The internet’s most beloved fanfiction site is undergoing a reckoning
This article on AO3 and their failure of moderation is brilliant. It acknowledges the irony that AO3 has completely ignored calls for blocking and moderation when it comes to violent racism, but is suddenly responding now that the “community” is complaining about a 1 million words fix interfering with their “sexy times.”
From the article:
Lori Morimoto, a fandom academic who was involved in the earlier discussion, didn’t mince words about the inherent hypocrisy of the controversy around STWW. “The discussions of the fic were absolutely riddled with people saying they wished you could block and/or ban certain users and fics on AO3 altogether because this is obnoxious,” she wrote to me in an email, “and nowhere (that I can see) is there anyone chiming in to say, ‘BUT FREE SPEECH!!!’”
Morimoto continued:
But when people suggest the same thing based on racist works and users, suddenly everything is about freedom of speech and how banning is bad. When it’s about racism, every apologist under the sun puts in an appearance to fight for our rights to be racist assholes, but if it’s about making the reading experience less enjoyable (which is basically what this is — it’s obnoxious, but not particularly harmful except to other works’ ability to be seen), then suddenly our overwhelming concern with free speech seems to just disappear in a poof of nothingness.
Lori Morimoto I don’t know who you are but I respect you tremendously.
I mean. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of AO3 and the issue in question.
It doesn’t exist to service readers. Anything it provides to help readers it does purely as a courtesy or to enhance it’s actual mission:
AO3 exists as a platform for writers.
They (by which I mean the people who own and run the site) don’t really make free speech defenses of their content, except purely in the abstract sense that they exist to provide an author platform, and you’re free to be dissatisfied with the way they do that, but they’re not gonna stop. They’ll only step in in two circumstances; direct harassment of users of the site by other users, or people using the site to actively impede authors.
STWW nails both of those. It’s tag cloud is at this point deliberately designed to harass both users and authors. The author of it has not innocently created an inconvenience out of good faith; they know precisely what they are doing and are doing it with malice. They are staying just inside the technical rules while weaponizing their work to directly degrade the experience of others, especially that of authors, in a way that a fic that merely contains content you think should be disallowed does not. And unlike simply not reading a work, which is easily done, you can’t actually avoid what its doing without fairly major browser surgery.
There’s absolutely no hypocrisy here. None whatsoever. AO3 may or may not be wrong on the merits of their “we allow all comers” policy, but this can’t be said to be hypocritical on their part.
I really don’t understand why everyone thinks this is some kind of moral or site moderation issue? Like, this is clearly a technical issue to me.
Tumblr already implemented a similar feature, if a post is longer than a certain amount it’s “collapsed” and only a certain amount of it is shown after which you have to click a read more button or to see the whole post.
AO3 could do a very similar thing with the <div>s (boxes) in which the fics are contained when looking at search results etc.
Or you know, cap the number of tags to like 300 or whatever.
There are a myriad of ways this could be solved without involving the moderation and without “punishing” anyone for using too many tags.