#reminder that squidgeworld exists

[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?