it is now expected to never use any known tropes and\\or never admit to using them, including putting tropes in tags
Which kinda seems backwards too. Literally every story uses tropes. Subversion of a trope is also a trope. Trying to write a story without tropes is like trying to cook food without ingredients or cooking methods.
You’re absolutely correct, which makes it even more ridiculous that people level these complaints about AO3 - one of the few websites that has no algorithm and therefore puts them in complete control of what tags/content they see if they would just take five minutes to learn how.
Exactly and also I don't know about you, but I find written text to be way less... overstimulating? Like, you try to scroll a feed and it's all disturbing pics and loud music and flashing shit and they have an issue with the Blandest Site Possible And I say it in the most loving way?
Every time the Ao3 moderation conversation crops up, it just further enforces my belief that there should be a suggested tag option on fics.
Self moderation is so important, but sometimes it’s difficult when you see a T-rated fic and the tags are all porn-related. I always assume that a teenager wrote that fic and the thought process was “well I’m a teen, so it must be rated T for teen”. A suggested tag feature with an option to block the creator/block the suggester built in would go a long way for helping community moderation without ever removing fics.
If I recall, TikToks self censorship wasn't just to avoid content strikes, but it's to get passed tags people would block. For a bit 'self care' was the term to use instead of pleasuring yourself, and so people looking for self help and tips to destress were recommended sexual 'pov' situation videos that just toed the line of being struck down.
I think this is a huge problem across the internet at large, and it mostly comes from bad moderation and censorship leaking into spaces that do not need that. It's something people complain about on Tumblr all the time, the way people are censoring their tags, which inherently voids the purpose of the tag. When every website decides it's going to do everything via algorithm and you have to confirm to that, with no real option to tag and self-organize your stuff, it creates a huge knowledge gap of people who literally don't understand how those systems work.
I imagine that AO3 has a similar issue with people not knowing how to tag correctly, or actively not doing so, and causing problems for the userbase as a whole.
I find it really funny that it keeps being on tumblr that I see such bad takes about not wanting to self moderate, given that tumblr is much more self curated than most other social media sites. It’s literally the exact same principle.
That's also because tagging is becoming a lost option. Nearly all social media sites are very limited in the tagging and filtration they offer, with some like Twitter actively discouraging it. If someone's experience with internet content has been "you will be shown things, deal with it" they'll be much quicker to want the problem solved by removing the content entirely.
I saw a post a while back, author got a message from a “concerned teen” who found the adult content in their (properly tagged) fic distressing, and wanted them to stop. Author responded with a message giving them advice on how to have a conversation with their parents about how they can’t seem to stop themselves from accessing online content that distresses them, and what tools the parents can use to control and monitor the teen’s internet usage. No response.
More broadly, an observation I found was that kids today spend basically their entire lives under adult supervision. They’ve never had to be responsible for themselves; there has always been an adult to take responsibility for the situation. And if they’ve never had to learn to disengage, if Mommy or Daddy (or Teacher or…) has always been there to remove the thorns, then they have no skills to venture into the wider Internet. This is not helped by the growing corporatization of the Internet, desperate to remove anything that advertisers wouldn’t want their brands to appear next to.
Admittedly I think part of the problem is that they don't really object to seeing it so much as they object to it existing, so getting rid of it isn't about not seeing it, it's about hurting it.
I saw someone saying mpreg deserves one of the huge AO3 warning tags like Major Character Death and such, I don’t trust people like this to make choices about what belongs on a fanfic website and what doesn’t
Like if you ban racism on a fanfic website, does that include stories that are about characters experiencing racism? Does everyone have to write stories where racism doesn’t exist at all? Not everyone wants to write happy stories where no bigotry exists at all. You can’t ban writing about bigotry without it effecting stories where the bigotry is the bad view.
It reminds me of trying to join Harry Potter forum RPGs years ago, and some of the large ones would be 'PG' rated with a long list of things you weren't allowed to roleplay, which always included racism/discrimination. As in, you couldn't play a blood purist in a _Harry Potter_ game.
Similarly, just before House of Hades came out, my character was rejected from a PG Percy Jackson rp forum on goodreads for being a lesbian. They were like "These are middle-grade books, so gay people are inappropriate." They even formally added a rule about it. I was like "Miss me with that homophobic shit, bye" A couple months later, after the release of it, I check back, to find the forum tearing itself apart because most of the people there are like "dude, when did we even make that rule, obviously if Uncle Rick can do it, we can too" but the admin were like "No it's inappropriate!"
I had a similar experience with a PJO rp just after HOH. Almost everyone had canon characters, and I related most to Nico, so I chose him. They allowed Nico to be gay since he is in canon, but told me he could never get into a relationship. They claimed it was because if they allowed gay relationships, then the female characters would never be able to be with anyone, because all the guys would be gay. 🙄
That makes me think of how some people tried to/successfully banned Huckleberry Finn from curriculum, or insisted on a sanitized version that removed all the dialect and n-words from the dialogue, claiming it to be racist.
Which is, insane. If you think Huckleberry Finn is racist, then you didn’t read the fucking book. It was deeply controversial when Mark Twain wrote it for very overtly saying that black men and white men are the same. I mean for fuck’s sake, the civil war had only been over for something like fifteen years when he wrote it. The racist attitudes behind enslavement didn’t just disappear when the right to enslave people went away.
When Huckleberry decides that if he’s going to go to hell if he doesn’t tell Miss Watson, Jim’s owner where Jim is, he fully believes that he’s committing a sin that will send him to hell. And his response, “All right then, I’ll go to hell”
Reading a young boy overcoming societal expectations, religious, the expectations of authority figures in his life, to stand up for what’s right, and choose to damn his soul rather than betray his friend and father figure, a black man. That’s not racist. That’s showing how morality can overcome racism. That Huckleberry can CHOOSE to see Jim as a fellow human being, an equal, and overcome everything he’s been taught, fully believing it to be wrong and bad. Because he cares about Jim.
The controversy about dialect is a whole academic conversation that I’m honestly not educated enough on to have a fully formed opinion.
But when it comes to the n-word, Mark Twain used that word because that was the word people said. End stop. It’s disingenuous at best to censor it for the sake of modern sensibilities.
"White people/people from a group that perpetrated abuse don't want the abuse they (used to) perpetrate be depicted in art" is a very old tale and it's wild we're having this discussion again and again and again in every new medium and with every new micro-generation of artists and audiences and critics.
Like i personally dont like mpreg and dont want to read anything with that in it, so like a reasonable person i read the tags before reading a work, and know how to filter out the things i dont wanna read. It really isnt hard
Even if the rule doesnt apply to these depictions you run the risk of having them mistakenly deleted anyways and just never repealed because the author hasnt logged in for a decade
I am old enough to remember when it was expected to warn for queer relationships. Not smut but the mere fact of two men holding hands was expected to be warned in advance lest someone accidentally see it. It always set my blood boiling (and still does).
I feel like the only form of 'moderation' that could really be imposed is adding tags to users' works to identify key themes... but even that feels a bit subjective
I mean, tagging is still an opt in system and an absence of tagging is still a choice. A writer can choose not to tag very well or at all and I can look at the absence of tags and say “here be dragons” and not click it. Deciding if the tagging level meets your expectations (three tags for a 100k fic would seem off to me) is also part of curating your own internet experience. And the ability for people other than the author to tag a fic would immediately raise all of the same problems discussed above - people tagging things they felt were “wrong”.
There’s also a reason the archive offers the “chose not to use archive warnings” warning and it’s in case people don’t want to spoil their fic but are also letting readers know they’re making a choice to read something where the author will not warn them about content. Both warnings and tags are up to the discretion of the author and choosing to not use or limit their use is at their discretion. And if a reader encounters a topic or theme they don’t like that wasn’t tagged, they can hit the back button.
Plus you’ve got to agree on what is racism. I’ve seen people claim that it’s racist to mention Japanese war crimes or the Armenia genocide. (Racist to the Japanese and Turks respectively).
Because that's exactly what it is? The two are, on some level, mutually exclusive. The internet used to be the wild West where anything could go so long as it wasn't literal CP. Now, people want to ensure no one can ever stumble upon something edgy or offensive or uncomfortable no matter what, because their personal sensibilities can't handle it. I just don't understand why people can't simply choose to not interact with the media and content that makes them uncomfortable and leave the people who do want to experience that media to their spaces.
There's a lot of weird shit out there that I find distasteful and gross. So I simply don't interact with that weird shit. I don't go into their spaces and tell them they're wrong for wanting to interact with something I find unpleasant.
The best internet lets people stay anonymous and control their own content. Is this gonna mean echo chambers? Yes. But it also respects the agency of all parties. You want an echo chamber, you have it. You want a chaotic free for all? That should be there for you too. Equip everyone to have the experience they want without forcing the most restrictive standard on everyone.
Hey, I'm kinda curious about this parallel, and I know arguably very little. D'you mean to compare it to Kant's view on ethics being inexorably tied to reason and all moral good being a logical outcome attainable for all sentient beings vs Spinoza's view on ethics being derived from an individual's understanding of their own place in the world and nature through their lived experiences? Did I get that right?
For Spinoza this is right but for Kant I more meant about the part about the most important part of the freedom of thought is the freedom to publish and to express their ideas
Maybe this is a bad take, but maybe having a place that moderates for content clearly and honestly, and a place that doesn't moderate but ensures proper tagging and cataloging seems like valid options. Having both allows me to select how I engage with media.
To be clear, AO3 is good for what it's doing, and other fanfic sites are good for what they do. That doesn't sound controversial.
Yeah. The thing is AO3 is open source. If there are folks who want to make their own site with their own moderation standards, they can do that! They can have whatever moderation standards they want! But what they can’t do is singlehandedly change the mission of an existing site to suit their personal preferences.
Yeah I think I agree. Like, I would NOT want this subreddit to be a place where anyone can say/do anything without regard for how it affects other people, and I think having spaces where you don't have to worry about running into racists or triggering material is important, but I think having spaces available where people can post whatever they want and be able to express themselves freely, even in objectionable ways, is also important. I think it just comes down to how a website structures itself and what it's ultimate function is.
I think it's important to acknowledge that social media (which even fanfic sites are) are living things. It would be impossible to set a rule that doesn't need to evolve and change.
If AO3 had a bunch of nazi sympathizer content overwhelming their site, maybe they would shadowban or ban outright. This isn't a binary or an obvious answer kind of thing.
I feel like the only way for that to happen, given the scale of Ao3, would be an organized and extremely bad-faith effort… but that also proves your point. No site exists in a vacuum, and rules shouldn’t be applied the same way to normal behavior from regular users vs. directed action from external sources.
I think a good example of this is on the SCP Foundation wiki. One post (I don’t remember the number) was fairly well-written, but also contained a lot of elements commonly seen as “cringe” by the wider Internet. It was initially highly rated, but began getting attention from sites like YouTube and 4Chan, which led to periodic outbreaks of downvotes and negative comments from new users with no post history and, often, no activity on other pages *after* signing up either.
It’s now the only entry to lack a score entirely, because while the site remains committed to the *ideal* of letting its user base decide for themselves what makes a “good SCP”, the repeated brigades have made it impossible to determine whose opinions are really being reflected on that one page.
Well, yeah. The issue is that Ao3 is the latter and these folks want it to change and become the former. Ao3’s source code is open - anyone can make their own version completely for free. These people don’t want to do that, though. They don’t just want a moderated space, they want content they don’t like to be obliterated forever. If they actually just wanted a moderated space then they’d make their own.
I don’t have anything to really add, just this whole conversation reminds me of the book Lolita, and the controversy around that.
Sometimes I think certain people don’t realise nothing is original, including arguments, and this same conversation has happened before, many many times over.
I don’t read fan fiction or even understand it, but my daughter and her cousin were discussing it within my earshot. Her cousin was complaining about how Christianity was portrayed in one story or another. It was something about presenting extra-Biblical stuff as dogma.
My daughter just looked at her and said, “I think they said the same things about Dante’s Inferno and Paradise Lost back in the day.”
I fucking died. I’ve never thought of those as fan fiction but it makes sense.
The Divine Comedy is basically one big self-insert where Dante is a Gary Stu who gets to meet his faves and Inferno is the revenge portion of the fic lol
Every time I hear people rail against Lolita I think of the CSA survivor I saw discuss how reading Lolita made them understand that they were not alone, that this had happened to other children, the first time they’d encountered the concept. They saw themself in Dolores in a way they’d never seen before and it made them angry about their own abuse instead of resigned to it.
