#i think the tumblr staff should like. add an option that privatizes a post forever

[yyshcul]

i'm privating those two posts for a while because the attention is getting very annoying and they've started to reach the wrong people :/ i hope it works. anyways hi guys how are you

[golbatgender]

It's very difficult to actually harass someone on AO3.

The primary way to contact a creator on AO3 is via work comments. By default, anon is on and comments are automatically posted; however, this is very easy to change and these options are automatically offered in the work posting form. In fact, it is possible to mark a work as only visible to logged in users, or to orphan it or add it to an anonymous collection (thereby hiding authorship). (For readers concerned about being monitored by others, it is also possible to make private bookmarks not listed when someone else clicks on your bookmarks.)

It is also possible to link someone's profile, but they will probably never see it. If the link results in comment harassment, they can respond as described above. Users can mark disparaging works as "inspired by" a work by someone they are trying to harass, but this is fairly rare and requires a great deal of effort. The affected user can also submit an abuse report, and AO3 is pretty good at actually dealing with them (unlike tumblr). Unless it's an actual parody and not just a polemic posted as a work, it will probably be taken down.

And you can't get around this. Not easily. If an author does not want interaction, it is very hard to continue it. You'd have to create an entire sockpuppet account, and that's bannable and not very easy to do. (And then it's very easy for your target to shut you down again.) I've been harassed, in comments and via parody fic. Turning off anonymous comments and enabling moderation stopped it. I, the target, had absolute control of the situation, and it was quite clear to my attackers that I had not only denied them consent to say these things to me but also that they could not brute force their way around those boundaries. There was only one parody fic, and I have never bothered to report it because the harassment had largely stopped on AO3 and because it might look like a normal parody without context. But I still felt like that was an option, because AO3 has a history of actually taking abuse reports seriously.

In fact, if other sites took abuse and boundaries as seriously as AO3 does, the harassment would not have gone there in the first place. It only happened because someone whom I'd blocked kept screenshotting my blog, even after I'd set it as only viewable to logged in users. (And he had to use chrome mobile to get the screenshots, because the app makes it so blocked users can't see real-time posts—though if the blog is still searchable, a search will still show posts. Eventually I disabled the logged in users restriction, because it wasn't enough to stop this guy and because loading in the dash takes forever in a browser.)

I want to make it abundantly clear that most of what relatively little harassment can and does happen on AO3 is only possible due to less-moderated social media. Tumblr refuses to ban the man who encouraged his followers, including underage users, to start a flamewar on an explicitly sexual work with no relation to his political vendetta against me. Who repeatedly exhorts his followers to kill me by name; to kill other named users; to kill all members of a sexual minority and anyone who dares support them. Who encourages and spreads slander of these people as sexual predators. Who owns multiple sockpuppets created for the sole purpose of harassing people who have already blocked him. Who has been reported numerous times by numerous people. Tumblr does not care about harassment and has no consequences. You get a form email and no help. The report option is not even available within the mobile app. As shitty as its current block system is, it didn't even have that before 2015 (or maybe late 2014?), and I suspect they were faced with a lawsuit in order to get that much. AO3 would have banned him ages ago, if he were even able to retain the motivation to be such a horrible person in the feedback-starved environment of AO3 comments. You don't get praise for being mean to people there, even if the target is actually a bad person. If it's not your work, you've already lost the argument, and people will find it boring or not read the comments on the fiction at all.

AO3 itself? Very difficult to harass anyone on there, beyond the level of annoyance they're willing to put up with (which can admittedly be a lot, among those of us who write strange things and understand that many people will not want to admit liking them under their own account names), without going off-site. If fandom were confined to AO3 and email, maybe even also a lightly moderated set of forums and a traditional blogging site, harassment would be much less of a problem. Instead, we're expected to use more recent forms of social media that are structurally predicated on the goal of viral content. Great for cat pictures; bad for discussion or accountability or the ability of users to control what happens to their own content, and with an inherent power differential between popular users and less-known users, since the former essentially control all information (especially in the presence of a moderation staff that only cares about dmca violations).

(I suspect that viral media is the trend of this decade, and that by the middle of the next, something else will replace it. I'm not sure what.)

But yes, that's what harassment is, on AO3 and elsewhere. And then people have the audacity to act like seeing mentions of disturbing things in tags is harassment?

Lolno. First off, if it's not aimed at a specific person or demographic group, it's not harassment. (And if it's not aimed at you or a group you are part of, you are not the victim of that harassment, just a concerned citizen.) Second, the warnings are there so you don't stumble into graphic descriptions of the thing without warning. It would be…extremely unusual for someone to be triggered by the word "rape" but not by a graphic or explicit description of such, or a detailed discussion of, but without the word. Third, the tagging promotes consistency so users can better avoid exposure to it, and browser extensions to substitute one word for another exist.

Finally, it is ridiculously entitled to think that everywhere on the internet has the responsibility to be safe for you, personally. That is like accusing grocery stores of attempted murder against people with allergies because they sell shrimp or peanut butter. You need to take measures to keep yourself safe, not expect people to do things that would often be removing more general safety features to keep you safe, especially if they don't even know you exist.

And like…it's the internet. You will see porn you did not ask for and do not like. The appropriate response is to be mildly annoyed and hit the appropriate buttons to make it stop.

Moral outrage is not the appropriate response, and it isn't the same as harassment or being triggered. Most of you all think AO3 is a hellpit of abusive fetishizing fic that will cause anyone who reads it to do those things to other people, and want it shut down. And you're wrong on all counts, and just end up sounding like creeps who want to rape people for real and are only stopped by social disapproval. (Especially when you proceed to sexually harass people in "socially approved" ways to express your displeasure with their ships!) So stop. Sit down. Realize that your disgust is probably personal and does not mean that something is morally wrong. (Seriously, people are into some strange things, and most of them are harmless in fiction and impossible in real life.) Stop acting like fringe cases should dictate everyday life. And if you really, truly must attack something Bad and feel like you'll die if you don't and you don't have a therapist to call, go take it out on /pol/. Make sure to use a proxy.