#but it IS insane how content is fucking moderated on this site

[sniffanimal]

trans people: [posts a picture with a V-neck top on] tumblr: BANNED. go to hell

cis people: can i make a community called "Sensual Elegance of the Mature Woman" and post pictures of my entire pussy? tumblr: sure and we'll even promote it to random users for you

[obserbolisk]

I’m sort of another outsider to this whole rodeo, paying attention but not posting until now. Watching the whole affair fills me with a ton of complex thoughts, imo the most valid arguments against AO3 are the ones focusing on how inefficiently run it is and how poorly volunteers appear to be treated.

On one hand, there’s multiple accounts of volunteers saying that they wanted to moderate the site and they were held back by the AO3 legal team and board. You’re right that proper moderation would be impossible, however it’s not completely absurd to say that they could be doing a lot better and to realize that voting/making noise/whatever they’re doing this time/changing fic names might make some difference. The idea is that this website is supposed to be some form of a democracy, when people feel that’s not happening, they’re going to get upset.

On the other hand, nonprofits are notoriously good at self destructive behavior. The OTW is clearly a slow, plodding bureaucracy run by a board that is extremely resistant to change. But I’m some ways, they have to behave like that, they’re the 57th most visited website in the USA and that’s a fuckload of upkeep. Running a hosting website is a dirty, dirty business, and it’s unlikely that they have enough hands to go around. The endless nightmare that is content moderation is a well-known phenomenon, for fucks sake we’re all discussing this on tumblr, a website that got taken off the App Store for hosting child pornography, and could only properly combat that with a large scale porn ban. And unfortunately, the insane details involving the process of removing illegal content coming out at AO3 aren’t too dissimilar to the stories of happening at every other social media website, including tumblr. It’s just happening at a much slower pace due to how mismanaged/understaffed the site is.

The treatment of labor there is fucked, but it’s fucked up in a manner that’s par for the course for any website that hosts media. And, like you say, it would be really hard for them to do better. But this behavior is actively chasing potential volunteers away, and once the site loses the majority of its volunteers, that’s when shit gets really bad.

On the topic of hiring a diversity consultant, I agree it’s unlikely they would be able to do anything useful. Most probable scenario you have another voice on the board making things run even slower. But people are focusing on their own personal best case scenario, where this person is a voice to push for actual changes to the way the site is run, an update to how archive warnings work. Stuff that’s probably going to be hard to implement. It seems like they want one diversity consultant to do things that would require five semi-competent coders to accomplish.

But if you assert that you’re gonna run a site like a democracy, expect people to run campaigns to affect that democracy. Imo that’s just a sign that people are invested in seeing change.

The whole #EndOTWracism is really fascinating to watch as an outsider because like, as I keep saying the elephant in the room is that the volunteer organization with a half million dollar budget is never going to moderate their website with millions of users, but the OTW also doesn't seem to acknowledge this at all.

If they wanted to be honest and transparent, either in 2020 or right now, they could've said "we are never going to do any more than the bare legal minimum when it comes to moderation because we lack the resources to do anything else, and if you don't like that you should stop using our site." And sure, that would piss a lot of people off, but it's also, like, the only actual possible outcome of any of this, so you might as well be upfront about it.

Instead they made a couple good feature additions and a bunch of promises to revisit their policies (which they know they couldn't enforce if they were less permissive) and then... hoped no one would remember that they promised this? Like, come on now, "say you're going to do a bunch of shit that you don't have any capacity to do and then hope everyone forgets about it" is a great strategy to have a ton of people yelling at you a few years later.

The weirdest part of this is the promise that OTW made (and that people seem to want them to keep) to hire a diversity consultant, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what anyone thinks this person would actually do. Diversity consultants are the people midsize companies hire when a white executive gets caught on tape saying the n word - what's the plan for one at the OTW?

[ohnoitstbskyen]

So I'm thinking about doing Business

I'm going to experimentally pay for Tumblr's "Blaze" on one of my posts to see what the effect is, if any. I don't plan to use it often, but if I'm using this site as part of my silly little content creator job, maybe it makes sense to advertise some things?

I don't even know what it would make sense to use that feature on, either... posts with my official video releases? Stuff like that article I wrote about the experience of going viral? ... posts about my merch store? (oh god I don't want to advertise the merch store, I haven't added anything to it in ages).

Anyway, if you see one of my posts with a "promoted" tag on it, that's why. Just figuring out if that's something that should be part of my job on here. There are some extended personal reflections on using Tumblr for My Job™ below the cut.

On the other hand, Twitter was never that much of a Business Platform for me, either. That site and app is insanely bad at driving traffic anywhere else, which is part of why its ad revenue was so low depite the huge user base. Getting people to click away from Twitter to anywhere else is like pulling teeth, even for people with million dollar marketing budgets, and so I just... kinda never tried, really. Partly because it never seemed worth the work, partly because it was my personal Twitter before it accidentally became my Business Twitter.

Tumblr in that regard is different though. Four years ago, someone posted an outtake from a shitpost video I did laughing myself half to death over an article about how millennials are killing mayonnaise. That outtake went some degree viral on Tumblr, and that virality did prompt a lot of people to go find the full video on YouTube, making it briefly the most successful video on my whole channel.

So I dunno. Maybe it makes sense to use Tumblr for Business™ in that way. Not that I think I can manufacture a viral hit, of course, but maybe paying to have my work shown to more people on here could be worth it? I guess I'll find out once that Blaze goes through the moderation.

It sorta ties in with a broader pre-post-Twitter reflection I've been having about how I use social media, though.

I don't want to be my job

My personal twitter became my business twitter entirely by accident, and while it was fun at first to have thousands of followers on my personal shitposting, it wasn't fun at all in the long run. At a certain point, usually somewhere past the 10k follower boundary (or if you had the misfortune of having a pre-Elon checkmark), people stop treating you like a person or a fellow poster, and start treating you like a brand, a celebrity (however minor), like a Public Figure. And on the one hand that's good, kinda, because if you have a larger platform, you do deserve more scrutiny. On the other hand, it means you can't be a person on your own social media.

Dark humor, in-jokes, dumb shitposts with friends, dunking on some random hot take, all of that starts to come with the danger that some stranger, who is determined to misunderstand what you post in the absolute worst possible faith, will see it and start yelling about it.

And if, as a person who has a bigger platform, you yell back at them, or dunk on their bullshit... yeah, there's a real risk that you're the one being the bigger asshole, actually. When you have a big Twitter audience, you have some responsibilty for what happens to the things you put in front of that audience. And if you have fans, they might want to defend you, and if you have a lot of fans, some percentage of them aren't going to know how to act or where the line is, and go way the fuck too far.

It's the reality of having a public profile. People will come at you in absolutely wild ways, accusing you of saying absolutely insane things that they have derived from truly deranged (often willful) misinterpretations, and you can't respond to that like a person responds, or you run the risk of being the one who does more harm.

And so you can't be a person on your social media anymore. You now have to be a Public Figure, and if you don't figure that out you're gonna get in trouble. I should have made a private friends-only account on Twitter far, far earlier than I did, I should have made an official brand account far, far earlier than I did. But the only way to know that is in hindsight.

... which leads me back to Tumblr. I've been thinking about Doing Business™ on Tumblr - Blazing my posts, doing SEO, promoting my brand and all that other shit that technically comes with the job I ostensibly have.

I fled back here when I saw Twitter start to torch itself, because I need to post somewhere, but do I need to post for myself, as a person?

Or do I need to post because I am TBSkyen the YouTuber and posting is part of my job, my brand and my online personality which I crafted as a layer of separation between myself and the audience but which has at this point become so entangled with my real self that I don't know the boundaries between them anymore?

Am I going to look back on this and realize, as I did on Twitter, that I should have made a private, friends-only Tumblr account right from the start, and not mixed the personal with the professional and with Posting? I have around 2000 followers right now and this is still fun and casual, but what happens if I manage to luck myself into a real following again? When am I going to dunk on something I think is dumb and cause the person who posted it to receive actionable threats because someone who likes my videos doesn't know how the fuck to act?

Anyway, this is the kind of shit that gets powerblasted through my brain when I pay $10 to make some more people see one of my posts on a website - how's your morning going?

