If you don’t support AO3′s policies, then don’t post your fic there.
Don’t read there, either.
..and don’t bitch about how you’re feeling excluded by the “cult of AO3” because hello, you’re against it, that’s what excluding yourself does….
None of this makes any sense…
>_> its tone deaf you’re right. Criticism isn’t bad.
I think that’s what it is. Folks cant be sensitive to criticism but then act like critics are “too sensitive”, the whole “you cannot utilize this site unless you 100 support it and are its primary demographic” doesnt work in any real life capacity and is extremely dismissive (and hypocritical), like we all know we didnt “exclude ourselves”…
I would like to clarify that this post was not made in response to people who would like to see AO3 add certain features, fix bugs, etc. You are right, criticism isn’t bad, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.
I’m responding to people who fundamentally disagree with the the philosophy at the core of the OTW and the Archive Of Our Own.
I’m responding to people who want AO3 to ban certain subject matter and certain ships. I’m responding to people who believe it is the job of the archive they utilize for free to curate content according to their tastes, preferences, and objections. I’m responding to people who are angry that AO3 does not act according to their desires.
And to those people, I say: you don’t have to use AO3, and if you feel strongly about it, perhaps you shouldn’t.
AO3′s software is completely open source. The code is here. You can set up your own site with all of its tools, but with your own rules. You can make it an entirely private site if you want. You don’t even have to be capable of continuing development on it, you can just keep updating with the things the OTW does. You just have to be capable of either maintaining it and editing the HTML, or paying someone to.
Nobody fucking does. Nobody wants to do the fucking work. People want AO3 volunteers to put in even more work than they already do to allow the objectors the power to control it. The objectors themselves don’t want to do the fucking work; they want other people to do the work while they make the rules. And that is some bull. shit.
I was there, Gandalf, three thousand years ago, when the OTW was just getting off the ground. And everyone involved in starting the AO3 just assumed that fandom would take the code and build a bunch of single-fandom / character / pairing / trope archives with it. Because that’s what fandom was. That’s what it did with Astolat’s Automated Archive software, which ran the original Yuletide exchange and the big archives for Sentinel and Smallville and Due South and a couple dozen other fandoms at the time.
The AO3 was primarily meant to be a repository–one big backup for all of fandom. It was designed with the assumption that most of its content wouldn’t even be uploaded directly to AO3, but automatically cross-posted or imported from other, smaller archives. Or mailing lists. Or individual author websites. Or other parts of the fannish environment that just…don’t exist anymore.
When fandom olds say the AO3 changed fandom, we mean, it was fandom’s oxygenation crisis: such an immense, runaway success that it wiped out almost every vestige of the previous world. And enabled all sorts of new and more complex things to grow and evolve–but they’re growing in the archive’s world and breathing its air.
Okay, I love the metaphor of AO3 as the Great Oxygen Catastrophe, because that’s hilarious and yet so apt. AO3 really did change the entire fandom ecosystem, and it’s hard to remember what we did in fandom before it.
Which is why Fanlore exists and you should read some entries when you have a moment.