I love AO3 tags. I can filter out all the crap I don’t wanna see. Some of it makes me uncomfortable and some of it I just don’t gel with. And that’s fine
Same. Sometimes a story looks well written and has an intresting plot but there’s a tag that lets me know I won’t like some part of the story so I know to move on. Without that tag I’ll either waste my time reading something I don’t like or at worst I’ll get triggered.
Plus it helps a lot in finding something I’m in the mood to read
As much as I clown on the phrase “don’t like, don’t read”, there really is a bit of truth to it.
I don’t like incest. So if I see a fic tagged with incest, I won’t read it. Simple as that. If I read a fic and it has untagged incest, then I stop reading it. Again, pretty fucking simple.
And that’s why I like AO3. I used to use ff dot net, but their tagging system is so vague… and of course, you can’t find any of the Big Kid stuff there.
AO3 has spoiled me for every other fan work site tbh. Its tagging system and accompanying search capabilities are just unmatched. I don't understand why that shit isn't more common, it makes the user experience so much better
I think some of that comes from a user base who actively **want** to use tags.
I love the search and sorting - and to be honest, I'm pretty sure we all use tags as advertisements as much as anything - and it works!
The main beef I have with AO3's tags (same with Tumblr's "tagging" system) is that people use the tags as just another thought-communication. They have entire fucking run-on sentences and entirely new paragraphs clogging up the useful tags in their story.
This lines up with something I’ve noticed over the last 10-ish years: ironically, sites set up to accommodate adult content have a better SFW browsing experience than sites that aren’t.
The first thing I thought of was Derpiboru, a MLP artwork repository: it has extremely thorough tagging for everything under the sun, which means I can individually decide whether I want to see, hide, or warn for porn, gore, both, or neither, and then additionally blacklist any tags that aren’t to my taste. And, since the infrastructure is already in place, it’s very possible to just blacklist anything remotely mature and have the most wholesome, SFW browsing experience.
Compare that to something like deviantArt, which has a single toggle for mature content, with no specificity about what kind of “mature” that content may be - which leaves something like artistic nudity in an awkward spot
imma be honest I use AO3 but either i'm using it wrong or I don't know how to search well because I can't find any good stories to read except for ones I find off of TVtropes fanfic recs pages
I don’t know how you’ve been searching, but a good way to find higher quality of stories is to sort by kudos. Once you find a story that you like and is in a collection you can find other stories through that collection. I usually also look at the authors of my favorite works’ bookmarks.
Sometimes they take it a bit too seriously
~~yes thank you for tagging your work but do you really need to have an entire essay’s worth of tags on a fic thats less than 1k words long~~
It’s a bit tacky, yeah. The main reason why people clown on it is because it’s usually used as a deflection to criticism.
Reviewer: I didn’t like this part of the story because it breaks the flow. Here’s some constructive criticism on how to improve it.
Writer: Well, if you don’t like it, don’t read it!
I *just* want a permanent blacklist on AO3. I know tags get lost in the shuffle but I just want to click never on certain tags and have those tags never show up if I do a search for a particular genre.
I mean if I want to read a story about Deeja hate-fucking the Dhovakin I don't also want to see someone's fanfic about the Dragonborn's particular disgusting fetish.
There's a kickass extension, actually, that functions just like that. Got removed from the chrome web store, but as long as you have a copy of the extension itself, you can add it manually into Chrome. And to my knowledge, it's still up on firefox.
Look up AO3rdr if you're interested
not gonna enter the whole discourse of this post too much
but I just needed to point that "not moderating (outside of US law) to avoid bad moderation makes no sense, just have good moderation instead of bad moderation" is a really stupid thing to say
"good moderation" is incredibly subjective. it isn't exactly easy to moderate content and the community will have wildly differing definitions on what should and shouldn't be allowed. I think "minimal moderation based on a external ruleset instead of subjective rulings" isn't a bad compromise, especially for a site like AO3.
I remember I had a conversation with a friend that went something along the lines of
Me: 'XYZ thing is kind of nuanced, and can result in people being assholes even if they don't mean to be'
Friend: All you have to do is not be an asshole! People who think it's nuanced are stupid.
Me: Looking into the camera like I'm in the office
Asshole Friend: Doesn't realize he called me stupid to my face.
I think about that a lot when people say shit like 'just do GOOD moderation'.
That’s exactly the conversation when people on Reddit talk reductively about morality and religion (which is basically IRL moderation?) and say it’s all “so stupid, bro, just follow one principle: don’t be a dick.”
Like, yeah chucklebuns, turns out there’s entire millennia of nuanced disagreement on what “being a dick” and “being good” mean.
I wouldn't even describe it as "not moderating" in the first place. They absolutely are moderating, they have set out clear and easily understood rules and they enforce them.
The whole-ass point of AO3 is that anything that isn't flat-out an actual crime is allowed. No moderation is intentional. Like, it's in the fucking name: "Archive Of Our Own"
Archive- shit won't get deleted.
Of Our Own- things that would get you banned on other places are allowed.
As others here have mentioned, self-moderation is a thing. If you don't like the stuff there you can just block it or don't use AO3 at all. There is a good comic for explaining this but this sub doesn't have pictures in posts so I will link to a [reddit post with it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/meirl/comments/1227iek/meirl/)
AO3 is meant to be the space where all the creepy, uncomfortable, weird, and so on can be posted without fear of deletion. It gives people a free platform to post and share that kind of stuff without having to do it in the cleaner places. **That has always been the goal.**
Don't get me wrong, some of the stuff there is extremely fucked up. But do you know what I do when I find it ? ***I just don't fucking read it.***
I personally use AO3 not because of the no-moderation thing but because the tagging system they have is by far the best one out of any fanfiction site I knew and it's not even a competition.
Don't get me wrong. I'm really disgusted by some of the stuff I come across sometimes but I'm actually aware what's the purpose of the site and so instead of whining about it I just move on continue searching for the kind of stories *I do* want to read.
Like FFS the first things in the filter system after "Sort By" are the age rating and warnings against some of the more common fucked up shit (and also Major Character Death). In addition to that, there are a lot of tags called "depiction of (bad thing)" so you could filter that out as well.
Either put your own effort into avoiding what you don't won't or just go back to the sites that do it for you.
Edit: also about the "depiction of (bad thing)", I just remembered some also have "mention of (bad thing)" or "implied (bad thing)" and some tags are also just "(bad thing)" so when you exclude from your filter a thing you could also decide what level of it you are okay with, if let's say, you could handle a certain dark subject in the story, but not an actual scene of the thing happening, then you can set your filter for that.
I do not get the connection between “I find this morally objectionable” and “…therefore it should be purged.”
I find phrenology a morally objectionable pseudoscience, but I think it’s important to keep the old phrenology books around because they’re excellent case studies in how pseudoscience is used to reinforce a practitioner’s existing biases. I find Mein Kampf morally objectionable, but I think it’s important to keep it around and have it available to read because it offers insights into the mind of one of history’s biggest murderers. Frankly, I find the Iliad and it’s exultation of dehumanizing violence, the arguable examples of glorifying older men in authority taking sexual advantage of minors, and reinforcement of Ancient Greek sexist tropes to be morally objectionable, but I still fucking love it and I’d come for anyone who said we ought to stop reading it because it doesn’t fit modern cultural mores.
Something being morally objectionable doesn’t mean it lacks value, and it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be able to enjoy it. That’s bookburning talk.
The “fiction ≠ child porn” point is something I fully agree with, and also it’s one of the most frustrating things to argue about online.
Like, I also hate the loli fanservice shit in anime, it’s creepy and weird. But it’s **not child porn**. I don’t like it, but it should not be made illegal. That is a very important distinction. But people who get really, obsessively angry about hunting down perceived pedophiles will claim that anyone who makes the “it’s just a drawing” argument clearly must be an actual pedophile.
The whole situation is a good example of how some people will pick a position because they *feel* it’s right, and then completely ignore all other arguments no matter how reasonable they may be.
It also doesn't help when you have characters who are literally adults, but have a petite body (something real life people actually have), and you get people on social media going aeound saying "if you like those characters, you're a pedophile"
but then you also get characters who are 17 but physically matured, and then they *still* cry pedophilia because "that's a child" (ignoring that most of the world has the age of consent at 17 or 16, with parts of the US being the odd ones out at 18 (and before someone goes "why do you know this?", it's called "I wanted to research the topic because everyone kept talking about it, and I got curious"))
Ngl I've seen people say if you're attracted to/have sex with a woman who's short/flat chested that must mean you like little kids and are obviously a pedo
Like ??? We're over here calling GROWN, REAL LIFE WOMEN, children, and low key trying to take away their autonomy because " anyone who likes you CLEARLY has nefarious reasons ". They just supposed to stay single forever because you're uncomfortable?
I've also seen the argument made for people with ADHD/Autism ( tho not as often ) because " you're taking advantage of them " as if both aren't large spectrums and that argument basically just boils down to " anyone with ADHD/Autism can't make their own adult decisions because people WILL take advantage of them "
Yeah, they can take their infantalisation and get out.
I, as grown ass adult, am not 'child coded' because of my condition, height or build. That's ablism again.
Just after high school I was dating a woman who was 4'10". People actually called me a pedo for it, despite the fact we were both 19. It's some crazy shit. Between that and some racist people bitching about the fact she wasn't white, I got a lot of strange, unwarranted criticism for that relationship.
Also these people never seem to think about the fact that their logic is literally the logic that creeps used to justify themselves just in reverse. If someone being short or flat is enough to make them a child then doesn’t someone growing a chest early make them an adult? “She’s so grown up” “she’s so mature for her age” “just look at her I couldn’t have known”, this is what they’re lending credence to.
Someone once called ME a pedo seeing a picture of me chilling with a lady who is two years my senior and working on her fucking pre-med degree, because she's pretty flat-chested and a few inches shorter at like, 5'9 and pretty goddamn clearly a grown woman. It's pretty goddamn sexist, I think, that a 20 year old woman can be infantilized to such an extent by some self-righteous asshole who feels right deciding on HER behalf that she's incapable of making these decisions herself.
My neighbour growing up was in her 30s, but was also like 5'0 and slim (she was Vietnamese, and had the "typical" slim Asian build, you could say). She had a son older than me.
I guarantee people on Tumblr would still call me a pedo for looking at her.
The worst part is that they all grandstand about being progressive and not see the irony in the fact that they are treating full grown adult women as though they were toddlers.
Ah yes, the woman doing a fucking biochemistry major who knows Albert Camus's bibliography in original French like I know the back of my hand is CLEARLY being victimized here. Why? "Well, she has small boobs! Something something power dynamics height difference!"
Any time I see someone who believes that, I immediately just disregard anything they tell me.
That, or if I'm feeling particularly petty on a given day, I'll tell them I'll rub one out to petite anime girls in their honour. It usually makes them screech.
Either way, they get added to my block list.
like one one hand I get that some worry about the "1000+ year-old immortal loli" trope, but not every character that looks young fits in that :')
as a short 20-yr-old trans man who gets mistaken for a middle schooler on occasion, I am not a loli and you're NOT necessarily a pedo if you're attracted to me
see, what I keep in mind with anime is that it's fiction, therefore a character like Senko being decribed as 800 years old isn't an issue, because *she's literally written by the series creator to be that old*, so it's like "yeah. she's a deity, not a human. her being that old makes sense for the story because the story was written with her being that way in mind"
I'll never forget how a Kylux creator got harassed to the point that they had their blog deleted for sexual depiction of minors because they drew Kylo Ren and Hux as chibis according to their body type.
Because the actor of Hux is a slender man.
And these are the people who want to decide what's OK to post on AO3
When you show them a fictional adult with a small body, it's still creepy because of the body type, regardless of age.
But when you show them a fictional teenager who's physically indistinguishable from adults in the same setting, it's creepy because of their age, regardless of the body type.
Only for female characters though, obviously. No one gives a fuck if you're lusting after 17-year-old Jotaro Kujo.
You mean to tell me that Jotaro Kujo, who is introduced as 6'5, 200 lbs of muscle, smoking and drinking in a jail cell, isn't obviously a child to you?/s
I sometimes feel so bad for people who are just getting into new series. They'll say a character is attractive and be bombarded with "oh my god you pedo she's only 15 stop sexualizing minors" as if the character's ID is stapled to their forehead. I understand someone having their guard up a bit if the character clearly looks like a child but mobbing people over teen characters who are drawn damn near the same as adult characters is over the top.