[the-eldritch-it-gay]

literally fucking insane that freaks are like "but introducing any amount of moderation will cause the ban of all nsfw content and lgbt content or dark content, and people will still manage to skirt the tags". like fucking. do you know how many sites ban erotica/porn of minors but still have "dark" shit and things people could find offensive. do you know how many websites and places have moderation. it literally fucking sounds like people being like "I don't support snuff films but I think youtube shouldn't ban snuff films because what if next they start banning my true crime videos or violent videogames :(("

[yakkety-yak-art]

Insane to me that if you criticize ao3 in any capacity whatsoever inevitably some weirdos will show up in your replies like “nooo ao3 is revolutionary it’s the only safe space online for women and queer people and you’re just trying to push your puritanical worldviews onto queer people because you’re homophobic and hate women and you’re trying to censor us because fanfiction is real literature and is the most important thing for the internet and you hate poor people because we can’t buy books and this is literally 1984” but the “PURITANICAL” critique is literally a queer person saying “hey it’s incredibly fucked up that ao3 actively refuses to moderate anything and allows explicit sexual content of living, breathing, real life children to be posted on their site” like how r u 30 ready to die on the hill of ao3. go to the library and read a real book so u can learn critical thinking skills Jesus Christ.

[mamawasatesttube]

ao3: "we're an anti-racist organization!"

also ao3:

It is also important that Warnings are well-understood and enforceable by PAC volunteers. The vast majority of all reports about mandatory Warnings must be easy for PAC to rule upon. A PAC volunteer must be able to look at the content in a work and understand without further research whether or not a Warning applies. This matters for both practicality and consistency: 1. If volunteers need to routinely perform external research in order to evaluate tickets, then this will greatly increase the time it takes to resolve reports, which will badly impact our already-overloaded ticketing system 2. If volunteers are not readily familiar with how warnings should be applied, then rulings will be inconsistent from work to work, which is unfair to users

"well our moderator staff are all volunteers who don't necessarily all agree on what racism is" (a fair point) "and therefore we cannot even Try to come up with any sort of standard or attempt to educate our staff to be on the same page" (????)

is there a magical very clearly demarcated standard for what counts as graphic violence somewhere? do your volunteers all comprehend the exact same definition of graphic vs nongraphic violence? or is it just different when it's racism?

An email from PAC about missing such a warning on work is also more likely to be received badly: a central difference between a "Racism" (or "Hate Speech") warning and the warnings we already have, such as "Major Character Death", is that many people read the former as describing a moral failing of the work or its creator, not just a depiction of something within the work. A user who believes that AO3 is telling them they're racist is a user who is more likely to delete their work as a direct result of contact from PAC.

"it might hurt people's feelings if we try to enforce warnings for racism and we don't want to hurt people's feelings if they were being racist on accident!" okay. right. lmao

but i think the most egregious thing in this article might just be this part:

Disproportionate targeting of POC on AO3 by other users is not a hypothetical. For example, in 2019, AO3 was undergoing a migration of primarily Chinese users after a new wave of fandom censorship on Lofter and Weibo (popular Chinese websites). At the time the "Language" field on AO3 fanworks defaulted to English, and it was often overlooked by non-English creators new to AO3. This caused many Chinese works to be posted labeled as "English", and often with the wrong fandom. A portion of AO3's English-speaking userbase began deliberately hunting these works down en-masse. Some left polite comments on the works to request changes to the language and fandom. Other English-speaking users left comments that were belligerent in tone or outright harassment. Some of the people enacting this targeting scheme also proceeded to use automated methods to overwhelm PAC with "incorrect language" and "incorrect fandom" tickets. Altogether, the number of "incorrect language tag" reports increased by 1530% compared to the prior year. PAC1 ended up contacting thousands of Chinese users to ask them to fix their tags. As a direct result of this targeted reporting campaign, a disproportionate number of Chinese creators deleted their works from AO3. This is a racially biased outcome that we do not want to see repeated.

this is so fucking bullshit i am honestly a little speechless. this was not just users using a moderation tool in order to be racist. this was racist site design. why does your statement not at all include that it was directly YOUR FAULT for having the form default to english to begin with??? where is the sense of responsibility??? to act like this is entirely on users and not at all on the otw for including that feature in ao3's posting form to begin with is INSANE levels of clown behavior. they even changed the default on the form - works no longer default to english but instead give you a dialog box sayinig you need to select a language. so they did realize that was wrong of them! and yet in their statement on why they intend to do nothing about racism they admit zero culpability for this event??? hm!!!

like. i'm not an archivist. i'm a layperson. i don't know the exact solution to racism on ao3. but i do know that a) just because ao3 is analogous to a library doesn't mean they cannot moderate at all - most libraries aren't necessarily going to throw out a copy of "birth of a nation", but they are going to shelve it among similar media in a section specific to racism of the early 1900s - and also b) there are definitely poc in the archival sciences that they could hire as consultants to try and sort through some of the many, many issues listed here.

instead they've just come up with a laundry list of excuses as to why they are not going to do anything about the issue of racism on ao3. they state that essentially, if you don't want to see racist works, you're entirely on your own:

We believe that the harassment policy, optional tags, filters, muting, and bookmark features do a better job at helping users avoid fanworks containing content they don't want to encounter. Users who create fanworks about sensitive topics are encouraged to tag appropriately, using Additional Tags if necessary. Other users can use filters, mute creators, or mute individual works that contain content that they find disturbing. Users who wish to screen or recommend works for other users are encouraged to use bookmarks to compile recommendation lists for works that they believe handle a topic well.

and it took them four years to come up with that. okay.

ao3 really wrote almost 5k words to say "umm racism is complicated and hard to deal with so we won't be doing any of that 🥺👉👈" huh

[multitrackdrifting]

Patch notes on my thoughts on AI Art

I'm not a tech idealist so I see shit like AI art and only three things come to mind:

AI Art sold to people as commissions

AI Art NFTs

Vocal contingents of people talking about how they feel persecuted for people shitting on them for spending hours mastering parameter refinement and rightfully being called skill-less.

"You don't understand how it works", oh execpt that almost every notable example of the technology being abused demonstrates that even if you lay out ethical guidelines and terms of service it doesn't stop the abuse cause ultimately it expects the users to act in good faith which is a fucking insane system to rely on given that technology's intended purpose is not always its practical use-case.

You're expecting people to choose ethical AI art generators with the embedded assumption that a significant amount of individuals will be guided to those ones instead of the ones that can farm the shit out of their favourite artist's style and spit out a commission at less than 1% of the cost.

I am not a tech idealist, nor am I a computer scientist/programmer that has a hard on for the promising areas of the tech: e.g. making personal use items like DND icons for monsters & players. I don't care about that at all, but you must realise that the niche positive use cases come with the wide-spread abuse opportunities right?

When you have to read shit like "man replicates recently deceased artist's style with AI", "plagiarist earns money through artist's style selling ai generated works" and see art hosting sites flooded to the brim with AI art that is default opt-in that you have to manually turn off you really have to wonder are these the problems of an emerging technology, or a technology that cannot feasibly be controlled.

If you say some shit like "it's democratizing art", I must remind you that creating art that you envision with ease is not a human necessity, nor do you have the fucking right to pillage the skills of others for novel concepts that you have the ideas but not the skill to execute. Let's stop "being fair" to techbro bullshit, how is this shit even defended on here at all?

Some of the muddy discourse around it is like "stealing labour" and "real art" arguments, I'm not as fascinated by these particular points, but that doesn't mean the vitriol people have towards AI Art is unwarranted just because some of their premises are not that agreeable.

You can already see examples of AI art having racial biases, turning people with darker skin tones white for no reason (like that new photo => anime one).

You can see that AI art for some people isj ust about making random fetish art, I literally got recommended a random ass tweet of some Genshin character's detailed armpit sweat recommended below a tweet about what my friend's thoughts on a game were. Are you for real? That's more of a twitter issue, but yeah.

You can see that AI Art won a fucking prize at the Colorado State Fair's Fine Arts competition and people were fucking pissed.

Anime Los Angeles had to ban AI Art from the artist alley because you can produce a dozen unique images to sell in bulk and you still make money off people who aren't privy to the indicators of AI Art.

There are so many notable examples of the misuse of AI art and how damaging it is to fandom, to the ability to see legitimate artworks (especially if it's some unpopular ass character that one person just spams the fucking tag with) and how difficult it is to moderate the content because there is no super convenient way to detect AI Art.

It is not a beast to be tamed, it is a scourge that should be eradicated from this planet because using a fucking honor system when traditional and digital art is already reposted and fucking stolen prior to the inception AI. Do you know what you get now? A layer of obfuscation, on-demand content generation that farms impressions and followers, paying no mind to the skill check that people are skipping over cause they know how to make a decently convincing AI picture based on very specific parameter searching.

It's no longer "this pic is so coool, credits to who made this", it's now [insert joke caption here] [ai generated image].

