SWpromptsandask

katjohnadams:

anarchycox:

fremedon:

some-stars:

aniseandspearmint:

I feel like I need to say this, as I’ve seen some concerning fandom purity bullshit crossing my dash.

This blog is unapologetically pro AO3.

I support them and all they do, may they continue to do it for decades to come.

i want to reblog this with the caveat that they DESPERATELY need to get their shit together and address the racist trolls that plague authors of color, which is a problem they’ve been ignoring for years despite repeated pleas for help. (also, giving people the ability to block authors who write racist fic!) AO3 is not perfect and we need to criticize it. but that job is made much harder by people who criticize it for doing good things, like being an archive that doesn’t censor anything that’s legal to host. that’s a good thing and i 100% support it.

THIS.

AO3 is not a curated collection and was never meant to be, but tolerating any legal content from users is not the same as tolerating all behavior from users.

The AO3 has already started making some changes to increase authors’ control over their own spaces:

• You can now restrict comments to logged-in users or shut them off altogether.
• You can freeze comment threads.

This is a good start! Other things the AO3 could do that don’t involve removing fic from the archive:

• They could allow users the ability to blacklist other users, so that they don’t appear in their search results and can’t comment on their fic.
• They could allow users to permanently blacklist specific tags, so that as long as they’re logged in they will never see them.
• This one’s more of a longshot, but it might be possible to allow users to blacklist certain terms from a third party’s bookmarks or collections, so that if someone you trust marks a fic as containing content you don’t want to see, you can take their word for it and exclude it from searches.

Most importantly, they can increase the size of the Abuse team (and support and train Abuse volunteers properly) so that they can actually deal with harassment in real time. (For values of ‘deal with’ up to and including ‘ban users, and follow up on reports of ban evasion.’) Harassment is already a TOS violation. Taking it seriously, and giving users more tools to control who they to interact with and what content they see, would make a huge difference to the archive’s usability for a lot of fans.

All this, with the reminder that AO3 is working on a block function, the freeze thread capability is their first step to that, but they admit that blocking is going to take a long time to implement because of coding and making sure it doesn’t break their system. 

The freeze thread is there to help people prove harassment because if you freeze a thread and the same person starts another and another that is hard data proof they can use for Harassment violation.

And it’s good to remember Ao3 IS LISTENING and working but is also run entirely by volunteer work and is always fighting to keep the site up, et alone code and implement changes.

The urge to chew on my own foot soles cause they itch reminds me that we are closely related to chimps. That information keeps me humble.

You know, even humbler than my already low self confidance.