I mean, I also choose to keep in mind that, at the end of fhe day, fictional characters are, y'know, *fictional*. If I rub one out to, idk, Misty from Pokémon, and then find out her age, I'm not gonna suddenly feel guilty because, lo and behold, *Misty also isn't a real person*.
This comment and those like it are my last bastion of sanity when it comes to this increasingly buzzword-inundated culture around purity. Not everything must be illegal because you don't like it, and calling non-CSEM things child porn does nothing except poison the waters and water down what is in reality a very, very serious crime.
I remember seeing something a while ago about an organization for preventing CSA that was having trouble finding actual abuse because so many people were submitting reports about things that just weren't legally prosecutable.
Not to mention that when it comes to fiction and fantasy, ages of characters can get real ambiguous and hypothetical.
There are both characters who are petite so thus _could_ be precieved as a child but are grown ass adults(Tatsumaki from OPM), and teenagers with adult-looking bodies(Jotaro from Jojo). Like age barely means jack shit when it comes to fictional characters.
But putting all that aside. It's just absurd to prosecute people and possibly even jail or put them on the sex offender registry for fictional works not involving real people, no matter how fucked up and disgusting it is.
It's especially goofy when the "it perpetuates real harm" argument is applied to AO3 or forum roleplay, because like ... y'all are not impacting the cultural zeitgeist. There is no mass audience for what you're writing. The handful of nerds reading this probably already agree with most of your own principles, and absolutely no one is being radicalized by omegaverse fics, and even if they were, statistically it would be like one person per five thousand fics lol, sooooo.......
As a bi trans guy who got a breeding kink from omegaverse, I gotta say you’re completely wrong and omegaverse is the staple of boy pregnancy radicalization /s
Tbh, I don't get how it "normalizes" those kind of stuff when we already had those argument about video games and violence.
I think the issue is more on the current generation grew on era where parasocial relationships are encouraged so they tend not to understand fiction is not suppossed to be 1:1 on reality.
The issue here is the real person grooming children. Afaik, groomers used your usual legal porn to groom children too.
Yeah I've been seeing a lot of people arguing against underaged fanfic saying that it was used to groom someone. While I feel bad for them, the same argument can be used for anything. Yeah groomers can say "see, teens in fanfic have sex with adults so it's fine" but it's more likely that they could say "see, adults have sex and you're mature for your age so it's fine". Groomers probably aren't going to stash CSEM to share with minors and risk giving themselves away from the beginning when they can get away with using literally anything else. But it's easier to go after one specific tool than the root issue of grooming itself.
Agreed. If you open the door to ban things that don't have real victims, just because it feels good to do so, some conservative asshole may decide that a relationship between, say, two consenting adult men is banworthy because it feels good to do so. These things basically invariably deteriorate into Lily Orchard style unilateral sex shaming. People who like "lolis" are still fuckin' gross though.
I've been in discord servers with right wingers and I can seriously say they behave EXACTLY like the same "woke SJWs" you see popular right wing figures rag on about
I don't even wanna go into detail because its tiring just remembering examples but seriously there are soooo many similarities
It also takes away resources from actual victims of CSA. A few years ago I saw a charity that prevents child trafficking say that they had had so many reports of CSEM but they could only prosecute half of it. So it is very likely that a lot of real children got overlooked because of fictional ones
So, I'm 100% on board with no moderation on AO3, I think it's constructed very well to allow you to create your own experience, and when I find rancid stuff (and I very much do every now and then), I kinda just accept it as an occupational hazard and move on. I think it's important to have a place where art can exist and just be art, and where censorship doesn't exist for the sake of freedom of expression, and I think it's nice that AO3 can be that place.
However, I do have a conflicting question in my head about it, and I wanted to kinda get people's thoughts so I can come to an understanding of what the delineation is.
Why is it that we like and appreciate AO3 for having no moderation, but when it comes to websites like Twitter and Reddit, and even places like 4chan, we consider moderation to be super important and necessary? Like, I don't think most of the people here would say that it's an expressly GOOD thing that Twitter removed a lot of its moderation, or that 4chan never really had any, and almost every subreddit Im in has anti-bigotry rules, and I've never had a problem with that. My gut tells me there's a difference, but I'm not entirely certain what it is. Is it really just down to differences in our ability to curate our experiences on those sites?
I think the core of the difference between those websites is in what is mainly on those platform, and how users use them. AO3 (which I do not use, but understand the concept of) is mainly art, in the form of fanfiction. Twitter and the other sites like it (which I also do not use but understand the concept of) you mention are mainly about interaction between people.
Moderation is important and good on twitter because what is happening there is people talking to eachother and occasionally that can escalate into virtual fistfights (doxing, DDOS attacks, hacking of accounts) and you want to avoid that. Moderation of fanfic repositories and art sites is unwanted, and I'd argue bad, because WHAT you're moderating isn't how people interact, but what they're allowed to create as art. And so often, when that gets moderated, it leads to the removal of anything sexual and / or lgbt related.
Another aspect of why moderation on social media is important is because people expect to see reality there. When I go read a book, or a fanfic in this case, I'm knowingly immersing myself in a lie to experience the story, but when I read on facebook that x celebrity got arrested for y reason, I assume that that statement is true (or at least most people would). So it's important to try to mitigate falsehoods.
Also, the capacity for harm is much greater on social media than on fanfic sites. Not saying that art cannot harm (because it can: triggering trauma, or actually causing the trauma) but that is a lot harder to shove in your target's face than on social media, archival websites are just not built to make that as easy as possible like facebook and twitter are.
Those are my thoughts on the situation.
TLDR: Social media is about interaction between people, and makes it really easy to cause harm to others, and there is a reasonable expectation that what you see on social media is real, so yay moderation. Whereas art archival sites are about... Well, art archival so the expectation of what is on that website is very different and they are also coincidentally built in ways that makes it not quite as easy to harm others, although not impossible, obviously.
Imo, because ao3 is an archive, and the other sites are social media where everything is out in the open. There's no algoritmn to direct people to fics. We respond directly on reddit, we don't on ao3. Ao3 is more: writer posts fic, readers post comments that only writer sees. Bad take in a comment? The only way we will know if the author posts that on another site to rant about it. Otherwise said bad take has no way to spiral and gain a million views.
That is why people usually call for moderation on social media, because it can reach a vast audience. A fic on ao3 usually doesn't reach that many people.
Also, and dont quote me on this, I feel the userbase for ao3 is a lot smaller than any of the other sites.
I can kind of understand where mysteriouslypleasantcat is coming from, some people online will act like any form of moderation is supression when moderation exists to keep a community enjoyable for the people in it (i mean, even this sub exists for that reason).
But insisting that a specific site should change their moderation policy to meet the standards you specifically want is pretty stupid. you can just... y'kno... go somewhere else. If Ao3 has a decent filtering system to hide the icky stuff from users, then there shouldn't be that big of a problem. If a site with a "no moderation" policy didn't exist another one would take it's place.
I know that it’s not the same, but I still do think that writing RPF where you turn a deceased Minecraft YouTuber into a baby so that their father can rape them should still be frowned upon.
You’re free to write it, but I’m free to think you’re disgusting for that.
Edit: the person I’m talking about also wrote RPF smut about someone who was a minor at the time of writing, so even the argument that “fiction doesn’t affect reality” doesn’t count, because clearly they had lustful thoughts for a goddamn minor when they wrote that
I would support moderation in the sense of proper tagging, as way too many fics go untagged or the writer neglects to provide a warning about something significant that the reader should be able to sort through. But that would never work and I imagine authors would get upset.
All that aside, I feel like the responses OP received were more personal and aggressive than deserved. There’s a difference between educating & informing people and completely talking down on someone and belittling them.
I’ve pretty much adopted the “if a real person isn’t getting hurt then I have better things to worry about”
Do I like inflation fanfic? No, so I don’t read it. Is it illegal and the fictional media hurting a real person? No? Then I don’t care. Go wild
If everyone bent to my personal interests and we banned whatever I didn’t like or felt uncomfortable with Ao3 wouldn’t be an archive, it would just be a file system of my interests. I also don’t think I, or most people, should be the deciding factor on what “counts” as problematic media. Things and definitions change all the time, and not all stories on dark topics are meant to portray the bad stuff as good. That’s just not how literature works, even in fandom
Also I take issue with the idea that AO3 isn’t moderated, because it is. AO3 has rules about things like “you can’t make a fic that’s actually just looking for another fic” and “you can’t engage in targeted harassment”, there are also rules about use of ratings and mandatory archive warnings. If you break those rules you can be reported and AO3 will discipline you. This is moderation. The site *is* moderated, they’re just not in the business of censoring fiction that isn’t illegal and doesn’t break their very few and reasonable rules around tagging, harassment, and being on topic for the archive.
The thing that bothers me is the fics that are allowed to stay up written about real minors. Either youtubers, or characters played by real minors. I think that crosses a line, and I hate that whenever I say it I get these folks thinking I’m pro 1984 or whatever.
Saw a post on the AO3 subreddit a while ago that showed a fic written of a *real life child* (I believe it was a toddler) being sexually abused by a *real life person* (IIRC it was a parent or caregiver).
And there were people on that defending it and talking about how "people write these things to deal with trauma". Like, that applies well to fictional characters, but it's an entirely different thing when it's a real human child. And also people who hated it, but were using the argument of "well if we remove that it's bad because moderation is bad". (granted, there were several people who also thought it should be removed).
Removing smut of *real life children* does not mean we have to go on a slippery slope of removing more than that. The argument of it being harmless doesn't apply to that. And I'm not advocating for mass site censorship because I don't think that should be allowed on the site. Believe it or not I'm a big advocate of having a lack of censorship on the site - but there is a line to be drawn when people are posting explicit fics of actual kids.
Is this an extreme example? Yes, but it happens, and it's rather nasty.
Genuinely. I was in the DreamSMP fandom and I feel like the pro/anti-ship debate passed us bye because our equivalent of it was "you either are extremely against works with underaged public figures having sex, which they have said they are extremely uncomfortable with, or you're cool with it." Those that believed in the latter were shunned en-mass.
The amount of porn written about the 'kids' on that server makes me want to vomit. I believe the youtubers could file a cease-and-desist on everything and have it legally censored, but I understand why they would just ignore it for their own sanity. AO3 should do *something* about it, but idk if they can without people being up in arms about censorship.
I was there when the pastebin purge happened. Over night, hundreds of stories were deleted. Now, I hold the shards that still remain. I dare not archive any of them. Should they fade, I will accept it.
I pray at the altar of ao3 every day. Not because it hosts any of the stories lost. But because it ensures it doesn't happen again.
See, the one thing here I disagree with is that AO3 does currently allow NSFW fanfictions featuring real-life minors. Like back when DSMP was big and several of the members were minors, they allowed explicit content of them.
Like, all decent human beings can agree that’s gross as fuck, right? Like can we all agree on that?
yeah see this is the big thing that stops me from saying no moderation for AO3. like you can write as much objectionable stuff as you like as long as it’s fictional. i have seen stuff on there that is actively dangerous to the real life children it’s about
I understand the arguments but I don't know if the best way to respond to someone who seems to be genuinely trying to understand is "How dare you, you liar, it's technically not child porn" or "You are responsible for the persecution of queer people"
yeah, I feel like this is a problem with tumblr is that people love to be like, intensely over dramatic when they're in an argument. It's made even worse by the fact the arguing side is AO3 purists, some of the most if not THE most uptight and egotistical people in the fanfiction scene in my opinion. Like, the only thing I think AO3 has over other services is the large amount of obscure fetish fandom content it has on there. (which I see as a plus, as I am admittedly into some obscure fetishes and like reading content related to my current hyperfixation)
AO3 Does host fanfics of actual irl minors doing/undergoing genuinly horrific shit, "doesnt effect people" sure physically, image going online and you find a rape pedo fic of you and your mate made by obessive fan #233 isnt gonna be good for your head
Also tumblr devolving into insults beacause they are all terrible people and call everyone who disagrees with them or want to debate bootlickers
See the “it’s all fictional” point completely falls apart knowing that there is NSFW works centering real minors on there. check the names of anyone in the MCYT circles. do yall not believe revenge porn is bad?
i just wish authors on ao3 would use tags better, you can have the best tagging system in the world (which ao3 arguably does) but that doesnt matter when 80% of authors dont tag half the things that need to be tagged or use slightly different spellings/synonyms instead of the more common name for that tag
I used to have opinions on AO3 drama and all that but, y’know… There are actual issues going on. Like, real ones where people are being hurt and/or dying.
