In the wake of China apparently banning AO3 in the country, this post has been making the rounds on Weibo and now on Twitter. I thought I’d bring it back here, as well. 

AO3 has a robust tagging system so that users can either find or avoid content. The site doesn’t moderate the content because the users do. If authors fail to tag or readers fail to pay attention to tags, that moderation slips and people are exposed to content they don’t want to see. 

I love the fact that AO3 puts the power over what I see in my hands. I have control, not some faceless person and certainly not my government. I can see whatever I want to see and avoid whatever I want to avoid and every other user of the site can do the same thing. 

This is a group effort, and if there’s anything that fandom is good at it’s banding together to get shit done. Tag your fics. Read the tags. Don’t be an asshole.

I think the argument that full moderation responsibility lies with the users and not with the hosting service is a dangerous one and requires a lot more nuance to be effective. That same argument would allow sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to continue to completely pass off responsibility for misinformation and active deception like we’ve recently seen in spades with the upcoming election and with coronavirus conspiracy theories.

It would be fantastic if we could trust users to always follow community guidelines and tagging procedures but that is just not the reality. The first time I was exposed to explicit porn was on a site aimed towards children, and one stray bad actor decided to post tons of it all over the site. Fortunately, it was stopped and deleted within a few minutes - because I was a moderator for the site and was able to ban them and delete the posts. I hope that I acted quickly enough to keep other people, many far younger than me, from seeing it. It was certainly upsetting enough for me.

Users absolutely should do as much as they are able to self-moderate but it really sucks when people who have been hurt or traumatized by unmoderated, unmarked content are told that actually they must have chosen to seek out that material and that it is their fault and they’re asking for additional protection for no reason. Even if you are adamantly against the removal of any works of fiction for any reason and adamantly supportive of relying on a tagging system, at the absolute minimum it seems like people should be able to agree that sites should be responsible for moderating content /that does not appropriately use the tagging system in place/. Like people posting misinformation on Facebook as if it’s the truth, or untagged explicit content in fandom spaces with a high population of kids.

It doesn’t help to call traumatized people assholes for being exposed against their wishes to explicit content, and it’s completely unfair to act like everyone calling for some moderation is just pissy that they read a fic knowing what to expect and then decided it was evil. I understand the threatening feeling that comes with censorship and moderation, but I urge people to work to look past that initial emotional response and consider where these arguments are coming from.

@crystalandrock , you bring up some interesting points, but I think the comparison of AO3 with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube falls down on a couple points. First, those companies have more responsibility for spreading misinformation because of how their algorithms actively promote some content they think will interest (or piss off) viewers more than the other posts. That’s why your timeline is never in order. Only it can really backfire on them if the ‘interesting’ content turns out to be troll dung. But AO3 doesn’t do that: it presents works in whatever order the user decides to sort them by. Fics on AO3 can’t really go viral in the same ways as social media facilitates.

Second, as far as misinformation goes, the entire site is works of fiction. By design. Nobody is guaranteed a single fact on the entire site! Are there some facts anyway? Sure. But that’s not the point. AO3 does not have the same sort of responsibility as a news-reporting organization.

Next, I’m sorry about your experience on that other site. The Internet is not always kid-friendly even in spaces where people try to make it so.

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this based on your post, but AO3’s tagging is not all unmoderated. If someone writes Explicit fic and rates it G or T, or tags No Archive Warnings Apply and then their fic contains Graphic Violence, those works are reportable and AO3 volunteers will change the tags if necessary. Is it a perfect system? No. Is it better than just about any alternative out there? A lot of people think so, me included. Hope I managed to add some nuance for you!

The way I write summaries have changed over time and will likely continue to change. Earlier, it was pure plot description depending on the length of the fic.

Long fics got something like “Character X is — and Character Y is —. Plot A happens.” That was the general formula. Oneshots and the like usually got either a single line of description or a few lines. Sometimes, I used a line of quote as decoration of sorts.

Nowadays, it’s a mix of description and quotes, with the latter dominating. So, basically a part of the story - often but not always - with dialogue - so that readers will get a good idea of both my writing style and the fic content. Then, 1 to 3 lines of description that kind of gives a gist of things.

It’s just one way to write summaries but it works for me.

It can be overwhelming to try to think about everything in your story and figure out how to tell the readers all of it right away. So instead, think about that first bright spark (or blaze) of an idea that made you want to write this particular fic. You might have to summon it up from a while ago, but what drew you in and made you excited to write it? That’s what will get your readers excited to read it. That’s your summary.

Laws and can (and should) be changed and AO3 could very easily forbide pedophilia.

Saying AO3 could not refuse pedophile works because it would be like saying a pickles jar should not hold pickles is a very bad comparison. First because pickles aren’t causing ptsd to most of their victims, but also because if the goal of a pickles jar is to hold pickles, the goal of AO3 is not to host pedophilia, it’s to host fan content, and fan content can very well not be pedophiliac. A better comparison would be: marriage gave men the right to rape their wives. One day,someone saif “hey, it’s shitty” and that became illegal. But marriage still existed.

That being said, even if it would be a very good action from AO3 to stop allowing pedophiliac content, the best solution would be to ask your government to forbide pedophiliac content. Then, not only would AO3 has to stop hosting it, but other websites and publishers as well, and it would be even less safe places for pedophiles.

