#people with higher stakes in the game (ie people who've been targeted with racial harrassment and all kinds of shit on the site) have been

[heart-forge]

at the risk of opening a huge can of worms,, care to rant about ao3 or talk about what you don't like about it? i don't know a lot about it and im super curious + i trust your opinion,, if that sounds like a lot of mental energy of course no worries,, love you n take care

tw mention of common controversial fic tag topics like child abuse, sexual violence, racism etc...because when you talk about the site, these things inevitably crop up. Anyway, time to swing a bat at a beehive.

I mean, first and foremost I want to point out because it doesn't really need to be hidden behind a tw, that when you're consuming content and not signed in then you have to agree to their terms of service which includes "if you reveal your race or religion or sexuality then you might open yourself up to harassment based on that, click here to agree" and from the very second they put that up I've thought it was the ugliest and most hateful thing I've ever seen in my life. I stopped using the site for a long time because it was so hideous to me that rather than put any basic effort towards moderation they just made you agree to a disclaimer that you understood that being gay or black or muslim would get you bullied and they won't do anything. Fuck them to the depths of hell for that, but I'll get into why the site is still used despite it's god awful garbage policy on washing its hand of all the content it allows to be on there.

I guess the tl;dr of that is both I don't think that using the site is morally worse than using any other social media site (ie I think all sites are equally as guilty as ao3, not that I think ao3 is not any worse than any other site), but I also understand why someone would individually decide to not use the site because they find it morally repulsive.

If you read this and feel the need to tell me about the old days of the internet when fanfiction was subversive and dangerous to post because of copyright, please go outside and touch some grass because you're an adult and you should have better things to do (not specifically you anon, this is a blanket warning).

tl;dr not every triggering piece of media is a masterpiece and should stop pretending like it is, not every person who writes about trauma is brave and indeed some of them are the reason people have to write about their trauma later on, "writing as therapy" is only valid insofar as you ask yourself if your mental health is better or worse after exposing your vulnerabilities to a fandom for public validation, and then you have to ask yourself if it was worth the reader's mental health as well, we as a species are responsible for other people (especially children) whether we like it or not, and finally ao3 has abdicated that responsibility in favour of pretending they're doing something vital by hosting and taking oodles and oodles of donations for...what exactly? Are they in a constant state of being sued? Is someone getting paid, because they have a lot of volunteers and no paid humans to moderate complaints/reports?

I know people have a lot of valid financial criticisms about how they run their business (I’ve seen posts but I didn’t memorize them so I’ll just skim on by these: I’m sure if you searched AO3 tag on Tumblr you’d see...well a lot that probably isn't worth the effort, but maybe find someone who has the proper mileage to talk about business practices).

I mostly, very frankly, don’t really approve of “well it was tagged” methodology behind allowing people to write whatever crosses their mind no matter how triggering or poorly thought or harmful it is overall. Stick with me here, people like to react at this point.

This shouldn’t be very surprising as I’ve at least posted snippets of blogs pointing out that I think people who claim basic moderation of content is censorship are stupid and as annoying to engage with as your garden variety Reddit troll, and that not every piece about controversial topics is a stunning deep dive into morality and the human mind and a lot of it is just trite garbage that hides behind the reputation of much better pieces of media as if every fic containing CSA is Lolita (which in itself struggles to be understood in a world that mostly supports child abuse and hates girls and women, but that’s a discussion you can hear from the Lolita Podcast, tw for...well it’s about the book Lolita so CSA at minimum), which they aren’t.

Again, is an AO3 anime fanfic the best platform for trauma content in general? And that’s without even asking “is this something that’s present in the text being explored by the author” (for example, the Elder Scrolls has sexual violence baked into vampire lore: I tag for sexual violence, therefore, if I mention topics directly pertaining to it, even though I never and will never write explicit sexual violence just because that's not my deal), versus "was this added by the author to an unrelated work" and "why did they do that?" (and "which character did they do it to" and "why that character" and "is this author enacting a violent sexual fantasy against as marginalized group because it makes them horny because I gotta tell you, not interested in the rights of those people overall let alone to do so in a public space where there's kids and also normal people").

People talk about fic as therapy which is valid to a point, but you have to ask yourself if therapy needs to be posted for public consumption. It's entirely possible that people are writing and posting therapy fics in good faith, but that doesn't mean that they have a get out criticism free card: they need to ask themselves if that's an appropriate and healthy way to approach theraputic writing (if it's for therapy, do you want it to be subject to public opinion? do you want it to be subject to people who aren't critically engaging with it and just think it's sexy? is that healthy for you? is that healthy for the person reading it?), if it's a valuable deconstruction of your feelings or literally just venting (ie did you want to deep dive on a topic, did you want to show it as a multifaceted thing, did you want to show the effects it can have in a healthy and safe space, or were you writing it to just get it out of you? if you just wanted it out of you, did it need to be posted for others to interact with? again, is that healthy for you? is that healthy for others?), or if it's really for theraputic purposes or if that's another wall that predators are hiding behind to validate themselves (which I gotta say, I see "turns out x person in fandom was a predator" way more often than I see a fic like this and think "wow they really got at something here").

Now, here's where people with the instinct to react to all that have my permission to calm down because I have a very obvious answer to the people who are screaming CENSORSHIP, WHY DON'T YOU JUST GIVE ME A LIST OF TOPICS IT'S OKAY TO WRITE ABOUT at their screen. Real people doing real moderation work is the answer, but much like literally all large scale social media sites, ao3 doesn't do that. If they want to allow for topics like that to be engaged with, if they want to allow for people to have the space to do this, it has to come part and parcel with people moderating for users who will abuse the system. For example, it gets grey around sexual violence, as it can be framed in a consensual and sexual way (BDSM, for example, is something that could both be consensual but should be tagged as sexual violence if it includes such a thing)—a human moderator can see that. A tag leaves that up to the writer and the person who's consuming it without really knowing which it is.