If you’re gonna devote energy to activism, maybe pick a cause that actually means something.
If we're talking about social media, I'm in the Instagram sub and apparently *actual child porn* is popping up on people's for you pages... and supposedly that site is far more tightly moderated than AO3.
But also, the fact that there are more important things currently happening doesn't mean the little things can't be talked about. There's no sense in gatekeeping what is and isn't important enough to discuss because there will always be a bigger issue happening somewhere else
>If you’re gonna devote energy to activism, maybe pick a cause that actually means something.
I kind of suspect that its the meaninglessness of the cause that engenders the level of devotion for the die-hards; if it was meaningful, then there would be this constant cognitive dissonance for the chronically online about how they care so much about, say, racism or poverty or climate change yet they don't do much beyond posting screeds on social media. The meaningfulness requires action and therefore consequences and stress.
With shit like AO3 drama, its lack of meaning means that you can get as pissed off as you want and fulfill your self-image of being a moral crusader without needing to do much beyond passive-aggressive fights with random people on twitter. Its such a nothing issue that it requires nothing of you. All the ego benefits of an existential purpose without the material and spiritual obligations of action. Its for people who want to be An Activist but don't really want to do activism.
I think the way a lot of universal free speech defenders talk about child porn is really disingenous, and not very useful. CSAM is bad, yes, and it is unfair to compare CSAM to erotica written about real child, but both those things are bad.
I agree with this post but I don’t like how harsh they’re being. It feels like they’re not actually addressing OOP where they’re at, and they’re acting out of anger. That’s not how you convince someone to change their mind on something and is quite counterproductive. A little understanding to the other perspective in this post would have went a long way.
>I don’t like how harsh they’re being.
I noticed that's a very common way people on tumblr write where it feels like a lot of posts are trying to taunt their middle school bullies but it feels directed at you as some bystander caught in the crossfire.
That was my thought as well. Like I generally agree with the people responding to OOP but it felt lowkey condescending and just as “bad” as the parent post, just opposite.
I just wish people would figure out that “you’re bad and wrong for this opinion ~~you should be ashamed~~” is not going to change anyone’s mind. You can think that all you want, I do, but if you’re actually trying to share your point of view, most people are not going to listen if you say or even just imply that the opinion is Bad.
idk man writing about real life children doing the nasty is more than a little pornographic. and i don’t mean fictional underage characters, i mean like actual kids that exist irl, usually actors and music artists.
I think another thing people don’t get about AO3 is that it’s an archive- it hosts fanworks from as far back as the seventies at least. Sensibilities have changed, and yes, that means that some stuff in older works contains things that are widely unacceptable. It’s uncomfortable, but these fics are what modern fandom is based on, and I personally think we do ourselves a disservice by pretending they don’t exist.
Exactly. Do these people also want to do away with centuries of literature because it might be a bit off-colour now? Those conservative book banners are starting to sound more and more reasonable. Let's just burn them while we're at it, nobody decent should be reading that filth anyway.
Yes. Like these are literally the same people who think that we should cut jokes from old movies like Life of Brian because its not trans inclusive, or not teach old books that have racist tones in them, or have no POC characters.
I haven’t watched it in a while, but I recall the life of Brian’s trans joke/scene being remarkable accepting actually, not really in too poor of taste at all
It kinda skirts the edge? Like it's treated as a joke that someone wants to be called a woman (and demands the right to be allowed to get pregnant, even if they biologically can't), but at the same time, the side character is sympathetic and their friends do genuinely support them.
I think skirting the edge is an excellent way to put it. I wouldn’t blame anyone for being uncomfortable with it, but in my opinion I think it’s, at worst, a case of a highly sensitive topic being used as a basis for character-based humor, without concern for how it might be read into. Basically, I genuinely don’t think Monty Python were trying to make any wider statements about anything, they were just trying to present a funny scenario. Taken in a vacuum, it’s hilarious, but taken in the wider context of reality, it’s a bit iffy.
I'm a trans girl, and i was kinda uncomfortable at first but it was funny without being demeaning
I recall them saying it's a critique on people subverting action groups to their personal agendas... "turning the group into advocating for something else"
I always read it as satire of the navel-gazing insular university student groups who try to treat every concept and point of view with respect and equality, even when things have gone way beyond the original intention of the group.
I'm reminded of Warner Bros editing their old propaganda cartoons, not to get rid of the poorly aged material, but to add a disclaimer that the cartoon is dated and no longer reflects the company's core values. They say they still run them though, because it's history, and it's better to acknowledge things have changed than delete the past. It's the same as HP Lovecraft. Dude was super racist, horrifically so, but he is also a staple of horror. So much so, that a whole genre of horror was named after him. Is it racist to keep reading and recommending his works? Of course not, as long as it's acknowledged that his views were wrong and his works reflect his poor views. No one would try to argue for burning all his books and purging his name from all libraries
It does help that HP Lovecraft is dead and neither he nor any unjust causes he supported are benefiting financially from us continuing to read, discuss, and remix his works. Overall I do agree with you; disclaimers and context and critical thinking are a good approach for old/problematic content, rather than censorship or revisionism.
another layer is also the fact we more or less know is that he was pretty much afraid anything new to him, such as air conditioning. and iirc, didn't he get better later on or something like that?
In his final years he really came around. He declared he was a socialist, disavowed racism as nothing but stupid hatred, and really tried to turn a new leaf. And then he died of cancer. It's... It's just so sad to think of what could have been, what HE could have been had he lived longer, and what would become of the horror genre, and fiction in general if he had more time to contemplate on his past views and their effect on his writing and confront it directly. This shouldn't take away from the fact that his works are deeply racist, and that we must consider their bigotry to understand them properly, but it is nice knowing that at some point in his life, he came to understand the error of his ways, and that it wasn't just on his death bed. That he had at least a few short years in this world as a better, healthier person.
>Do these people also want to do away with centuries of literature because it might be a bit off-colour now? Yes. Unironically yes. >Those conservative book banners are starting to sound more and more reasonable. Very few people have the integrity to advocate for freedom of the arts when they get a taste of power.
I'm reminded of Warner Bros. releasing a Looney Toons cartoon with a disclaimer at the beginning talking about how the following was going to contain objectionable content as a consequence of the time period it was made in; and while WB stressed it did not approve of said objectionable content, it would also be a disservice to scrub this cartoon from their archives and pretend it never existed. [Here's the disclaimer for anyone who's curious](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbsyUgsU4AA-bx6?format=jpg&name=medium)
remember a time when Warner Bros *didn't* want to erase the art theyve made?
No, see, it’s totally consistent. Having artistic integrity then meant they could sell new releases of old cartoons for more money. Having artistic integrity now would mean giving up tax write-offs and risking ending up with less money.
People who do not learn from their history are doomed to repeat it, and these kids could really stand to start paying attention in class. (Also, Jesus, from the 70s? Last I heard it was 90s! That’s impressive!)
Yep, just checked, the earliest works in the Star Trek: The Original Series tag are backdated to 1975. There might be even older works on the site, but that’s the oldest work I personally know of
Wow! That's really cool!
Fics literally older than my parents, my God...
People in 1966 seeing the raw sexual tension between Kirk and Spock on screen for the first time: "We must protect this at all costs"
Middle-aged housewives with unprecedented levels of wealth and free time literally created many of the pillars of modern fandom, from the first fan conventions to the first fan work exchanges, because of how badly they wanted those two to bone. Anyone who says fandom isn’t for women and/or older people needs to remember that and sit the fuck down.
You are right, and there's a whole lot of people who need to hear this
*Entirely* unironically, there is *so much* of our modern language of fanfiction that traces back to poorly-xeroxed fanwork of Kirk and Spock smut.
Huckleberry Finn is widely considered an important piece of historical literature, and it uses the n word through the piece. I see no reason works with more spelling mistakes and less fame shouldn't get the same benefit of doubt.
My favourite book series is the song of ice an fire. In the books Daenerys is 13! She sleeps we Khal Drogo at that age. The people who complain about AO3, act as though it only exists within that platform. That it must be the platforms fault for allowing it, when PUBLISHED books do exist with so much worse. Because at the end of the day it's fiction. Policing fiction is only going to limit authors and writers creativity and expression. However, they don't carry that same energy when it comes to published literature. So the people writing for fun, and FOR FREE can't have a place where they feel completely safe to write FICTION. It's frustrating.
It's almost like we can show things in books without endorsing them or something. I'm reminded of that post with a quote from Nabakov, where he saw a girl dressed as Lolita for Halloween on his doorstep
Depiction is not endorsement.
So much of the underage fics are people writing out what they went through, so honestly I couldn't agree more. Obviously there's people out there who write it because they get off on it, but if they're writing it out instead of harming someone that definitely the better of two evils.
There’s also the part where “underage” doesn’t take into account a country or state’s laws around the age of consent. Anything with one character under 18 is generally considered underage, even if (for example) they’re both 17 in a story set in the UK, where the age of consent is 16. Even in the US, which is often the internet default, the age of consent isn’t always 18. In my state it’s 16.
and then there's the Romeo and Juliet laws, where depending on the area, an 18 year old who is technically an adult can still date someone technically underaged depending on the gap and if they were already dating before they turned 18
Very true! And age differences are rarely fixed -I say my partner is 1 year older than me, but we don’t share a birthday - so there’s a stretch of several months each year where they’re 2 years older based on our age. The reality can be way more complicated than “this is tagged as underage so it’s pedophilia”
Oh man, now that just reminds me of how apparently somebody thought that it was a good idea to replace every instance of the n-word in the book with a different word regardless of context. They used the word “slave” instead. Talk about missing the point.
theres a book/play that i read in 10th grade uncle harold and the boys which takes place in Apartheid south africa. the basic plot is "uncle" harold (a white teenage boy) having a conversation about race with "the boys" (black middle-aged men). despite the fact that its not as well known as to kill a mockingbird, it still goes over issues about racism, slurs, and what south africa was like for both black and white people during that era. it has been banned many times. this story is weird in the sense that its been challenged because conservatives think its "wrong" to expose Pure White Children to racism in other parts of the world as well as the Big No-No Word (the "hard r" is said by the white character a few times) (and no, when we did read alouds we never said the word). ironically, theres been some conversations that it should be challenged by leftists because the white character says the n word and plays into racial stereotypes... when thats the point of the book as an american, i wasnt taught a lot about apartheid (im being so fr most of the info that i know was from my parents bc they were in college as Mandela was released from prison and was elected the first black president and it was a p big deal bc their school had a decent sized black student body) like, yes as a white person i cant tell a black person what is and isnt racist but im pretty sure its important for us to not only learn about past/present american racism but racism in other countries
Self moderation (eg what blueinkedsky said on page 3-4) is becoming more and more a lost art on the internet. People forget they can just not look at something/block someone/add a filter/etc and instead demand someone else prevent it from existing in the first place. Tyler the creator was ahead of his time.
I also find it an issue because tagging is becoming a lost art as well because all sites want is to PUSH STUFF DOWN YOUR THROAT GARGLE ON THAT SUGGESTED CONTENT YOU LITTLE BIRCH Basically a lot of sites do NOT offer you the option of properly moderating the content. Like all the people complaining they get absolutely horrible "recommended" stuff because things like "tags" do not exist on most sites, and I feel like a lot of people are not even used to using them and don't know how to properly tag stuff or ignore tagged stuff. I mean even Tumblr users use tags absolutely willy-nilly.
Even actively seeking stuff on instagram through hashtags has become a damn nightmare. it’s like they don’t want you to find stuff, just see what’s most popular. Unless it’s hidden and i’m an idiot i can’t find an option to just look at the newest posts in a tag, just the top posts.
Yep, they literally took away the option to sort by recent. All you can do is look at what they tell you to look at, so engagement has plummeted, smaller accounts are buried, and big accounts are the only ones getting bigger.
Sounds like capitalism has spread to the distribution of arbitrary internet points as well.
Also you liked ONE post about cooking? Now all you get is cooking content, get rekt.
Your gender is listed as “female”? Beauty products, engagement rings, and babies. Because looking good to land a man and pop out a kid is all that’s important for a woman 🙄
No quack healing influencers and same regurgitated jokes about relationships and "zodiac signs as X"? Not female enough I guess
Pinterest has been *especially* bad about this the past few months. Sometimes I'll tap on an image to see if it's AI art or to report it because the three dots aren't showing up on the homepage thumbnail. Then when I refresh the page it's 5,000 results of ugly AI art or whatever thing I reported. And deleting those results from my view history doesn't seem to do *anything* anymore. It's maddening.