And skill does not equal influence (and lets not be obtuse, there are fundamentals that can be meaningfully measured i.e. anatomical accuracy, the consistency of linework and other such things), I know many skilled painters thta can do both realistic and anime styles that have like 1500 followers - but you know what it does do?

It means budding artists are held to the fucking unrealistic standards of AI Art trained to artists with over 20 years of professioanl experience bodying their earnest works of their character that they love. It trains the subsconsious to discern betwen good and bad under a very superficial scope. In turn, it lowers their engagement with random people, but random people that aren't your friends constitute a large amt of followers for any creator.

I don't condone harassing random people, but I certainly wont feel a lick of sympathy when people express their woes about people shitting on their 20 word prompt pictures that an AI spat out in 15 minutes.

At the end of it all, how I feel about AI Art is this:

It's kinda like a swiss army knife, it can do a lot of shit, some are harmless in nature -- but if it's got like 13 different Knives That Are Good At Killing People, should we be that surprised reading about times it's used to kill people (metaphorically). It's not the strongest rhetoric in the world, but it's how I look at it. There's so much bad it can, and has done, that we are beyond the point of reigning it in.

I'm just keeping it real, this shit is bad, and honestly, I am glad that so many artists I follow on social media shit on it because it deserves to be pummeled into the ground. Ad hominem my balls, just pick up a pencil and paper and stop feeling so entitled to pillaging the works of others mayhaps - don't really care how you wokeify it, it's still stupid as shit

Saying "democratizing art" and making art accessible are just uses of buzzwords that don't mean anything socially progressive, they are lies meant to sell you on subscribing to a technology or tacitly accepting its existence

[garetthawke]

i know the discussion of problematic content being hosted on ao3 is a complicated one, but with the mass amounts of internet censorship happening right now to a truly insane degree, i hope a lot of y'all start to realize how complicated it is too. we've gotten to the point it is the ONLY remaining site i use that i do not fear getting banned on for posting certain content that i have a right to post.

i predicted the train of events a few years ago with purity culture making such a huge wave inside the world of politics and the way the internet has shifted to functioning for capitalism, and here we are. tumblr, facebook, twitter, instagram, youtube, tiktok - I've gotten banned and censored on ALL of them, and all for lgbt or anti racist posts. please let that sink in - the moderation that ALL of these sites have imposed are presented as "protection" from the very problematic content y'all are speaking against, and yet it targets queer and poc content very blatantly.

so please. PLEASE. in a time when the whole of the internet is trying to erase our existences for the sake of profit, approach the topic of a not-for-profit, unmoderated site primarily used by queer people with a LITTLE more nuance than you have been. understand the gravity of censorship in a time when so many of us are stuck in our homes with only the internet available to us. please understand how badly capitalism has fucked up our ability to speak and exist online - and how that extends to our ability to create moderation that is not abused for capitalistic profit.

there is not a single website you can list that has produced EFFECTIVE moderation that didn't take a whole lot of marginalized people down too - if it even did what it was supposed to do in the first place.

and a secondary, but very important point: a driving force behind internet censorship is anti sex work and extreme sex negativity, and SWERF propaganda hides behind a lot of the talking points y'all use, even when you don't intend it. even sites intended to to host sexual content, from onlyfans to porn sites, are banning and censoring sex workers because of threat to profit.

do not think for a SINGLE second that doing the same thing on ao3 would somehow produce different results. moderation takes time and effort and people, which costs money, which means it ALWAYS runs at the mercy of capitalism.

which means we honestly ought to have other priorities right now, and frankly, it deeply concerns me that with ALL the bullshit happening on the internet right now, some people's biggest concern is whether ao3 is implementing the same failed censorship moderation that every other site has imposed due to capitalism.

maybe we can focus a little more on, i don't know, black women or queer people not getting banned for speaking and existing on social media first. especially when the same problematic people and content exist across those platforms too - pedophiles swarm twitter, tiktok is filled with racists, tumblr has had a history with nazis, and terfs exist freely everywhere. ao3 the nonprofit is not going to magically solve the solution of dealing with them that the highly funded, capitalism fueled megacorp websites have failed to do, and DEFINITELY not in a way that won't also silence and erase marginalized people also.

[wherevermyway]

the FiVE:RACHA project (1/7) // black mirror AU // 18+

chapter one: freedom series navigation: [desktop] [mobile]

⚠ POTENTIAL TW: READ WITH CAUTION! ⚠ pairings: lee minho x kim seungmin | hwang hyunjin x lee felix x yang jeongin | bang chan x seo changbin x han jisung rating: explicit! 18+ warnings/tags: creator chose not to use archive warnings, descent into madness, horror, thriller, technological implants, blood and gore, alcohol abuse, some sexual content in later chapters but it’s not, like, smut. word count: 3,101 also on AO3

PS: i made a carrd for this. check it out if you’re interested!

originally posted: 26 december 2020

Several years ago, five men created a website for South Korea's international rap sensation, 3RACHA. The website, The FiVE:RACHA Project, was almost as popular as the group themselves. About two years after the website went live, FiVE:RACHA had the opportunity to meet 3RACHA.

Immediately after they meet, the members of FiVE:RACHA and 3RACHA go missing. The FiVE:RACHA Project website is down. Their Twitter account has been deactivated, and 3RACHA stops posting. A few months after their meetup, it was announced that 3RACHA had disbanded. Nobody knows what happened to either group.

Nobody knows, until now.

For some, modern day fame comes at a price that is too high to pay.

disclaimer: this is a work of fiction! any reference to persons in this work of fiction are purely coincidental. the characters referenced from Stray Kids are  interpretations loosely based on their personalities in the group and do  not represent the real people behind the personas. if this, or any of  the content included in the warnings above make you uncomfortable,  please stop reading now.

// note: with other darker stuff i post, i’m not totally sure i’ll post the entirety of this fic on tumblr. if not, i’ll do a little notice post for people interested to keep following it on AO3.

...Do you wish to proceed? To learn the truth of FiVE:RACHA and 3RACHA?

What is the true price of fame?

A Foreword:

Several years ago, there was a fan site, The FiVE:RACHA Project, dedicated to South Korea’s most famous rap group, 3RACHA. One day, it went down without notice. The site, as well as their Twitter account with over four million followers, was almost as well-known as the rap group itself.

3RACHA mysteriously disbanded several months after FiVE:RACHA went down. Nobody has seen or heard from the members of either group since the disbandment. There are several theories and myths surrounding the disappearances of both groups, but most of them are incorrect.

Be aware that, no, FiVE:RACHA did not go down because the site moderators were bored of 3RACHA. No, 3RACHA did not disband because Supreme Entertainment was about to collapse due to widespread fraud and their political scandals within the Korean government.

The stories of FiVE:RACHA and 3RACHA are very much deeply intertwined within each other, and the truth is uncomfortable to witness.

This novel’s authors, comprised of some of the most loyal fans of both groups, will remain anonymous and stay in hiding due to fear of being caught by the one responsible for the disappearances. An individual outside of our group found a Shinyu of someone involved in this, someone discarded in the Han River many years ago. How the implant survived with no living host for so long is beyond remarkable.

In case the Shinyu is defunct or replaced by the time you’re reading this, allow us to explain. The name comes from “close friend” in Japanese, likely as a play on words for how close the implant gets to its host, both physically and socially. The Shinyu was created in Tokyo in 2025; it is a small technological implant embedded under the skin of the right side of everyone’s temples.

Everyone has one placed at thirteen, and it encodes all of our visual, tactile, and auditory data, syncing it to our phones and uploading it to personal servers in the cloud. The data is encrypted, and requires access from both the Shinyu and the phone to decipher. It allows us to integrate technology into our daily lives, records our memories and important moments, but there is a price we all pay for this. Critics have been outspoken about this since its inception, but the governments never listened.

Alas, we digress. The Shinyu is vital to uncovering so much information that has been hidden and speculated on after all this time. Regardless of our personal opinions regarding the ethics of the device, we are grateful that we were able to obtain one of the implants. It has been vital to connect a lot of the missing pieces of the greater picture.

The authors have spent years decoding the information from this implant. Thanks to an anonymous source, we were able to obtain the personal computer of someone in FiVE:RACHA, personal cell phones of both groups, access to the database of Supreme Entertainment and its defunct myIdol data, some declassified legal information, and archives of both FiVE:RACHA and 3RACHA’s Twitter accounts.

Why have we chosen to extrapolate all of this data in the form of a novel? Perhaps we would like it to serve as a modern day parable for the plights of technology being so intricately interwoven between us all now. We, as humans, are now one with technology. Technology is literally embedded into us. It is astounding that technology allows us to interact so closely with famed idols now, beyond some barriers that critics have denounced for being inappropriate or unhealthy.