I'm just saying, but for a site that takes in so much money through donations, they should be able to invest in a real team of real (diverse!) people paid to moderate fic to make sure that a fic tagged underage is addressing something in canon (allowing for the extremely insignificant statistical chance that a victim is reclaiming a character from a fic and not just writing underage because they're a young teenager who wants their self-insert to be their age but doesn't want to age down a canonical character, or again the visibly more significant portion of people who think it's sexy) and not glorifying child abuse because the author is a child abuser who thinks that publically posting such a thing "doesn't count" because there was not a physically alive child involved (that they know of).

Which is a segway into the next point, you only have to be thirteen to sign up to a website that proudly hosts not only these topics (which, like it or not, it shouldn't be up to a child to self-moderate full stop; I don't care who "turned out okay" in the end, I don't care who thinks its good for kids to be exposed to intense and/or explicit topics (speaking from experience, go to hell), I don't care if every day TV shows and movies are just as bad so who cares, I don't care if "well they'll find it somewhere", it is not their job to self moderate as a feature of the website and it's not for a website run by adults to trust that children will stick to their lane once they've already been told that this is a space that includes them) but also just garden variety explicit content. You can never guarantee that nobody is lying about their age, and it's not good practice to assume that someone who seems like a child online actually is one: it is, however, your responsibility to do your level best to make sure that you've made clear that a child isn't welcome in the space that you've created explicitly for adult content. My games are all tagged as NSFW on itch, even though there isn't explicit boning. I don't love to associate my games with what is a GENEROUS swath of fetish porn, but I also don't want kids there in case I ever do want to get a little dicey with the sexual content, or violence content. I don't want to write in the responsible kind of way that one does when there's kids around, so I use the tools I have to do my best to make sure that kids know it's not their space.

It's what makes being a content creator difficult, on ao3 and on every website: every site is technically like this. You know children are there, and you know they're happy to lie about their age to get at restricted content. As a user, all you can really do is tag it and hope that people abide by those tags, because there are no content moderators there for you to get help from and the original purposes of these tags (as warnings) is being twisted by people (many of whom I think would absolutely get the ban hammer if there was a real and dedicated team of moderators and a useful and meaningful way to report people) into being used as advertisements.

Now, there's plenty to say about how functional an actual team of moderators would be (cog is proof of that, plus the basic human knowledge that putting a team of cis white people on the job isn't going to represent the interests of targeted parties), but contemporary internet has at minimum proven that 1) doing nothing, and 2) letting a robot decide, isn't working. Every website is just as culpable as ao3, but ao3 is in the extremely dubious position of being proud to host the things that it does, refusing to moderate and putting full responsibility for consuming content on a userbase that includes children, and only just now (I've heard: rumours swirl) giving people a way to block others? Other companies (YouTube another big "we're happy to traumatize children for dollars") at least have the smokescreen ability to restrict that content, even if they don't exercise it (or exercise it very badly, but the point is ao3 was built for adult content).

I don't think everyone who uses ao3 is being willfully ignorant or negligent in some way (obviously: I still use it). It's the most popular and high trafficked fic site and out of the three big ones (WattPad, fanfic.net, and itself) has the better reputation as far as "hosting work for people of a certain age" (ie, there's nothing for me, in my mid twenties, on WattPad, even if I'm not looking for sexual content). Engagement is just as terrible as it is on somewhere like Tumblr (the evil you know) but on ao3 you're not competing with visual art which is a huge problem on multi media sites (not to pit artists and writers against each other, but I'm sure many text game authors are happy to talk about how poor their engagement is compared to games with visual sprites).

I think the owners of ao3 are being extremely negligent and doing so on purpose because they come from a pool of people who think that 1) they turned out fine (which is subjective on a huge scale and I would definitely argue that adults who figure they blanket turned out fine after exposure to even casual internet usage among mostly their peers should reexamine; you don't have to have full blown PTSD to recognise that something deeply affected you as a child and where exactly you found that shit), and that 2) they have no means of for sure keeping out children and therefore they're clear to do nothing (which is a terrible abdication of responsibility, all the way down to greedily including children (with a wealth of spare time, potentially spare income depending on the household, and willingness to believe that a site that caters to their interests is therefore interested in them as an individual) in their userbase while claiming not to cater to them).

I think every dogshit fic on their is on their shoulders far more than the handful of inoffensive stuff or the stuff that they get praised for hosting (ie, good fic). I also don't think there's an ice cube's chance in hell of their policy ever changing, simply because you can't tell anything to people who think getting bullied for liking fandom is the same as structural oppression, and at this point the site has been allowed to grow so far without moderation that the effort to bring it under control would be an insane expense in both time and recompense for people who would be setting themselves up to purposely dig through traumatizing material in order to weed out the shit that should never have been allowed to be there in the first place.

My work and the work of my friends and peers on there is not a reflection of them having done something correctly, only that they have a stranglehold on sites specifically for hosting writing where fic writers are able to at all engage with fandom, versus multimedia sites where we're largely ignored for the much for aesthetically straightforward (ie "make the blog look nice") and optimized (Tumblr is NOT optimized for long text posts, not from a posting perspective and not from a display perspective) visual art (which still struggles with engagement!).