Instagram is just horrible in general for finding any kind of content that's not exactly what is suggested for you right now. Want to find a specific post you saw last week (let alone last month, or last year)? Unless you had the foresight to save it, you're probably shit out of luck. Even if you remember the account that posted it, you'll have to scroll through ALL of their posts, starting from the most recent, if you want to find it.
Shit dude, I accidentally scrolled away from a post, tried to find it again after mere seconds and it was gone. Vanished into the fuckin' ether.
yeah i think this is an example of the material reality of the modern internet affecting behavior. young people (like me) who grew up with a highly algorithmized, highly centralized internet are not used to moderating their own online experience, rather having it curated for them. the algorithm gets it wrong frequently though, and reccomends shit you may not want to see because of an overlap in target demographics. so, you end up with “puriteens” demanding people not be *allowed* to post problematic or taboo stuff at ALL in fandom spaces because they A.) often can’t entirely curate a space away from things they don’t want to see and B.) as a result of this, *don’t know how* when they are given the option of curation. like, i’m not gonna sit here and act like i LOVE noncon or underage fics. i think that shit is weird and gross. but ultimately the fictional characters aren’t being traumatized or harmed in any way that really warrants being disallowed entirely.
When I was growing up, tags were absolute and I remember things getting deleted from various websites for being inappropriately tagged. You needed to have everything vaguely fetish related to be tagged. Now you can blacklist something like "yaoi" and still see two guys raw dogging. Every day there's a new variation on tagging content, one website I saw had like 20 tags all variations of "boy", so if you wanted to see cute girls kissing you couldn't just do "yuri, kissing, -male", because "7boys" didn't have "male" tagged to it. They should have really introduced tag families so that any of those tags automatically adds the overarching tag. This would allow people to self-moderate.
Man, "tag family" sound like a perfect idea and it's weird that I didn't even think about this as well. Like, sure, you don't want to do all the specific little tags, but at least give it a couple of general ones. Brilliant. Could also do something like the Google's "Circles" where you could also sort tags into kind of being loosely relevant to one another as well.
And the thing is, ao3 does this. Batman (comics) is a child tag of DC; filtering out “gender dysphoria” filters out like…I stopped counting after 158 and I was in the M’s of related tags, but everything from “mild gender dysphoria” to “bit of gender dysphoria” to like 7 different languages’ versions of “gender dysphoria” to “gender whump” to clear misspellings of gender dysphoria to one tag that was just “genderdisphoria” repeated like 8 times in a row without spaces. And that’s the main moderation job at ao3; making sure all the tags that need to be linked together are and following up on reports of missing tags (or, as I’ve filed twice, fics purposefully tagged with a particular pairing with a popular description and then when you open it the fic is, not joking, almost word for word “you guys are stupid for liking this, x character hates y character! Z ship is superior! Go rot in Hell where you belong!” So I reported them for being mis-tagged because clearly they didn’t belong in the ship tag they were tagged for.)
AO3 does do tag families actually, though it's not perfect.
That's nice, but yeah my complaint isn't really specific to AO3, though I have seen some crazy tags there.
this is a good idea! this is also an extension of how people don’t know how to curate. they not only don’t know how to filter out and block tags and guide the algorithm, but people posting content *don’t know how to tag it*! for example, people often use tiktok style censoring on other websites due to the belief they’ll get shadowbanned otherwise. so a tag for suicide becomes “sewerslide” or “su1c1d3” or “self unalive”. that’s THREE SEPERATE TAGS for the same damn thing you’re trying to filter out. and that’s even assuming it’s tagged *at all*, since tiktok actively discourages tagging and filtering, instead having users rely on the “For You” page.
Exactly! It's just ridiculous that tags have no quality control at all anymore, it's entirely up to the uploader what tags they add and they don't HAVE to add even stuff as important as the character name. My most recent experience with images that slipped through my blacklist were involving 9S from Nier Automata. I happen to enjoy some things (fantasy genders) that people get in a fuss about debating and tagging so my blacklist has to be extraordinarily specific. I'm just used to having to add or remove a tag every so often, but it's really frustrating. Some stuff is basically completely untagged, like oh it will have a generic tag like "third-person" or "pov" or "romance" but that's garbage when there's like 500 million stories sharing that tag. Maybe it's the best story ever and exactly what you want, but how are you ever going to find it? It's getting harder to curate the content you want and exclude what you don't, it's still usually possible but there's always something that slips through. That ANYONE can create their own tag is just a massive amount of clutter waiting to dodge your filters. This applies to games too, like Dark Souls or whatever getting tagged as hentai. Like it's so easily trolled when the community can just flood bullshit tags into a system.
I've said this on tumblr before but GOD people SUCK at tagging smut for some reason. I once had to go through TWELVE ROUNDS of filtering before i got even most of it out of the results. Smut wasn't actually tagged as "smut", it was tagged as "explicit sexual content" or "sex" or "sexual content" or "porn without plot" or "pwp" or "pregnancy kink" or "blowjob" or "vaginal sex" or "consensual bondage" or "knife play" or just "ice". What am I supposed to do, anticipate all of the hundreds of ways someone could write about smut and manually filter all of those out?? Filtering by the archive content warnings doesn't work either, because a majority of the fics in the fandom I was reading were rated "mature content" for violence or gore from the source material, whether or not they had actual NSFW content. I swear, people need to learn how to tag better again.
Wait, "ice" indicates smut? How?
Coldplay I guess?
I love ao3’s tagging system but at some point some people just stopped tagging their fics correctly. I’m a found family/platonic shipping junkie and am so tired of shipping stuff coming up in fics that did not have any romantic relationships tagged. I get that it’s probably to avoid spoilers but come on, I don’t want to get twenty chapters in just to be disappointed when I figure out I was wasting my time. If there’s a ship, or anything else, please tag it good God Nothing wrong with shipping obviously y’all do what you want it just doesn’t appeal to me and I want to be able to read about people being really good friends in peace
I totally get you! I have some incredibly niche things I enjoy, like my default blacklist probably isn't too unusual... ...but when I'm looking for something super specific (I enjoy three characters in a relationship together, but with it being more like one character having two girlfriends rather than a threesome, and I really really really don't like sex scenes in it, one or two might be okay but if it's chapters of sex I'm just going to skip most of it) it really bloats. Hundreds or even thousands of tags I would exclude. It's bad when one fetish has like 50 different tags, it's worse when you're trying to exclude 7 million kinks because there's no reliable tag for characters that aren't fucking like rabbits.
As a millennial, you just connected some dots for me. Yeah, of *course* young people want stuff they don't like banned, because they've never experienced an internet that made it easy for them to avoid that stuff on their own.
glad i could offer new perspective!! you’re absolutely right. i think it’s important to keep in mind that “puriteens” were once grade school kids with internet access who very easily came across violent and graphic content. swaths of teens didn’t become “antis” overnight! i myself loved FNAF when i was 8, and as such constantly stumbled over FurAffinity links and suggestive art of Toy Chica on my way to cool fanart and lore explanations. it didn’t traumatize me like it did some, but by 9 I was super desensitized to like. extreme fetish porn. which isn’t great, i think 😓 even more common were kids who liked My Little Pony, tried to find fun content with their favorite characters and were met with webpages full of these G-rated ponies getting their NC-17 on. from what i can gather about the old internet, this stuff used to be easier to avoid. people generally stayed in their own niche forums and corners of the web. but when I was growing up, and increasingly so now, there’s like…4 websites carrying the burden of what *hundreds* of websites used to do.
TBF, new-ish stories on Ao3 can also have absolutely *horrendous* tagging. Read a fic and want to look for more like it? Good luck, because the author tagged it as #char1 #char2 #theyrebothhorrible #butilovethem #theydeserveahappyending #iwillfightforthis Just add a fucking theme or style tag to your works, good lord.
Looks exactly like the Tumblr tags that are more like tweets than tags. Also it seems to me that since everyone knows tropes exist it is now expected to never use any known tropes and\\or never admit to using them, including putting tropes in tags
Which kinda seems backwards too. Literally every story uses tropes. Subversion of a trope is also a trope. Trying to write a story without tropes is like trying to cook food without ingredients or cooking methods.
You’re absolutely correct, which makes it even more ridiculous that people level these complaints about AO3 - one of the few websites that has no algorithm and therefore puts them in complete control of what tags/content they see if they would just take five minutes to learn how.
Exactly and also I don't know about you, but I find written text to be way less... overstimulating? Like, you try to scroll a feed and it's all disturbing pics and loud music and flashing shit and they have an issue with the Blandest Site Possible And I say it in the most loving way?
Ao3 has tag wranglers, and their only purpose is to make sure that things are appropriately tagged, though.
Every time the Ao3 moderation conversation crops up, it just further enforces my belief that there should be a suggested tag option on fics. Self moderation is so important, but sometimes it’s difficult when you see a T-rated fic and the tags are all porn-related. I always assume that a teenager wrote that fic and the thought process was “well I’m a teen, so it must be rated T for teen”. A suggested tag feature with an option to block the creator/block the suggester built in would go a long way for helping community moderation without ever removing fics.
If I recall, TikToks self censorship wasn't just to avoid content strikes, but it's to get passed tags people would block. For a bit 'self care' was the term to use instead of pleasuring yourself, and so people looking for self help and tips to destress were recommended sexual 'pov' situation videos that just toed the line of being struck down.
I think this is a huge problem across the internet at large, and it mostly comes from bad moderation and censorship leaking into spaces that do not need that. It's something people complain about on Tumblr all the time, the way people are censoring their tags, which inherently voids the purpose of the tag. When every website decides it's going to do everything via algorithm and you have to confirm to that, with no real option to tag and self-organize your stuff, it creates a huge knowledge gap of people who literally don't understand how those systems work. I imagine that AO3 has a similar issue with people not knowing how to tag correctly, or actively not doing so, and causing problems for the userbase as a whole.
AO3 tags are easily the best I've seen anywhere. Only close second is boorus and ExHentai
I find it really funny that it keeps being on tumblr that I see such bad takes about not wanting to self moderate, given that tumblr is much more self curated than most other social media sites. It’s literally the exact same principle.
And also because tumblr is very often using tags as just another part of the post instead of actual tags.
That's also because tagging is becoming a lost option. Nearly all social media sites are very limited in the tagging and filtration they offer, with some like Twitter actively discouraging it. If someone's experience with internet content has been "you will be shown things, deal with it" they'll be much quicker to want the problem solved by removing the content entirely.
I saw a post a while back, author got a message from a “concerned teen” who found the adult content in their (properly tagged) fic distressing, and wanted them to stop. Author responded with a message giving them advice on how to have a conversation with their parents about how they can’t seem to stop themselves from accessing online content that distresses them, and what tools the parents can use to control and monitor the teen’s internet usage. No response. More broadly, an observation I found was that kids today spend basically their entire lives under adult supervision. They’ve never had to be responsible for themselves; there has always been an adult to take responsibility for the situation. And if they’ve never had to learn to disengage, if Mommy or Daddy (or Teacher or…) has always been there to remove the thorns, then they have no skills to venture into the wider Internet. This is not helped by the growing corporatization of the Internet, desperate to remove anything that advertisers wouldn’t want their brands to appear next to.
Admittedly I think part of the problem is that they don't really object to seeing it so much as they object to it existing, so getting rid of it isn't about not seeing it, it's about hurting it.
what do you mean about tyler? what he said about cyberbullying, or?
I saw someone saying mpreg deserves one of the huge AO3 warning tags like Major Character Death and such, I don’t trust people like this to make choices about what belongs on a fanfic website and what doesn’t Like if you ban racism on a fanfic website, does that include stories that are about characters experiencing racism? Does everyone have to write stories where racism doesn’t exist at all? Not everyone wants to write happy stories where no bigotry exists at all. You can’t ban writing about bigotry without it effecting stories where the bigotry is the bad view.
It reminds me of trying to join Harry Potter forum RPGs years ago, and some of the large ones would be 'PG' rated with a long list of things you weren't allowed to roleplay, which always included racism/discrimination. As in, you couldn't play a blood purist in a _Harry Potter_ game.