Some of us may pay the ultimate price for this.

Some of us, unfortunately, already have.

However interconnected we are with technology and how close we can get to those of which we idolize in society, though, humans will still crave entertainment. That is why this was written almost as a work of fiction. Those that pay attention to the story will be rewarded. Maybe not immediately, and maybe only after self-reflection, but readers will be rewarded. That much can be promised.

Above all else, we cannot stress enough that modern day fame and convenience comes at a price that is too high for some to pay. Stay safe, err on the side of caution. Disconnect from your Shinyu if you choose to proceed any further, because you never know who is watching.

— Curators of The FiVE:RACHA Project

One: Freedom

Nobody really knows who exactly manages FiVE:RACHA, just that it’s a group of five fans that run a fansite for the popular rap group 3RACHA. Their website is the most well-known and widely used out of the millions of fans that are out there. It always has live updates for the members: Bang Chan, Seo Changbin, and Han Jisung. There are daily paparazzi photos of at least one of them slapped up on the front page, embedded social media posts from each of the members updated as soon as they post, and hard-to-find facts about each of them.

Hell, one of the FiVE:RACHA members went through and coded up a section of the site dedicated to decoding natal charts for each of the members. Again, like most things about FiVE:RACHA, the source of this information was a mystery. Nobody’s sure exactly how they obtained 3RACHA’s birth times and locations. Some had speculated that it happened the same day the government had announced that there was a security breach of some of their databases, because the timing was oddly convenient.

To most casual fans, it sometimes felt really fucking weird to have so much information on idols readily available at their fingertips. However, to 3RACHA’s most dedicated, most obsessed fans, it was perfect. Exactly what they wanted. Their work seemed well-appreciated by the broader community, since the amount of Twitter followers FiVE:RACHA had was comparable to 3RACHA’s following, nearly half of their total count: 4,100,000 to 8,500,000.

There was nothing else that could compare to the controlled insanity that The FiVE:RACHA Project had to offer.

The FiVE:RACHA website was an international sensation, known to most 3RACHA fans, even those that opposed it. There was even a small, but growing, fanbase for the members of FiVE:RACHA, something that was slightly worrisome to them, but they had remained anonymous for so long, they weren’t really overtly concerned over it.

“This article is bullshit, man. ‘Controlled insanity’? None of this is controlled, it’s just insanity.”

Idle hums and trills of various electronics thrum in a dark room. Two young men stare at several computer monitors in a daze, lost in their own worlds as a ticker tape-like feed of coding and statistics flew past them on screen.“Let ‘em talk, dude,” the younger-looking man with blue hair scoots away from his computer and sighs. “Fuckin’ gossip rags. Anyway, I can’t stare at this CSS anymore. I can’t figure out why the embedded feeds are busted. Can you take over on this, Seung?”

The slightly older man with short, shaggy black hair rolls his neck, snapping some joints, not bothering to look away from his screens. “Yeah, yeah,” he stops poring over the article written about them on one screen, tabbing away to another. He cracks the knuckles in his fingers, and waves his hand in the air as he taps a couple of keys on his keyboard. “Go take a break, Jeongin. Hyunjin was looking for you, anyways. Probably got something good from a source of his, since he’s in one of his giddy moods.”

As Seungmin settles into his work, Jeongin chuckles as he stands up and stretches. He takes a couple steps over to the other computer desk and pats the older man on the back. “Thanks, dude,” he says with a smile and walks out of the server room, out into the hallway that leads into the open living room of their flat. The ambient humming of the room stops as he shuts the door, now replaced by the sound of his feet shuffling, the muffled noises echoing against the hardwood floor.

Five men all lived and worked in this large apartment together: Yang Jeongin, Kim Seungmin, Hwang Hyunjin, Lee Felix, and Lee Minho. Collectively, this was where they lived and breathed The FiVE:RACHA Project. Running the largest, most extensive fansite for South Korea’s most famous rap group, 3RACHA, was more than a full-time job. They all equally poured their hearts and souls into maintaining the website and their Twitter account. It proved to be almost too much for five people alone to handle as their shifts sometimes went from twelve hours and bled into sixteen, sometimes twenty-four hour shifts.

Minho, the leader, didn’t trust anyone but the original five to the project, however. Jeongin could hear the oldest man’s airy voice echo in his ears: “I trusted the four of you with this. Now, it’s devolved into something I don’t even recognize. There’s no way anyone deserves to see what we’ve done. Imagine if it got out that we were the ones in charge of this monstrosity?”

Jeongin glided into the kitchen, and pulled his phone out of his back pocket, eyeing the time. 13:36. He had another hour left of his shift, and he was exhausted after yesterday’s all-nighter. 33 hours of work, with only a small nap in between was rough on anyone, and he was starting to feel it, physically. His Shinyu Implant would ping him once every hour that he was very low on sleep, reminding him that it was unhealthy to go without sleep for so long and that he would not be able to drive. As he slinked his way to the fridge, he shoved his phone back into his pocket and yawned. He opened the fridge, the contents in the shelves of the door clattering as they abruptly shifted around.

The first thing he saw was a bottle of unsweetened coffee and, while he knew he shouldn’t drink caffeine within a few hours of hopeful sleep, Jeongin went against his instincts and reached for the bottle anyways. As he opened it, the cracking of the seal reverberated against all of the hard surfaces and sounded much louder than it should have, startling the man awake a bit.

He hated unsweetened coffee, but there was no way he would make it through another hour or so of coding maintenance without it. Jeongin polished off the entire bottle within seconds, grimacing in disgust the entire time. He tapped his right temple twice, and grumbled. “Set reminder, after work: grocery shopping. Have Hyunjin drive. Add to list: energy drinks. The good kind, none of that berry-flavoured shit.” A very faint, nearly inaudible ding responds after he’s done speaking, and Jeongin moves to discard the bottle into the recycling bin.

“Innie?” Almost as if the devil himself heard Jeongin’s request, a familiar voice rounded the corner of the kitchen. “Oh, good, I thought that was you. Anyway, you won’t believe the content I got from Yeji at Seoul Scoop, dude,” the lanky, beacon-like blond grins wildly at Jeongin, walking into the kitchen. “I actually got a photo of Chan and Changbin looking awfully close at KNECT’s backstage event a couple days ago. Think they were celebrating their recent win a little too hard.”

Hyunjin proudly slaps a grainy photo down on the countertop, where Changbin is sitting in Chan’s lap, arms wrapped around the older man’s neck. Sure, it could easily be explained away as friendly closeness, since everyone knew that all of the guys were very close friends, and the area was cramped. The photo, however, would cause a lot of panic within the community.

Jeongin smirked as he eyed the photo, taking it into his fingers and bringing it up close to his face. “The shippers are going to have a field day over this, you know.”

“I know,” Hyunjin shakes some of his hair out of his face as he arrogantly places a hand on his hip, shifting his weight to one side. “It’ll be great traffic for the site. I’ll have Seungmin put it on the front page later.” He takes a couple of steps closer to Jeongin and pulls the younger man to his chest, stroking his hair down. “I love you, but you look like shit. Why not call it a little early today?”

Jeongin shook his head, burying his nose into the older man’s shoulder, letting his eyes flutter shut with a sigh. “Seungmin and I are trying to fix a string of broken code that’s causing the social media feed to bug out a little bit. Definitely wanna have that fixed before we upload this.”

A clattering of keys startles both of the younger men, causing them to look behind Hyunjin. “Don’t worry about it, Jeongin,” a third voice speaks from the entrance of the kitchen. “Seriously, you worked really hard yesterday, and I’m sure we’ll manage. I’ll be sure to wake up Felix a little earlier and we’ll fix the coding.”

“You’re home early, Minho,” Jeongin chuckles once as he nods. “Figured you’d be stuck in the office for a few more hours.”

“Nah,” Minho dismissively waves his hand in the air as he walks over to the sink, rinsing his hands. “Seungmin called me earlier and said you were nodding off at your desk, asked me to come home early.”

A look of guilt washed over Jeongin’s face. “Shit, my bad.”

“Don’t apologize,” Minho smiles as he towels off his hands. “I appreciate all of the work you did yesterday; completely revamping the social media section was hard. But I can’t have you possibly miscode something and have it break the site because you’re running low on sleep. You’ve started getting pings, haven’t you?”

Jeongin sheepishly nods his head and mumbles an affirmation.

Hyunjin rolls his eyes and elbows the young man in the side. “I thought I told you to take a nap, dude?”

“I did!” Jeongin whines. “It was, like, a half-hour, though.”

Both Hyunjin and Minho roll their eyes at Jeongin. “Get out of here,” Minho scoffs, walking towards the server room. “Go to bed. I don’t wanna see you back in the server room until tomorrow morning.”

Jeongin opens his mouth to protest, but Hyunjin drags him away, up the stairs towards their bedroom. A ping comes from his implant, a transparent box popping up in the lower right-hand corner of his vision. The soft voice of the AI reverberates against his skull, allowing him to hear it as if it were a real voice whispering into his ear. It reads off the notification from his display.

“Movement away from workplace detected. Reminder: grocery shopping later, have Hyunjin drive. Would you like me to pull up your list?”

“No.” A low grumble comes up from Jeongin’s throat as he taps his temple twice to dismiss the notification. “Hyunjin,” he sighs, “we’ve gotta go grocery shopping.”

“You’re too tired,” Hyunjin shakes his finger without turning to look at Jeongin. “The grocery store will still be there tomorrow.”

“I’m out of my energy drinks, though,” the younger man protests.

Hyunjin smiles, opening the door to their bedroom and whispers. “I’ll be sure to get some for you. Go cuddle up with Felix and get some sleep.”

“Hyunjin, I—” Jeongin is cut off as the older man grabs his wrist, pulling him into his chest. They share a brief kiss before Hyunjin guides him into the bedroom.

“Shh, Lixie is sleeping.”

There’s a shuffling that comes from the bedsheets, and a sleepy voice grumbles. “Not anymore.”

“Aw, mornin’, babe,” Hyunjin says with a smile. “Sorry to wake you. Minho’s probably gonna come ask for you in a bit, anyways, though.”

Felix rolls over, sitting upright as he runs his hands through his brassy blond hair. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” Jeongin sighs as he makes his way over to the bed, bringing an arm up to the blond and wrapping him in a lazy hug as he pulls them down to the bed.

The blond lets out a soft laugh. “Don’t worry about it, man,” he turns his head to face the bluenette and offers him a quick peck on the lips. “I couldn’t sleep much, anyways. Finding out about that myIdol rumour yesterday had my brain going kind of wild.”

“You heard about it too, huh?” Hyunjin says, colliding down onto the bed opposite of Felix. “Someone at Seoul Scoop told me about it this morning. It lets fans connect with their idols, like they’re actually directly messaging them.”

“That’s weird,” the bluenette sleepily grumbles into Felix’s shoulder.

“I think so, too.” Felix says with a frown as he nuzzles his head against Jeongin’s forehead, staring up into the ceiling.

Hyunjin shrugs with indifference. “I dunno, I think it’s pretty interesting.”

Jeongin lifts his head and stares down Hyunjin with a smirk. “You just want to pretend like Changbin cares about you.”

The older blond frowns as he flips off Jeongin. “Like you wouldn’t want Jisung to send you a ‘Have a wonderful day, bestie!’ message?”

The youngest member flops back down onto the bed. “Okay, that’s fair. It’s still weird, though. Seems so artificial and fake, I guess.”

“Well,” Hyunjin sits up, offering a hand out to Felix, “I’ll have more information on it tomorrow, probably. Why don’t you let yourself sleep for a while?” Felix takes the hand offered to him, and both men stand up. “Lixie and I will go out and get some groceries and get you those nasty energy drinks you like so much.”

Jeongin grumbles as he wiggles his way up to the pillows, half-asleep and irritated from the loss of warmth from Felix. “Just not the berry ones, okay?”

“I’ll see what we can do,” Hyunjin says with a smirk before he spins on his heel and walks out of the room. “Love you, Innie!”

“Don’t worry,” Felix leans down to kiss Jeongin’s forehead, “I’ll make sure he doesn’t get the kinds you hate. Let yourself actually sleep, too. We’ll make it all work out, okay?”

Jeongin mutters some sort of incoherent affirmation as he lets his heavy eyelids flutter shut. Seungmin would be able to fix the CSS by himself, he figured, trying not to worry too much about how broken small parts of the site were. He heard Felix say something else as he quickly faded off into sleep, but it didn’t register fully as he sank into the abyss.

There were a lot of sleepless nights ahead of them, whether FiVE:RACHA felt it coming or not.

[acatfishconfession]

Chapter 1: Who am I?

If someone - anyone, had bothered to ask me (other than my elementary school teachers) where I could see myself at age twenty-nine, pushing thirty. It sure as fuck wouldn’t be here.

“Where is ‘here’, exactly?”   Here, is sitting in a broke down computer chair. Listening to sad instrumentals on YouTube auto-play while I sip my Dunkin refresher, binge eat munchkin donut holes and cry over my laptop keyboard.

I wish I could say that was the worst of it. Truly,  I do. But the real depth of it - the most heinous and offensive thing of all that I am doing right now is why I am here and writing this with my D.D. and emotional bullshit.�� 

Most of my time is currently occupied flipping between five fake Instagram accounts, three fake Facebooks, two fake Twitter accounts, a fake Tinder, a fake Bumble, and my three personal accounts on social media where I’ve already lined up my next potential ‘mask’. Which is what I like to call the unwitting victims of image theft.

That’s right, world. 

I am an online catfish.

Hate me. Hate me as much as I do.

I keep hoping that maybe if I feel enough of it - it will somehow trick the overly sensitive, non-confrontational, and social anxiety-riddled side of me into once and for all stopping this madness. Or at least making me feel guilty enough to just want this be over - in whatever way this sort of insanity can end once and for all.

I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit considering the two ways it most likely will. As well as the one that I don’t dare to even mention because it’s as foolish and more unlikely than any other.

The two main ways it will likely end are death or prison. The likelihood of death being by my own hand though, is slim. Not impossible, but most definitely unlikely. Purely for the fact that I am without doubt, the biggest pussy I know. Hell, most of my tattoos were just a means to try and impress friends. Which sucks even more now because I hate damn near all of the friends I wanted and equally the tattoos that I have. 

Still not sure if it’s because I hate the tattoo artist that did them or just their artwork in general. Either way, there it is. I’m a pussy. If you were concerned for a moment that I might kill myself and by partisan obligate you to contact someone for help - you can relax now. 

No. If I die it will most likely be homicide via crime of passion. I am fully aware that I may inevitably piss off the wrong person in my catfishing ventures, and end up at the bottom of a river somewhere. But that would probably be good old karma just doing what she’s best at. After all... When you play a dangerous game with emotions, those emotions can become the most volatile weapon anyone can wield. Especially when they are tested and toyed with enough.  As for prison... Well... I know there are many legal actions people can take in regard to how their photos are used and what is said about them. How they are portrayed by others online or otherwise falls under the realm of slander - if I’m not mistaken. Not entirely sure if we can call it genuine identity theft. I’m pretty sure the entire point of being a catfishing is to work in a lucrative enough way to which the content owners will be forever (or at least prolongingly) never the wiser to what you’re doing. So you change things like name, locations, ages, birthdays, etc. Avoid them and their circle of friends with prejudice. I don’t just mean ‘don’t send them friend requests’ or ‘don’t check their pages’. 

If you’re good at catfishing (if one even call the level of depravity you have to hit to do it well ‘good’), you pull out all the stops. Finding all of their accounts on every site and app and blocking them, their friends, their friend’s friends, and families. Whole geographic locations sometimes. Anyone from their area or who went to their school. You vanish from their potential radar.

And believe me when I say.... At catfishing... There are none better than me. At least, not that I’ve ever heard of. 

That’s not to be confused with boasting. I feel disgusted with myself in even stating it. Because that’s what it is - disgusting. This is the first time I’m admitting this in my entire life. So, I suggest you take a deep breath with me before you read what I’m about to confess. Ready?

In - one, two, three, four, five, six. 

Out - seven, eight, nine, ten.

I have catfished as (yes, I’ve counted)… One-hundred and twenty-seven people.

I know... I know... It’s impressive. Horribly and disturbingly so. And that does not account for the number of accounts I’ve had for each of them. Emails, Instagrams, Facebooks, etc. Even a few Vampirefreaks and Darkstarling accounts back in the day. I can’t even remember the names of most of them anymore. Only their faces. But even those fade over time.

You’d think for as prolific as I’ve been with getting to know them, their lives, and those around them so intimately to pull off the amount of catfishing I have - I’d remember more clearly. But I suppose if you do anything for as long as I’ve been catfishing, you’re bound to lose track of a few memories or blips of time. 