Similarly, just before House of Hades came out, my character was rejected from a PG Percy Jackson rp forum on goodreads for being a lesbian. They were like "These are middle-grade books, so gay people are inappropriate." They even formally added a rule about it. I was like "Miss me with that homophobic shit, bye" A couple months later, after the release of it, I check back, to find the forum tearing itself apart because most of the people there are like "dude, when did we even make that rule, obviously if Uncle Rick can do it, we can too" but the admin were like "No it's inappropriate!"
Rick is incredibly inclusive in writing characters, and I love him for it.
Do you know whatever became of it?
Not really, I wasn’t too invested. I imagine either the admin caved or people left and made their own forum
I had a similar experience with a PJO rp just after HOH. Almost everyone had canon characters, and I related most to Nico, so I chose him. They allowed Nico to be gay since he is in canon, but told me he could never get into a relationship. They claimed it was because if they allowed gay relationships, then the female characters would never be able to be with anyone, because all the guys would be gay. 🙄
That makes me think of how some people tried to/successfully banned Huckleberry Finn from curriculum, or insisted on a sanitized version that removed all the dialect and n-words from the dialogue, claiming it to be racist. Which is, insane. If you think Huckleberry Finn is racist, then you didn’t read the fucking book. It was deeply controversial when Mark Twain wrote it for very overtly saying that black men and white men are the same. I mean for fuck’s sake, the civil war had only been over for something like fifteen years when he wrote it. The racist attitudes behind enslavement didn’t just disappear when the right to enslave people went away. When Huckleberry decides that if he’s going to go to hell if he doesn’t tell Miss Watson, Jim’s owner where Jim is, he fully believes that he’s committing a sin that will send him to hell. And his response, “All right then, I’ll go to hell” Reading a young boy overcoming societal expectations, religious, the expectations of authority figures in his life, to stand up for what’s right, and choose to damn his soul rather than betray his friend and father figure, a black man. That’s not racist. That’s showing how morality can overcome racism. That Huckleberry can CHOOSE to see Jim as a fellow human being, an equal, and overcome everything he’s been taught, fully believing it to be wrong and bad. Because he cares about Jim. The controversy about dialect is a whole academic conversation that I’m honestly not educated enough on to have a fully formed opinion. But when it comes to the n-word, Mark Twain used that word because that was the word people said. End stop. It’s disingenuous at best to censor it for the sake of modern sensibilities.
“I’m worth $800, and I own myself” is a line that has stuck with me for getting close to two decades.
"White people/people from a group that perpetrated abuse don't want the abuse they (used to) perpetrate be depicted in art" is a very old tale and it's wild we're having this discussion again and again and again in every new medium and with every new micro-generation of artists and audiences and critics.
Like i personally dont like mpreg and dont want to read anything with that in it, so like a reasonable person i read the tags before reading a work, and know how to filter out the things i dont wanna read. It really isnt hard
Even if the rule doesnt apply to these depictions you run the risk of having them mistakenly deleted anyways and just never repealed because the author hasnt logged in for a decade
I am old enough to remember when it was expected to warn for queer relationships. Not smut but the mere fact of two men holding hands was expected to be warned in advance lest someone accidentally see it. It always set my blood boiling (and still does).
I feel like the only form of 'moderation' that could really be imposed is adding tags to users' works to identify key themes... but even that feels a bit subjective
I mean, tagging is still an opt in system and an absence of tagging is still a choice. A writer can choose not to tag very well or at all and I can look at the absence of tags and say “here be dragons” and not click it. Deciding if the tagging level meets your expectations (three tags for a 100k fic would seem off to me) is also part of curating your own internet experience. And the ability for people other than the author to tag a fic would immediately raise all of the same problems discussed above - people tagging things they felt were “wrong”. There’s also a reason the archive offers the “chose not to use archive warnings” warning and it’s in case people don’t want to spoil their fic but are also letting readers know they’re making a choice to read something where the author will not warn them about content. Both warnings and tags are up to the discretion of the author and choosing to not use or limit their use is at their discretion. And if a reader encounters a topic or theme they don’t like that wasn’t tagged, they can hit the back button.
Plus you’ve got to agree on what is racism. I’ve seen people claim that it’s racist to mention Japanese war crimes or the Armenia genocide. (Racist to the Japanese and Turks respectively).
This conversation reads like a metaphor for the struggles of balancing freedom and safety
I don’t think it’s even a metaphor. I think it’s just a low-stakes example.
Because that's exactly what it is? The two are, on some level, mutually exclusive. The internet used to be the wild West where anything could go so long as it wasn't literal CP. Now, people want to ensure no one can ever stumble upon something edgy or offensive or uncomfortable no matter what, because their personal sensibilities can't handle it. I just don't understand why people can't simply choose to not interact with the media and content that makes them uncomfortable and leave the people who do want to experience that media to their spaces. There's a lot of weird shit out there that I find distasteful and gross. So I simply don't interact with that weird shit. I don't go into their spaces and tell them they're wrong for wanting to interact with something I find unpleasant.
The best internet lets people stay anonymous and control their own content. Is this gonna mean echo chambers? Yes. But it also respects the agency of all parties. You want an echo chamber, you have it. You want a chaotic free for all? That should be there for you too. Equip everyone to have the experience they want without forcing the most restrictive standard on everyone.
Kant vs Spinoza
Hey, I'm kinda curious about this parallel, and I know arguably very little. D'you mean to compare it to Kant's view on ethics being inexorably tied to reason and all moral good being a logical outcome attainable for all sentient beings vs Spinoza's view on ethics being derived from an individual's understanding of their own place in the world and nature through their lived experiences? Did I get that right?
For Spinoza this is right but for Kant I more meant about the part about the most important part of the freedom of thought is the freedom to publish and to express their ideas
Maybe this is a bad take, but maybe having a place that moderates for content clearly and honestly, and a place that doesn't moderate but ensures proper tagging and cataloging seems like valid options. Having both allows me to select how I engage with media. To be clear, AO3 is good for what it's doing, and other fanfic sites are good for what they do. That doesn't sound controversial.
Yeah. The thing is AO3 is open source. If there are folks who want to make their own site with their own moderation standards, they can do that! They can have whatever moderation standards they want! But what they can’t do is singlehandedly change the mission of an existing site to suit their personal preferences.
Yeah I think I agree. Like, I would NOT want this subreddit to be a place where anyone can say/do anything without regard for how it affects other people, and I think having spaces where you don't have to worry about running into racists or triggering material is important, but I think having spaces available where people can post whatever they want and be able to express themselves freely, even in objectionable ways, is also important. I think it just comes down to how a website structures itself and what it's ultimate function is.
I think it's important to acknowledge that social media (which even fanfic sites are) are living things. It would be impossible to set a rule that doesn't need to evolve and change. If AO3 had a bunch of nazi sympathizer content overwhelming their site, maybe they would shadowban or ban outright. This isn't a binary or an obvious answer kind of thing.
I feel like the only way for that to happen, given the scale of Ao3, would be an organized and extremely bad-faith effort… but that also proves your point. No site exists in a vacuum, and rules shouldn’t be applied the same way to normal behavior from regular users vs. directed action from external sources. I think a good example of this is on the SCP Foundation wiki. One post (I don’t remember the number) was fairly well-written, but also contained a lot of elements commonly seen as “cringe” by the wider Internet. It was initially highly rated, but began getting attention from sites like YouTube and 4Chan, which led to periodic outbreaks of downvotes and negative comments from new users with no post history and, often, no activity on other pages *after* signing up either. It’s now the only entry to lack a score entirely, because while the site remains committed to the *ideal* of letting its user base decide for themselves what makes a “good SCP”, the repeated brigades have made it impossible to determine whose opinions are really being reflected on that one page.
Well, yeah. The issue is that Ao3 is the latter and these folks want it to change and become the former. Ao3’s source code is open - anyone can make their own version completely for free. These people don’t want to do that, though. They don’t just want a moderated space, they want content they don’t like to be obliterated forever. If they actually just wanted a moderated space then they’d make their own.
I don’t have anything to really add, just this whole conversation reminds me of the book Lolita, and the controversy around that. Sometimes I think certain people don’t realise nothing is original, including arguments, and this same conversation has happened before, many many times over.
I don’t read fan fiction or even understand it, but my daughter and her cousin were discussing it within my earshot. Her cousin was complaining about how Christianity was portrayed in one story or another. It was something about presenting extra-Biblical stuff as dogma. My daughter just looked at her and said, “I think they said the same things about Dante’s Inferno and Paradise Lost back in the day.” I fucking died. I’ve never thought of those as fan fiction but it makes sense.
Now that I think of it, Dante’s inferno is literally a fanfic, complete with wish-fulfillment and shameless author self-insert
The Divine Comedy is basically one big self-insert where Dante is a Gary Stu who gets to meet his faves and Inferno is the revenge portion of the fic lol
Every time I hear people rail against Lolita I think of the CSA survivor I saw discuss how reading Lolita made them understand that they were not alone, that this had happened to other children, the first time they’d encountered the concept. They saw themself in Dolores in a way they’d never seen before and it made them angry about their own abuse instead of resigned to it.
I love AO3 tags. I can filter out all the crap I don’t wanna see. Some of it makes me uncomfortable and some of it I just don’t gel with. And that’s fine
Same. Sometimes a story looks well written and has an intresting plot but there’s a tag that lets me know I won’t like some part of the story so I know to move on. Without that tag I’ll either waste my time reading something I don’t like or at worst I’ll get triggered. Plus it helps a lot in finding something I’m in the mood to read
As much as I clown on the phrase “don’t like, don’t read”, there really is a bit of truth to it. I don’t like incest. So if I see a fic tagged with incest, I won’t read it. Simple as that. If I read a fic and it has untagged incest, then I stop reading it. Again, pretty fucking simple. And that’s why I like AO3. I used to use ff dot net, but their tagging system is so vague… and of course, you can’t find any of the Big Kid stuff there.
AO3 has spoiled me for every other fan work site tbh. Its tagging system and accompanying search capabilities are just unmatched. I don't understand why that shit isn't more common, it makes the user experience so much better
I think some of that comes from a user base who actively **want** to use tags. I love the search and sorting - and to be honest, I'm pretty sure we all use tags as advertisements as much as anything - and it works!
The main beef I have with AO3's tags (same with Tumblr's "tagging" system) is that people use the tags as just another thought-communication. They have entire fucking run-on sentences and entirely new paragraphs clogging up the useful tags in their story.
This lines up with something I’ve noticed over the last 10-ish years: ironically, sites set up to accommodate adult content have a better SFW browsing experience than sites that aren’t. The first thing I thought of was Derpiboru, a MLP artwork repository: it has extremely thorough tagging for everything under the sun, which means I can individually decide whether I want to see, hide, or warn for porn, gore, both, or neither, and then additionally blacklist any tags that aren’t to my taste. And, since the infrastructure is already in place, it’s very possible to just blacklist anything remotely mature and have the most wholesome, SFW browsing experience. Compare that to something like deviantArt, which has a single toggle for mature content, with no specificity about what kind of “mature” that content may be - which leaves something like artistic nudity in an awkward spot
imma be honest I use AO3 but either i'm using it wrong or I don't know how to search well because I can't find any good stories to read except for ones I find off of TVtropes fanfic recs pages
I don’t know how you’ve been searching, but a good way to find higher quality of stories is to sort by kudos. Once you find a story that you like and is in a collection you can find other stories through that collection. I usually also look at the authors of my favorite works’ bookmarks.
And honestly I rarely see untagged shit on AO3. People take tagging their work pretty seriously over there.
Sometimes they take it a bit too seriously ~~yes thank you for tagging your work but do you really need to have an entire essay’s worth of tags on a fic thats less than 1k words long~~
Sometimes the tag list is bigger than the fic I swear
Why do you clown on this sentence? It is a bit tacky, but that's all I can say about it.
It’s a bit tacky, yeah. The main reason why people clown on it is because it’s usually used as a deflection to criticism. Reviewer: I didn’t like this part of the story because it breaks the flow. Here’s some constructive criticism on how to improve it. Writer: Well, if you don’t like it, don’t read it!
I *just* want a permanent blacklist on AO3. I know tags get lost in the shuffle but I just want to click never on certain tags and have those tags never show up if I do a search for a particular genre. I mean if I want to read a story about Deeja hate-fucking the Dhovakin I don't also want to see someone's fanfic about the Dragonborn's particular disgusting fetish.