I know you’re all dying to know exactly how long I’ve being doing this for. So I’ll tell you. The answer may be as equally shocking as my ‘mask count’. Realistically, take a moment and try to guess how old I was when I started. Here’s a tip. As I sit and write this, I’m 29. Just a few months shy of my 30th birthday. Now go on.... Give it your best shot.

Got a guess?

Ladies, gentlemen, and thems. I have been catfishing since I was eight years old.

That’s right. Only eight years old. I’m sure you were thinking surely fourteen or even fifteen. Technically, you’re right. Somewhere around there is when I actually became aware of what it was exactly that I was doing. But things were much different then. When I was eight, the internet being a modern in-home comfort was relatively new. We had dial-up. Screechy AOL start up sounds that were most likely close rivals to what would be Cthulhu’s mating call. The days of poorly moderated chatrooms and weak HTML coding. Not even Myspace existed at that point (I really miss Tom. We took him for granted. Zuckerberg’s rules kind of make him seem like a bit of a cuck. But I digress.)

Before I was twelve years old, no one knew what the hell ‘catfishing’ was. We’d never experienced enough of it to have to worry that people online would lie about something as outlandish as their face. Their age, name, or location  - maybe. Shit, people have been lying about their relationship and marital statuses since the dawn of man. The internet didn’t breed lies like that, (though I’m certain it made it a great deal easier to do). Those were the kind of lies that you’d think of when it came to telling lies on the internet. But nothing like this. 

Now look at us. For every ten of your actual friends on Instagram, there is at least one catfish following you or trying to make friends with you. Not that it’s a factually proven ratio or anything, more so an idea. I’m clearly not a scientist or research analyst, and as we’ve already established - I’m way too busy maintaining fake accounts to actually look up factual catfishing statistics.

So why? Why did I do it? Why do I continue to do it? Why confess now? Most importantly, who the hell am I? The ‘whys’ are a bit more complex than just selecting reason A or B. But if you’re really curious to know and willing to hear what I have to say and find out what makes up a catfish. Or at least - me. The most prolific online catfish likely to date (here’s hoping I am because I’d hate to know there is anyone crazier than me out there). Then stick around, because I’m ready to tell you - all of you. Everyone who cares to read this story. I am going to do my best along the way to help you answer some questions you might have. What is it like, how does it make me feel, do I really feel guilty, are there other kinds of catfish, and which one am I? And of course - how to spot and potentially stop a catfish.

Maybe by the end of this blog series, and once you are past out-right hating me (if you can find it in you to get past out-right hating me.... *Insert nervous and shameful laughter here*). You’ll be at least thankful to have learned some new things and gained an understanding that you hadn’t expected to from this. Or at least be thoroughly entertained - because, who the hell doesn’t love a controversial story line? As for who I am.... 

I really wish I could give you an answer. Because truth be told - I don’t even know anymore. 

Maybe in writing this series, I’ll figure that out. Hell, you might even help me get there a bit. Aside the most obvious and recently discovered portion of that answer being, that I am first and foremost, a massive piece of shit - for stealing people’s photos and lying about who I am. 

[greyias]

Everyone, please excuse me for a moment as I break my normal cheery demeanor, to vent about something that happened on another website. But first, I want to assure all my dear Tumblrites that this has absolutely nothing to do with any of you.

I've just about reached my limit with FanFiction.net. I've had an account and hosted stories over there nearly since the site's opening, and have had to deal with the ridiculous changes to formatting and constant shifting of rules of what they deem acceptable. Like, hands down, Archive of Our Own is a superior site. The only reason I had continued mirroring things there is that I know it was still many readers’ main archive of choice.

And then I opened up my e-mail this afternoon to find a review on a very old story of mine.

Now, mind you, I've gotten bad reviews before, and I do one of two things: shrug/ignore them and go about my day or take a shot of tequila and shed a tear and then try to incorporate the feedback if it's relevant. Sometimes I might strike up a conversation with the reviewer in private if I think their words are actually coming from a genuine place (and in general I can tell when someone's just trying to pick a fight versus actually trying to be helpful).

Well, I finally reached the review today that made me want to actually respond to someone and say "Wow. Fuck you too, jackass."

I'm not sure exactly why this one outranks the time someone went off on me for not praising the magnificence of a car, or the time someone thought it relevant to veer way off topic in the middle of the review to tell me how their uncle killed themselves, or even the time someone called me a horrible putrid person because I dared to write about two men in a loving relationship.

And usually I just sit and stew on this in silence. Or talk about things like this in private and then let it go. I was fully intending to just delete this review and scrub it from my mind, but NOPE! In their infinite wisdom, FFnet has decided that I no longer have the ability to moderate reviews unless they come from someone not logged in. And while part of me understands why that policy might be in place, sometimes you just don't want to stare at some asshole's venting. Like this five-star review:

Ok, warning to future readers. This story is very well written. The plot is good. The characters are spot on. That said, by the time I got to the end I was so annoyed and p'd off, I wanted to smack the author. The saying, The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different response, applies to this story more than anything else I can think of. Seriously, readers be ware.

I'm sorry, what is this? A fucking eBay review? "Buyers Readers beware"? The story in question is clearly labeled with many warnings about the dark content contained within, and the fact that they willingly went in and read a story whose entire trope was based on the fact that things repeat. Like I’m fairly certain that was actually advertised/warned for as well. It's a time loop story. A time loop story whose entire premise is driving the POV character to the brink of insanity. Like that’s the point. It’s literally stated in the story’s summary.

(And before anyone tries to assure me the story in question is good, etc--that's not really my concern. I know it's on a lot of people's favorite list, and is a story some return to and read every so often. For once, I am actually not in doubt of the quality or effectiveness of something I put out there (and I hope that doesn’t sound conceited or anything). Thank you SGA Fandom, I still ♥ you all, you're amazing people.)

But, all of that aside, I think what makes me so angry about this is I'm fairly certain this is not the first review of this type that this person has left behind. Like it's not even a knock against my writing, I wrote this story ten years ago, when I was a very different person, and not as experienced a writer. But at the time I was someone who was unknowingly struggling with a debilitating chronic condition that affected my mental and emotional state. I was very, very sick and I didn't even know it, and I can't help but wonder how my past self would have reacted to this? Would I have been able to shrug it off then? Or would it have made things worse? And what if this person has said something like the above to someone who is struggling now like I was back when I originally wrote this story?

Like I feel the need to assure everyone I'm in a much better place now, and this story does not hold the same significance for me now that it did back then. Like, the words above don't even hurt my feelings -- they just make me angry. All I can sit here and think is if this jackass has sent similar reviews to other authors. How many times has this jerk tried to tear someone down instead of you know... close the window or say "this wasn't my thing"? Instead of trying to shame someone for something they've written. Like it’s okay to not like a story, maybe even say so in a polite manner. But to get on a high horse and tell everyone to beware?

Wow.

Like, technically that review doesn't break any of FFnet's rules on reviewing. So I don't even feel I can flag it (especially as the author of story in question, doing so would feel very... petty). But the site is set up so horrible, I can't even look at this person's review history to see if they've gone off on someone else. And maybe report them for repeated abuse. But I get a major bullying vibe off of that, and if there’s one thing I hate it’s a bully. Like you can come at me, whatever, but if someone starts picking on other people? That makes me angry. Like it’d be one thing if I could verify I’m the only person they talked this way to, but I can’t. And that’s frustrating.

So. Sorry for the rant, but I really needed to get that off my chest. Like I hesitate to take any of my works down off FFnet because I do know a lot of people return to their favorite sites to re-read things, but it's definitely discouraging me from wanting to add anything else there in the future. If the website is going to go out of its way to remove tools from authors' hands to protect themselves from unnecessary bile like above, what's even the point of posting there?

Maybe I'll just go make another donation to AO3 in protest. At least there they care about their users.

[elementalheroneos]

not a mutual but I figure I'd say what anyone else can say. mostly that the problems can be summed up into three points

1) ao3 boasts itself as a beacon of creative expression and ergo needs virtually no moderation. they very willingly host fics with content that anyone in the right mind would delete ranging from incredibly racist fic that makes fun of real life tragedies to porn about actual child celebrities. people have reported these fics to be met with emails essentially saying to fuck off. on top of that just look at some of the fic categories. underage is a huge part of their e sections.

2) the site has been in beta for probably closer to 10 years now. any basic features people could ask for such as the ability to block/filter specific users have never been provided. the only times they have looked into adding these features has been when something was a harmless nuisance (re: people who add way too many tags to a fic) over actual harassment and user comfort

3) what makes 1 and 2 so much worse is these donation drives where they always make 2-4x what they were asking for to supposedly run the site. they have their spending public and you can see every year they have a surplus of money that could keep the site afloat another year yet still ask for more multiple times a year. for a site that once again has not implemented any change a user could ask for and is very specifically run by volunteers. people will argue it's in case they get taken to court but that has never happened nor will it ever (just look at how media conglomerates encourage fic bc they know its free advertising and keeps people engaged with their products). their budget shows that they spend iirc roughly $1k-2k on legal fees (per year) out of $100k+ (per drive) and they have it in their terms of service they're not legally obligated to help if a user of their site does somehow manage to get taken to court. they've also publically announced that they started putting surplus into stock portfolios as well to create more of a profit

TLDR: the owners of the ao3 are making insane profits off a site that doesn't care about its users and takes pride in zero standards for content. donate to literally anyone who needs money instead

Hi, I've never heard anyone be mad at ao3 before, and although I'm obviously going to go do my owm research as well, I really want to know why you don't like the site/the people who donate to them? No obligaton to answer obviously, I'm just curious😊

I'm not in the mood. Can one of my mutuals give out the facts tho?

[djnimbin]

The Days Between

This is a letter Robert Hunter wrote to Jerry Garcia a year after his passing.

Dear JG,

it's been a year since you shuffled off the mortal coil and a lot has happened. It might surprise you to know you made every front page in the world. The press is still having fun, mostly over lawsuits challenging your somewhat ...umm... patchwork Last Will and Testament. Annabelle didn't get the EC horror comic collection, which I think would piss you off as much as anything. Nor could Dough Irwin accept the legacy of the guitars he built for you because the tax-assessment on them, icon-enriched as they are, is more than he can afford short of selling them off. The upside of the craziness is: your image is selling briskly enough that your estate should manage something to keep various wolves from various familial doors, even after the lawyers are paid. How it's to be divided will probably fall in the hands of the judge. An expert on celebrity wills said in the news that yours was a blueprint on how not to make a will.

The band decided to call it quits. I think it's a move that had to be made. You weren't exactly a sideman. But nothing's for certain. Some need at least the pretense of retirement after all these years. Can they sustain it? We'll see.

I'm writing this from England, by the way. Much clarity of perspective to be had from stepping out of the scene for a couple of months. What isn't so clear is my own role, but it's really no more problematic than it has been for the last decade. As long as I get words on paper and can lead myself to believe it's not bullshit, I'm roughly content. I'm not exactly Mr. Business.

I decided to get a personal archive together to stick on that stagnating computer site we had. Really started pouring the mustard on. I'm writing, for crying out loud, my diary on it! Besides running my ego full tilt (what's new?) I'm trying to give folks some skinny on what's going down. I don't mean I'm busting the usual suspects left and right, but am giving a somewhat less than cautious overview and soapboxing more than a little. They appointed me webmaster, and I hope they don't regret it.

There are those in the entourage who quietly believe we're washed up without you. Even should time and circumstance prove it to be so, we need to believe otherwise long enough to get some self sustaining operations going, or we'll never know for sure. It's matter of self respect. Maybe it's a long shot, but this whole fucking trip was a longshot from the start, so what else is new?

Your funeral service was one hell of a scene. Maureen and I took Barbara and Sara in and sat with them. MG waited over at our place. Manasha and Keelan were also absent. None by choice. Everybody from the band said some words and Steve, especially, did you proud, speaking with great love and candor. Annabelle got up and said you were a genius, a great guy, a wonderful friend, and a shitty father - which shocked part of the contingent and amused the rest. After awhile the minister said that that was enough talking, but I called out, from the back of the church, "Wait, I've got something!" and charged up the aisle and read this piece I wrote for you, my voice and hands shaking like a leaf. Man, it was weird looking over and seeing you dead!

A slew of books have come out about you and more to follow. Perspective is lacking. It's way too soon. You'd be amazed at the number of people with whom you've had a nodding acquaintance who are suddenly experts on your psychology and motivations. Your music still speaks louder than all the BS: who you were, not the messes you got yourself into. Only a very great star is afforded that much inspection and that much forgiveness.

There was so much confusion on who should be allowed to attend the scattering of your ashes that they sat around for four months. It was way too weird for this cowboy who was neither invited nor desirous of going. I said good-bye with my poem at the funeral service. It was cathartic and I didn't need an anti-climax.

A surreal sidelight: Weir went to India and scattered a handful of your ashes in the Ganges as a token of your worldwide stature. He took a lot of flak from the fans for it, which must have hurt. A bunch of them decided to scapegoat him, presumably needing someplace to misdirect their anger over the loss of you. In retrospect, I think Weir was hardest hit of the old crowd by your death. I take these things in my stride, though I admit to a rough patch here and there. But Bob took it right on the chin. Shock was written all over his face for a long time, for any with eyes to see.

Some of the guys have got bands together and are doing a tour. The fans complain it's not the same without you, and of course it isn't, but a reasonable number show up and have a pretty good time. The insane crush of the latter day GD shows is gone and that's all for the best. From the show I saw, and reports on the rest, the crowd is discovering that the sense of community is still present, matured through mutual grief over losing you. This will evolve in more joyous directions over time, but no one's looking to fill your shoes. No one has the presumption.

Been remembering some of the key talks we had in the old days, trying to suss what kind of a tiger we were riding, where it was going, and how to direct it, if possible. Driving to the city once, you admitted you didn't have a clue what to do beyond composing and playing the best you could. I agreed - put the weight on the music, stay out of politics, and everything else should follow. I trusted your musical sense and you were good enough to trust my words. Trust was the whole enchilada, looking back.

Walking down Madrone Canyon in Larkspur in 1969, you said some pretty mindblowing stuff, how we were creating a universe and I was responsible for the verbal half of it. I said maybe, but it was your way with music and a guitar that was pulling it off. You said "That's for now. This is your time in the shadow, but it won't always be that way. I'm not going to live a long time, it's not in the cards. Then it'll be your turn." I may be alive and kicking, but no pencil pusher is going to inherit the stratosphere that so gladly opened to you. Recalling your statement, though, often helped keep me oriented as my own star murked below the horizon while you streaked across the sky of our generation like a goddamned comet!

Though my will to achieve great things is moderated by seeing what comes of them, I've assigned myself the task of trying to honor the original vision. I'm not answerable to anybody but my conscience, which, if less than spotless, doesn't keep me awake at night. Maybe it's best, personally speaking, that the power to make contracts and deal the remains of what was built through the decades rests in other hands. I wave the flag and rock the boat from time to time, since I believe much depends on it, but will accept the outcome with equanimity.

Just thought it should be said that I no longer hold your years of self inflicted decline against you. I did for awhile, felt ripped off, but have come to understand that you were troubled and compromised by your position in the public eye far beyond anyone's powers to deal with. Star shit. Who can you really trust? Is it you or your image they love? No one can understand those dilemmas in depth except those who have no choice but to live them. You whistled up the whirlwind and it blew you away. Your substance of choice made you more malleable to forces you would have brushed off with a characteristic sneer in earlier days. Well, you know it to be so. Let those who pick your bones note that it was not always so.

So here I am, writing a letter to a dead man, because it's hard to find a context to say things like this other than to imagine I have your ear, which of course I don't. Only to say that what you were is more startlingly apparent in your absence than ever it was in the last decade. I remember sitting in the waiting room of the hospital through the days of your first coma. Not being related, I wasn't allowed into the intensive care unit to see you until you came to and requested to see me. And there you were - more open and vulnerable than I'd ever seen you. You grasped my hand and began telling me your visions, the crazy densely packed phantasmagoria way beyond any acid trip, the demons and mechanical monsters that taunted and derided, telling you endless bad jokes and making horrible puns of everything - and then you asked, point blank, "Have I gone insane?" I said "No, you've been very sick. You've been in a coma for days, right at death's door. They're only hallucinations, they'll go away. You survived." "Thanks," you said. "I needed to hear that."

Your biographers aren't pleased that I don't talk to them, but how am I to say stuff like this to an interviewer with an agenda? I sometimes report things that occur to me about you in my journal, as the moment releases it, in my own way, in my own time, and they can take what they want of that.

Obviously, faith in the underlying vision which spawned the Grateful Dead might be hard to muster for those who weren't part of the all night rap sessions circa 1960-61 ... sessions that picked up the next morning at Kepler's bookstore then headed over to the Stanford cellar or St. Mike's to continue over coffee and guitars. There were no hippies in those days and the beats had bellied up. There was only us vs. 50's consciousness. There no jobs to be had if we wanted them. Just folk music and tremendous dreams. Yeah, we dreamed our way here. I trust it. So did you. Not so long ago we wrote a song about all that, and you sang it like a prayer. The Days Between. Last song we ever wrote.