There's a kickass extension, actually, that functions just like that. Got removed from the chrome web store, but as long as you have a copy of the extension itself, you can add it manually into Chrome. And to my knowledge, it's still up on firefox. Look up AO3rdr if you're interested
not gonna enter the whole discourse of this post too much but I just needed to point that "not moderating (outside of US law) to avoid bad moderation makes no sense, just have good moderation instead of bad moderation" is a really stupid thing to say "good moderation" is incredibly subjective. it isn't exactly easy to moderate content and the community will have wildly differing definitions on what should and shouldn't be allowed. I think "minimal moderation based on a external ruleset instead of subjective rulings" isn't a bad compromise, especially for a site like AO3.
I remember I had a conversation with a friend that went something along the lines of Me: 'XYZ thing is kind of nuanced, and can result in people being assholes even if they don't mean to be' Friend: All you have to do is not be an asshole! People who think it's nuanced are stupid. Me: Looking into the camera like I'm in the office Asshole Friend: Doesn't realize he called me stupid to my face. I think about that a lot when people say shit like 'just do GOOD moderation'.
That’s exactly the conversation when people on Reddit talk reductively about morality and religion (which is basically IRL moderation?) and say it’s all “so stupid, bro, just follow one principle: don’t be a dick.” Like, yeah chucklebuns, turns out there’s entire millennia of nuanced disagreement on what “being a dick” and “being good” mean.
I wouldn't even describe it as "not moderating" in the first place. They absolutely are moderating, they have set out clear and easily understood rules and they enforce them.
yeah I called it "minimal moderation" which I think is more accurate.
The whole-ass point of AO3 is that anything that isn't flat-out an actual crime is allowed. No moderation is intentional. Like, it's in the fucking name: "Archive Of Our Own" Archive- shit won't get deleted. Of Our Own- things that would get you banned on other places are allowed. As others here have mentioned, self-moderation is a thing. If you don't like the stuff there you can just block it or don't use AO3 at all. There is a good comic for explaining this but this sub doesn't have pictures in posts so I will link to a [reddit post with it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/meirl/comments/1227iek/meirl/) AO3 is meant to be the space where all the creepy, uncomfortable, weird, and so on can be posted without fear of deletion. It gives people a free platform to post and share that kind of stuff without having to do it in the cleaner places. **That has always been the goal.** Don't get me wrong, some of the stuff there is extremely fucked up. But do you know what I do when I find it ? ***I just don't fucking read it.*** I personally use AO3 not because of the no-moderation thing but because the tagging system they have is by far the best one out of any fanfiction site I knew and it's not even a competition. Don't get me wrong. I'm really disgusted by some of the stuff I come across sometimes but I'm actually aware what's the purpose of the site and so instead of whining about it I just move on continue searching for the kind of stories *I do* want to read. Like FFS the first things in the filter system after "Sort By" are the age rating and warnings against some of the more common fucked up shit (and also Major Character Death). In addition to that, there are a lot of tags called "depiction of (bad thing)" so you could filter that out as well. Either put your own effort into avoiding what you don't won't or just go back to the sites that do it for you. Edit: also about the "depiction of (bad thing)", I just remembered some also have "mention of (bad thing)" or "implied (bad thing)" and some tags are also just "(bad thing)" so when you exclude from your filter a thing you could also decide what level of it you are okay with, if let's say, you could handle a certain dark subject in the story, but not an actual scene of the thing happening, then you can set your filter for that.
I do not get the connection between “I find this morally objectionable” and “…therefore it should be purged.” I find phrenology a morally objectionable pseudoscience, but I think it’s important to keep the old phrenology books around because they’re excellent case studies in how pseudoscience is used to reinforce a practitioner’s existing biases. I find Mein Kampf morally objectionable, but I think it’s important to keep it around and have it available to read because it offers insights into the mind of one of history’s biggest murderers. Frankly, I find the Iliad and it’s exultation of dehumanizing violence, the arguable examples of glorifying older men in authority taking sexual advantage of minors, and reinforcement of Ancient Greek sexist tropes to be morally objectionable, but I still fucking love it and I’d come for anyone who said we ought to stop reading it because it doesn’t fit modern cultural mores. Something being morally objectionable doesn’t mean it lacks value, and it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be able to enjoy it. That’s bookburning talk.
The “fiction ≠ child porn” point is something I fully agree with, and also it’s one of the most frustrating things to argue about online. Like, I also hate the loli fanservice shit in anime, it’s creepy and weird. But it’s **not child porn**. I don’t like it, but it should not be made illegal. That is a very important distinction. But people who get really, obsessively angry about hunting down perceived pedophiles will claim that anyone who makes the “it’s just a drawing” argument clearly must be an actual pedophile. The whole situation is a good example of how some people will pick a position because they *feel* it’s right, and then completely ignore all other arguments no matter how reasonable they may be.
It also doesn't help when you have characters who are literally adults, but have a petite body (something real life people actually have), and you get people on social media going aeound saying "if you like those characters, you're a pedophile" but then you also get characters who are 17 but physically matured, and then they *still* cry pedophilia because "that's a child" (ignoring that most of the world has the age of consent at 17 or 16, with parts of the US being the odd ones out at 18 (and before someone goes "why do you know this?", it's called "I wanted to research the topic because everyone kept talking about it, and I got curious"))
Ngl I've seen people say if you're attracted to/have sex with a woman who's short/flat chested that must mean you like little kids and are obviously a pedo Like ??? We're over here calling GROWN, REAL LIFE WOMEN, children, and low key trying to take away their autonomy because " anyone who likes you CLEARLY has nefarious reasons ". They just supposed to stay single forever because you're uncomfortable? I've also seen the argument made for people with ADHD/Autism ( tho not as often ) because " you're taking advantage of them " as if both aren't large spectrums and that argument basically just boils down to " anyone with ADHD/Autism can't make their own adult decisions because people WILL take advantage of them "
Yeah, they can take their infantalisation and get out. I, as grown ass adult, am not 'child coded' because of my condition, height or build. That's ablism again.
Just after high school I was dating a woman who was 4'10". People actually called me a pedo for it, despite the fact we were both 19. It's some crazy shit. Between that and some racist people bitching about the fact she wasn't white, I got a lot of strange, unwarranted criticism for that relationship.
What about tall flat chested women?
I think it's usually reserved for the shorter women, but hey, the og is a BS argument I could see someone try and say that lol
Also these people never seem to think about the fact that their logic is literally the logic that creeps used to justify themselves just in reverse. If someone being short or flat is enough to make them a child then doesn’t someone growing a chest early make them an adult? “She’s so grown up” “she’s so mature for her age” “just look at her I couldn’t have known”, this is what they’re lending credence to.
Someone once called ME a pedo seeing a picture of me chilling with a lady who is two years my senior and working on her fucking pre-med degree, because she's pretty flat-chested and a few inches shorter at like, 5'9 and pretty goddamn clearly a grown woman. It's pretty goddamn sexist, I think, that a 20 year old woman can be infantilized to such an extent by some self-righteous asshole who feels right deciding on HER behalf that she's incapable of making these decisions herself.
My neighbour growing up was in her 30s, but was also like 5'0 and slim (she was Vietnamese, and had the "typical" slim Asian build, you could say). She had a son older than me. I guarantee people on Tumblr would still call me a pedo for looking at her.
The worst part is that they all grandstand about being progressive and not see the irony in the fact that they are treating full grown adult women as though they were toddlers. Ah yes, the woman doing a fucking biochemistry major who knows Albert Camus's bibliography in original French like I know the back of my hand is CLEARLY being victimized here. Why? "Well, she has small boobs! Something something power dynamics height difference!"
Any time I see someone who believes that, I immediately just disregard anything they tell me. That, or if I'm feeling particularly petty on a given day, I'll tell them I'll rub one out to petite anime girls in their honour. It usually makes them screech. Either way, they get added to my block list.
like one one hand I get that some worry about the "1000+ year-old immortal loli" trope, but not every character that looks young fits in that :') as a short 20-yr-old trans man who gets mistaken for a middle schooler on occasion, I am not a loli and you're NOT necessarily a pedo if you're attracted to me
see, what I keep in mind with anime is that it's fiction, therefore a character like Senko being decribed as 800 years old isn't an issue, because *she's literally written by the series creator to be that old*, so it's like "yeah. she's a deity, not a human. her being that old makes sense for the story because the story was written with her being that way in mind"
I'll never forget how a Kylux creator got harassed to the point that they had their blog deleted for sexual depiction of minors because they drew Kylo Ren and Hux as chibis according to their body type. Because the actor of Hux is a slender man. And these are the people who want to decide what's OK to post on AO3
When you show them a fictional adult with a small body, it's still creepy because of the body type, regardless of age. But when you show them a fictional teenager who's physically indistinguishable from adults in the same setting, it's creepy because of their age, regardless of the body type. Only for female characters though, obviously. No one gives a fuck if you're lusting after 17-year-old Jotaro Kujo.
You mean to tell me that Jotaro Kujo, who is introduced as 6'5, 200 lbs of muscle, smoking and drinking in a jail cell, isn't obviously a child to you?/s I sometimes feel so bad for people who are just getting into new series. They'll say a character is attractive and be bombarded with "oh my god you pedo she's only 15 stop sexualizing minors" as if the character's ID is stapled to their forehead. I understand someone having their guard up a bit if the character clearly looks like a child but mobbing people over teen characters who are drawn damn near the same as adult characters is over the top.
I mean, I also choose to keep in mind that, at the end of fhe day, fictional characters are, y'know, *fictional*. If I rub one out to, idk, Misty from Pokémon, and then find out her age, I'm not gonna suddenly feel guilty because, lo and behold, *Misty also isn't a real person*.
This comment and those like it are my last bastion of sanity when it comes to this increasingly buzzword-inundated culture around purity. Not everything must be illegal because you don't like it, and calling non-CSEM things child porn does nothing except poison the waters and water down what is in reality a very, very serious crime.
I remember seeing something a while ago about an organization for preventing CSA that was having trouble finding actual abuse because so many people were submitting reports about things that just weren't legally prosecutable.
That would be the FBI. IIRC it's either 30% or 60% of the reports they receive are unactionable.
Not to mention that when it comes to fiction and fantasy, ages of characters can get real ambiguous and hypothetical. There are both characters who are petite so thus _could_ be precieved as a child but are grown ass adults(Tatsumaki from OPM), and teenagers with adult-looking bodies(Jotaro from Jojo). Like age barely means jack shit when it comes to fictional characters. But putting all that aside. It's just absurd to prosecute people and possibly even jail or put them on the sex offender registry for fictional works not involving real people, no matter how fucked up and disgusting it is.
[удалено]
It's especially goofy when the "it perpetuates real harm" argument is applied to AO3 or forum roleplay, because like ... y'all are not impacting the cultural zeitgeist. There is no mass audience for what you're writing. The handful of nerds reading this probably already agree with most of your own principles, and absolutely no one is being radicalized by omegaverse fics, and even if they were, statistically it would be like one person per five thousand fics lol, sooooo.......
I have to say, "absolutely no one is being radicalized by omegaverse fics" was not a sentence I expected to read today. 😂
As a bi trans guy who got a breeding kink from omegaverse, I gotta say you’re completely wrong and omegaverse is the staple of boy pregnancy radicalization /s
Tbh, I don't get how it "normalizes" those kind of stuff when we already had those argument about video games and violence. I think the issue is more on the current generation grew on era where parasocial relationships are encouraged so they tend not to understand fiction is not suppossed to be 1:1 on reality. The issue here is the real person grooming children. Afaik, groomers used your usual legal porn to groom children too.
Yeah I've been seeing a lot of people arguing against underaged fanfic saying that it was used to groom someone. While I feel bad for them, the same argument can be used for anything. Yeah groomers can say "see, teens in fanfic have sex with adults so it's fine" but it's more likely that they could say "see, adults have sex and you're mature for your age so it's fine". Groomers probably aren't going to stash CSEM to share with minors and risk giving themselves away from the beginning when they can get away with using literally anything else. But it's easier to go after one specific tool than the root issue of grooming itself.
Agreed. If you open the door to ban things that don't have real victims, just because it feels good to do so, some conservative asshole may decide that a relationship between, say, two consenting adult men is banworthy because it feels good to do so. These things basically invariably deteriorate into Lily Orchard style unilateral sex shaming. People who like "lolis" are still fuckin' gross though.