Context is lost, even now. The sixties were a long time ago and getting longer. A cartoon version of our times satisfies public perception. Our continuity is misunderstood as some sort of strange persistence of an outmoded style. Beads, bell bottoms and peace signs. But no amount of pop cynicism can erase the suspicion, in the minds of the present generation, that something was going on once that was better than what's going on now. And I sense that they're digging for "what it is" and only need the proper catalyst to find it for themselves. Your guitar is like a compass needle pointing the strange way there. I'm wandering far afield from the intention of this letter, a year's report, but this year wasn't made up only of events following your death in some roughly chronological manner. It reached down to the roots of everything, shook the earth off, and inspected them. The only constant is the fact that you remain silent. Various dances are done around that fact.

Don't misconstrue me, I don't waste much time in grief. Insofar as you were able, you were an exponent of a dream in the continual act of being defined into a reality. You had a massive personality and talent to present it to the world. That dream is the crux of the matter, and somehow concerns beauty, consciousness and community. We were, and are, worthy insofar as we serve it. When that dream is dead, there'll be time enough for true and endless grief.

John Kahn died in May, same day Leary did. Linda called 911 and they came over and searched the house, found a tiny bit of coke and carted her off to jail in shock. If the devil himself isn't active in this world, there's sure something every bit as mean: institutional righteousness without an iota of fellow feeling. But, as I figure, that's the very reason the dream is so important - it's whatever is the diametric opposite of that. Human kindness.

Trust me that I don't walk around saying "this was what Jerry would have wanted" to drive my points home. What you wanted is a secret known but to yourself. You said 'yes' to what sounded like a good idea at the time, 'no' to what sounded like a bad one. I see more of what leadership is about, in the absence of it. It's an instinct for good ideas. An aversion to bad ones. Compromise on indifferent ones. Power is another matter. Power is not leadership but coercion. People follow leaders because they want to.

I know you were often sick and tired of the conflicting demands made on you by contentious forces you invited into your life and couldn't as easily dismiss. You once said to me, in 1960, "just say yes to everybody and do what you damn well want." Maybe, but when every 'yes' becomes an IOU payable in full, who's coffer is big enough to pay up? "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke!" would be a characteristic reply. Unfortunately, you're not around to explain what was a joke and what wasn't. It all boils down to signed pieces of paper with no punch lines appended.

I know what I'm saying in this letter can be taken a hundred ways. As always, I just say what occurs to me to say and can't say what doesn't. Could I write a book about you? No. Didn't know you well enough. Let those who knew you even less write them. You were canny enough to keep your own self to yourself and let your fingers do the talking. Speaking of 'personal matters' was never your shtick.

Our friendship was testy. I challenged you rather more than you liked, having a caustic tongue. In later years you preferred the company of those capable of keeping it light and non-judgmental. I think it must always be that way with prominent and powerfully gifted persons. I don't say that, for the most part, your inner circle weren't good and true. They'd have laid down their lives for you. I'd have had to think about it. I mean, a star is a star is a star. There's no reality check. If the truth were known, you were too well loved for your own good, but that smacks of psychologizing and I drop the subject forthwith

All our songs are acquiring new meanings. I don't deny writing with an eye to the future at times, but our mutual folk, blues and country background gave us a mutual liking for songs that dealt with sorrow and the dark issues of life. Neither of us gave a fuck for candy coated shit, psychedelic or otherwise. I never even thought of us as a "pop band." You had to say to me one day, after I'd handed over the Eagle Mall suite, "Look, Hunter - we're a goddamn dance band, for Christ's sake! At least write something with a beat!" Okay. I handed over Truckin' next. How was I to know? I thought we were silver and gold; something new on this Earth. But the next time I tried to slip you the heavy stuff, you actually went for it. Seems like you'd had the vision of the music about the same time I had the vision of the words, independently. Terrapin. Shame about the record, but the concert piece, the first night it was played, took me about as close as I ever expect to get to feeling certain we were doing what we were put here to do. One of my few regrets is that you never wanted to finish it, though you approved of the final version I eked out many years later. You said, apologetically, "I love it, but I'll never get the time to do it justice." I realized that was true. Time was the one thing you never had in the last decade and a half. Supporting the Grateful Dead plus your own trip took all there was of that. The rest was crashing time. Besides, as you once said, "I'd rather toss cards in a hat than compose." But man, when you finally got down on it, you sure knew how.

The pressure of making regular records was a creative spur for a long time, but poor sales put the economic weight on live concerts where new material wasn't really required, so my role in the group waned. A difficult time for me, being at my absolute peak and all. I had to go on the road myself to make a living. It was good for me. I developed a sense of self direction that didn't depend on the Dead at all. This served well for the songs we were still to write together. You sure weren't interested in flooding the market. You knew one decent song was worth a dozen cobbled together pieces of shit, saved only by arrangement. I guess we have a few of those too, but the percentage is respect ably low. Pop songs come and go, blossom and wither, but we scored a piece of Americana, my friend. Sooner or later, they'll notice what we did doesn't die the way we do. I've always believed that and so did you. Once in awhile we'd even call each other "Mister" and exchange congratulations. Other people are starting to record those songs now, and they stand on their own.

For some reason it seems worthwhile to maintain the Grateful Dead structures: Rex, the website, GDP, the deadhead office, the studio ... even with the band out of commission. I don't know if this is some sort of denial that the game is finished, or if the intuitive impulse is a sound one. I feel it's better to have it than not, just in case, because once it's gone there's no bringing it back. The forces will disperse and settle elsewhere. A business that can't support itself is, of course, no business at all, just a locus of dissension, so the reality factor will rule. Diminished as we are without you, there is still some of the quick, bright spirit around. I mean, you wouldn't have thrown in your lot with a bunch of belly floppers, would you?

Let me see - is there anything I've missed? Plenty, but this seems like a pretty fat report. You've been gone a year now and the boat is still afloat. Can we make it another year? What forms will it assume? It's all kind of exciting. They say a thousand years are only a twinkle in God's eye. Is that so?

Missing you in a longtime way RH

[diesiraeseason2releasedate-blog]

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[garetthawke]

literally never see common sense comprehension of the fact that you literally cannot censor whole tag content, and that moderating tags would require an actual insane number of mods constantly reading the contents of all the fics uploaded to judge whether it fit within the bounds of what they want moderated.

"just censor the whole tags then!" the tags literally exist as trigger warnings, including in fics that reference things or cover previous history with something. if you wanted to censor "noncon," for example, you would end up censoring every fic also that had a character who references rape in their past or fics where they work through their trauma relating to it, which would result in that trigger no longer being tagged so people wouldn't have their fic censored. it would become actively more dangerous for ppl who need to avoid that trigger bc it would all but eliminate the effective warning tag.

ao3 is nonprofit and works with VOLUNTEERS not employees, so getting the moderation needed to examine each and every fic (even if there was an easy line to be drawn on what needs to be moderated, bc literally no one in this discussion agrees on where it is,) would require funneling the money away that keeps the site up and running and pays the lawyers that keep you from getting sued.

if you think you can break down and lay out a functional business model where the work can be done and the site can be kept at the safe level of functionality it is at now, I'm all ears.

but every single shitty fucking take I've seen is all outrage for show with little care that what they want done with actively make ao3 harder and more dangerous to navigate for people with triggers.

keeping the site unmoderated but very tagged and navigatable is the only way to make sure people can properly and safely control what content they see. taking that away from us so you can feel better about ao3 advertising a moral line is incredibly selfish and impractical.

and as someone with triggers and a history of abuse, the fact that so many people side with the "morality" of making a display of your stances, drawing lines and rules and restrictions, rather than a functional place that encourages people to tag content that would trigger me, makes me feel like they care 100% more about how they look, and feeling good about themselves, than making sure that fandom (and probably the world at large) is a safe place for ppl like me.

i would 100% rather that shitty content exist free and tagged so i could make sure i don't see it, than remove tags and/or censor them so that people lose the incentive to tag such triggering content. discussions of ao3 censorship without talking about how it would affect people like me is a bunch of self righteous, ineffective performarivism.

and none of this is even getting into how the funding of moderation would require ads, which would require compliance with the companies on what was allowed on the site, which in history has ALWAYS censored our content unfairly and to the point of the site being rendered unusable, which is literally the reason ao3 exists today the way it does.

I've still yet to read a critical take on ao3 that is educated in the slightest on both fandom censorship history and how ao3 actually functions