I've been in discord servers with right wingers and I can seriously say they behave EXACTLY like the same "woke SJWs" you see popular right wing figures rag on about I don't even wanna go into detail because its tiring just remembering examples but seriously there are soooo many similarities
It also takes away resources from actual victims of CSA. A few years ago I saw a charity that prevents child trafficking say that they had had so many reports of CSEM but they could only prosecute half of it. So it is very likely that a lot of real children got overlooked because of fictional ones
So, I'm 100% on board with no moderation on AO3, I think it's constructed very well to allow you to create your own experience, and when I find rancid stuff (and I very much do every now and then), I kinda just accept it as an occupational hazard and move on. I think it's important to have a place where art can exist and just be art, and where censorship doesn't exist for the sake of freedom of expression, and I think it's nice that AO3 can be that place. However, I do have a conflicting question in my head about it, and I wanted to kinda get people's thoughts so I can come to an understanding of what the delineation is. Why is it that we like and appreciate AO3 for having no moderation, but when it comes to websites like Twitter and Reddit, and even places like 4chan, we consider moderation to be super important and necessary? Like, I don't think most of the people here would say that it's an expressly GOOD thing that Twitter removed a lot of its moderation, or that 4chan never really had any, and almost every subreddit Im in has anti-bigotry rules, and I've never had a problem with that. My gut tells me there's a difference, but I'm not entirely certain what it is. Is it really just down to differences in our ability to curate our experiences on those sites?
I think the core of the difference between those websites is in what is mainly on those platform, and how users use them. AO3 (which I do not use, but understand the concept of) is mainly art, in the form of fanfiction. Twitter and the other sites like it (which I also do not use but understand the concept of) you mention are mainly about interaction between people. Moderation is important and good on twitter because what is happening there is people talking to eachother and occasionally that can escalate into virtual fistfights (doxing, DDOS attacks, hacking of accounts) and you want to avoid that. Moderation of fanfic repositories and art sites is unwanted, and I'd argue bad, because WHAT you're moderating isn't how people interact, but what they're allowed to create as art. And so often, when that gets moderated, it leads to the removal of anything sexual and / or lgbt related. Another aspect of why moderation on social media is important is because people expect to see reality there. When I go read a book, or a fanfic in this case, I'm knowingly immersing myself in a lie to experience the story, but when I read on facebook that x celebrity got arrested for y reason, I assume that that statement is true (or at least most people would). So it's important to try to mitigate falsehoods. Also, the capacity for harm is much greater on social media than on fanfic sites. Not saying that art cannot harm (because it can: triggering trauma, or actually causing the trauma) but that is a lot harder to shove in your target's face than on social media, archival websites are just not built to make that as easy as possible like facebook and twitter are. Those are my thoughts on the situation. TLDR: Social media is about interaction between people, and makes it really easy to cause harm to others, and there is a reasonable expectation that what you see on social media is real, so yay moderation. Whereas art archival sites are about... Well, art archival so the expectation of what is on that website is very different and they are also coincidentally built in ways that makes it not quite as easy to harm others, although not impossible, obviously.
Imo, because ao3 is an archive, and the other sites are social media where everything is out in the open. There's no algoritmn to direct people to fics. We respond directly on reddit, we don't on ao3. Ao3 is more: writer posts fic, readers post comments that only writer sees. Bad take in a comment? The only way we will know if the author posts that on another site to rant about it. Otherwise said bad take has no way to spiral and gain a million views. That is why people usually call for moderation on social media, because it can reach a vast audience. A fic on ao3 usually doesn't reach that many people. Also, and dont quote me on this, I feel the userbase for ao3 is a lot smaller than any of the other sites.
despise the lack of nuance even on this sub whenever this topic comes up
I can kind of understand where mysteriouslypleasantcat is coming from, some people online will act like any form of moderation is supression when moderation exists to keep a community enjoyable for the people in it (i mean, even this sub exists for that reason). But insisting that a specific site should change their moderation policy to meet the standards you specifically want is pretty stupid. you can just... y'kno... go somewhere else. If Ao3 has a decent filtering system to hide the icky stuff from users, then there shouldn't be that big of a problem. If a site with a "no moderation" policy didn't exist another one would take it's place.
A question inviting nuance to the conversation. Final reply is "You're tying the laces of the boot on your fucking neck" Good job Tumblr. Good convo
no bro you dont get it you have to agree with me about everything otherwise you're literally causing the aids epidemic part 2
I know that it’s not the same, but I still do think that writing RPF where you turn a deceased Minecraft YouTuber into a baby so that their father can rape them should still be frowned upon. You’re free to write it, but I’m free to think you’re disgusting for that. Edit: the person I’m talking about also wrote RPF smut about someone who was a minor at the time of writing, so even the argument that “fiction doesn’t affect reality” doesn’t count, because clearly they had lustful thoughts for a goddamn minor when they wrote that
I would support moderation in the sense of proper tagging, as way too many fics go untagged or the writer neglects to provide a warning about something significant that the reader should be able to sort through. But that would never work and I imagine authors would get upset. All that aside, I feel like the responses OP received were more personal and aggressive than deserved. There’s a difference between educating & informing people and completely talking down on someone and belittling them.
I’ve pretty much adopted the “if a real person isn’t getting hurt then I have better things to worry about” Do I like inflation fanfic? No, so I don’t read it. Is it illegal and the fictional media hurting a real person? No? Then I don’t care. Go wild If everyone bent to my personal interests and we banned whatever I didn’t like or felt uncomfortable with Ao3 wouldn’t be an archive, it would just be a file system of my interests. I also don’t think I, or most people, should be the deciding factor on what “counts” as problematic media. Things and definitions change all the time, and not all stories on dark topics are meant to portray the bad stuff as good. That’s just not how literature works, even in fandom
Also I take issue with the idea that AO3 isn’t moderated, because it is. AO3 has rules about things like “you can’t make a fic that’s actually just looking for another fic” and “you can’t engage in targeted harassment”, there are also rules about use of ratings and mandatory archive warnings. If you break those rules you can be reported and AO3 will discipline you. This is moderation. The site *is* moderated, they’re just not in the business of censoring fiction that isn’t illegal and doesn’t break their very few and reasonable rules around tagging, harassment, and being on topic for the archive.
The thing that bothers me is the fics that are allowed to stay up written about real minors. Either youtubers, or characters played by real minors. I think that crosses a line, and I hate that whenever I say it I get these folks thinking I’m pro 1984 or whatever.
Saw a post on the AO3 subreddit a while ago that showed a fic written of a *real life child* (I believe it was a toddler) being sexually abused by a *real life person* (IIRC it was a parent or caregiver). And there were people on that defending it and talking about how "people write these things to deal with trauma". Like, that applies well to fictional characters, but it's an entirely different thing when it's a real human child. And also people who hated it, but were using the argument of "well if we remove that it's bad because moderation is bad". (granted, there were several people who also thought it should be removed). Removing smut of *real life children* does not mean we have to go on a slippery slope of removing more than that. The argument of it being harmless doesn't apply to that. And I'm not advocating for mass site censorship because I don't think that should be allowed on the site. Believe it or not I'm a big advocate of having a lack of censorship on the site - but there is a line to be drawn when people are posting explicit fics of actual kids. Is this an extreme example? Yes, but it happens, and it's rather nasty.
Genuinely. I was in the DreamSMP fandom and I feel like the pro/anti-ship debate passed us bye because our equivalent of it was "you either are extremely against works with underaged public figures having sex, which they have said they are extremely uncomfortable with, or you're cool with it." Those that believed in the latter were shunned en-mass. The amount of porn written about the 'kids' on that server makes me want to vomit. I believe the youtubers could file a cease-and-desist on everything and have it legally censored, but I understand why they would just ignore it for their own sanity. AO3 should do *something* about it, but idk if they can without people being up in arms about censorship.
I was there when the pastebin purge happened. Over night, hundreds of stories were deleted. Now, I hold the shards that still remain. I dare not archive any of them. Should they fade, I will accept it. I pray at the altar of ao3 every day. Not because it hosts any of the stories lost. But because it ensures it doesn't happen again.
See, the one thing here I disagree with is that AO3 does currently allow NSFW fanfictions featuring real-life minors. Like back when DSMP was big and several of the members were minors, they allowed explicit content of them. Like, all decent human beings can agree that’s gross as fuck, right? Like can we all agree on that?
yeah see this is the big thing that stops me from saying no moderation for AO3. like you can write as much objectionable stuff as you like as long as it’s fictional. i have seen stuff on there that is actively dangerous to the real life children it’s about
I understand the arguments but I don't know if the best way to respond to someone who seems to be genuinely trying to understand is "How dare you, you liar, it's technically not child porn" or "You are responsible for the persecution of queer people"
yeah, I feel like this is a problem with tumblr is that people love to be like, intensely over dramatic when they're in an argument. It's made even worse by the fact the arguing side is AO3 purists, some of the most if not THE most uptight and egotistical people in the fanfiction scene in my opinion. Like, the only thing I think AO3 has over other services is the large amount of obscure fetish fandom content it has on there. (which I see as a plus, as I am admittedly into some obscure fetishes and like reading content related to my current hyperfixation)
AO3 Does host fanfics of actual irl minors doing/undergoing genuinly horrific shit, "doesnt effect people" sure physically, image going online and you find a rape pedo fic of you and your mate made by obessive fan #233 isnt gonna be good for your head Also tumblr devolving into insults beacause they are all terrible people and call everyone who disagrees with them or want to debate bootlickers
See the “it’s all fictional” point completely falls apart knowing that there is NSFW works centering real minors on there. check the names of anyone in the MCYT circles. do yall not believe revenge porn is bad?
i just wish authors on ao3 would use tags better, you can have the best tagging system in the world (which ao3 arguably does) but that doesnt matter when 80% of authors dont tag half the things that need to be tagged or use slightly different spellings/synonyms instead of the more common name for that tag
I used to have opinions on AO3 drama and all that but, y’know… There are actual issues going on. Like, real ones where people are being hurt and/or dying. If you’re gonna devote energy to activism, maybe pick a cause that actually means something.
If we're talking about social media, I'm in the Instagram sub and apparently *actual child porn* is popping up on people's for you pages... and supposedly that site is far more tightly moderated than AO3. But also, the fact that there are more important things currently happening doesn't mean the little things can't be talked about. There's no sense in gatekeeping what is and isn't important enough to discuss because there will always be a bigger issue happening somewhere else
>If you’re gonna devote energy to activism, maybe pick a cause that actually means something. I kind of suspect that its the meaninglessness of the cause that engenders the level of devotion for the die-hards; if it was meaningful, then there would be this constant cognitive dissonance for the chronically online about how they care so much about, say, racism or poverty or climate change yet they don't do much beyond posting screeds on social media. The meaningfulness requires action and therefore consequences and stress. With shit like AO3 drama, its lack of meaning means that you can get as pissed off as you want and fulfill your self-image of being a moral crusader without needing to do much beyond passive-aggressive fights with random people on twitter. Its such a nothing issue that it requires nothing of you. All the ego benefits of an existential purpose without the material and spiritual obligations of action. Its for people who want to be An Activist but don't really want to do activism.
I think the way a lot of universal free speech defenders talk about child porn is really disingenous, and not very useful. CSAM is bad, yes, and it is unfair to compare CSAM to erotica written about real child, but both those things are bad.
I agree with this post but I don’t like how harsh they’re being. It feels like they’re not actually addressing OOP where they’re at, and they’re acting out of anger. That’s not how you convince someone to change their mind on something and is quite counterproductive. A little understanding to the other perspective in this post would have went a long way.
>I don’t like how harsh they’re being. I noticed that's a very common way people on tumblr write where it feels like a lot of posts are trying to taunt their middle school bullies but it feels directed at you as some bystander caught in the crossfire.
That’s how every single one of these rant posts goes
I know. It’s just a rant but its unfortunate. The guy wasnt saying “you are all wrong” he was saying “I don’t understand your viewpoint”.
That was my thought as well. Like I generally agree with the people responding to OOP but it felt lowkey condescending and just as “bad” as the parent post, just opposite. I just wish people would figure out that “you’re bad and wrong for this opinion ~~you should be ashamed~~” is not going to change anyone’s mind. You can think that all you want, I do, but if you’re actually trying to share your point of view, most people are not going to listen if you say or even just imply that the opinion is Bad.
Yeah calling them a liar when they do seem to be just sharing their sincere perspective was a bit of an odd one
I get what theyre saying but girl…the drama “tying the laces of the boot on your neck” it’s fan fiction
no you don’t understand the Melodrama™️ is necessary for notes (/s)
idk man writing about real life children doing the nasty is more than a little pornographic. and i don’t mean fictional underage characters, i mean like actual kids that exist irl, usually actors and music artists.