“it would be even less safe places for pedophiles.” Given the fact that we do not control the things we find hot, we only control whether the actions we take harm others or not, why are you so convinced it would be a net good to drive all talk of underage sex into illegal spaces? Making topics legally unspeakable (and don’t kid yourself, that’s what any kind of official ban would result in, because you can’t bureaucratically separate the horny from the working-through-trauma - even assuming they were mutually exclusive categories) is pretty much the opposite of helpful for ptsd. It’s not that people don’t recognize that the existence of these types of fics can be indirectly hurtful: that’s why they’re so thoroughly tagged and warned-for. But that hurt does not outweigh the hurt that would occur by taking away one of the very few spaces in which it is safe to talk about the darkest areas of the human psyche: fiction. And make no mistake: there is a huge difference between fictional abuse and men raping their wives. AO3 from the start has been committed to being a space where it is safe to explore fictional themes that other sites would arbitrarily and without warning ban and delete. People got real sick of waking up to find their fiction or their friends’ fiction or the fiction they liked to read gone because somebody went on a power trip with a banhammer. So fed up with it, in fact, that they decided to build An Archive Of Our Own where that wouldn’t ever happen.

Like OP said, if you don’t like it? Go build your own. Or just make an app that only lets people browse unproblematic fic, that’d probably be easier. People are always clamoring for an app. Nothing’s stopping you from solving this problem and the best part is you don’t even have to ask the government to stomp on vulnerable people for your solution!

Yes, you can block and filter and stuff, but sometimes a little social engineering goes a long way. Here’s stuff that, in my experience, has made fandom a more positive experience in the face of bullying:

1. Figure out who the people you want to be in fandom with are, and organize and promote around that. That can be emphasizing good behaviour, talking about the kind of fanworks you want to defend, or focusing on a character or aspect of canon that you all love. Your fandom as a whole contains both the people like you, and the bullies; find a way to define your subset of the fandom, where people write what they want and don’t attack other people. That lets you create community hubs–a Tumblr tag you all agree to use, a Discord, etc. That way you can do a lot of your fandom socializing through #bullyfreefandomtag instead of #fandomtag. Then you automatically have friends and allies who will support and encourage each other in making different kinds of fanworks and dealing with hate.
2. Work to encourage good feelings in your community/subfandom. Consider encouraging people to post rec lists or do challenges to leave more feedback, or encourage remixing or sending each other gifts. Work to promote the kind of fannish interaction you do want to happen.
3. Be really open and clear about what your community’s ethical standards are–eg. tag your stuff, put NSFW stuff behind a readmore, don’t send people death threats. Let people know really clearly how to be in your good books.
4. This can include making it really clear how to handle disputes and differences of opinion, so you can go, “If you’re upset that story aspect isn’t tagged, you can just ask the author to tag it. We’ll signalboost your request to have those things tagged. That works way better than sending them vague hatemail.”
5. The same way, make sure people know about ways to avoid the kinds of fic they don’t like. That can include posting about filtering devices (New XKit, AO3 Savior, Washboard, etc) or going to AO3, filtering your fandom’s new fic by all the stuff these people don’t like, and showing off the URL. (That way if people bookmark that URL and go to it instead of the main AO3 feed, it’ll be pre-filtered for them.) 
6. If you argue in public, you’re not trying to make the bullies stop being bullies–you’re letting people know this conflict is happening, and persuading the bystanders to side with you. Your life can be a lot easier or harder depending on how many neutral parties will reblog callout posts or feed the bullies information, vs. how many will support you and promote good fannish behavior. 
7. Keep the receipts. You might not choose to make these bullying tactics known right now–but having a folder of screencaps and saved emails that demonstrate how badly they’re acting is always useful. A lot of bullies try to spin their behaviour in the best way possible and gain social capital; if everything they did were publicly known, they wouldn’t have so many followers.

Also, if I can add a 1b: Reach out to and speak with other fans in your fandom that you like, especially if they are being targeted. Don’t let people suffer alone–build up positive interactions with the folks who are writing, and try to talk to them about the things they’re doing that you genuinely love. Do a lot of “yes, and!” commenting, not even necessarily on fics themselves but on the social media around fics–Tumblr, here, or twitter, or DW, or Pillowfort, or wherever your main fannish socializing is. Build up the kinds of pleasant conversations that anyone might chime in on. 

The thing is, you don’t necessarily have to build a specific formalish Thing to encourage the kinds of fandom dynamics you want if that seems too pointed and you don’t want to deal with open conflict re: the clique that you’re worried about. You can also achieve some of the same positive things by making friends with the people you really do like and coming up with an unrelated tag/discord/whatever that give folks an alternative to the bullying clique to hang out with. You can make a banner for a bully-free section of fandom that folks can cluster under without necessarily noticing that you’re uniting under a commitment to rejecting bullying tactics, and that can be a very helpful form of social organizing that makes it harder for callout posts to get traction. After all, you’re not formally organizing in opposition to Team Fluffybland–you’re organizing team NuancedEmotions, and part of that nuanced approach to human emotions might include trauma exploration. It’s harder for folks trying to shut down discussion to target groups of people than individuals, and it’s much harder for these folks to target groups of people organized around an explicit positive ideal than it is for them to target groups who are organized around something that casual observers might view as bad or shameful. 

As long as it’s properly tagged and rated, you did what you were supposed to do and it’s out of your hands

If you want to write something you don’t think your usual audience would appreciate, you have a few options:

1. Make a pseud on your account, and post under the pseud. This doesn’t do a lot, tbh: your subscribers will still be notified and people looking at your account can see that there’s a pseud and click on it. But it will keep that story from showing up in your main Works section.

2. Lock the fic to AO3 users only. Kids are supposed to be 13+ to get an account. It’s not perfect and could keep people who don’t browse logged in (for whatever reason) from seeing your fic, but I figure people with an AO3 account are pretty likely to be aware that there’s smut on this here website.

3. Post anonymously. You can do this by putting ‘Anonymous’ in the Post To Collections box. Note: if someone is serious about detective work, they can see on your account that you have a work posted to Anonymous, so if it’s a small fandom you may want to check if it would be obvious which work is yours (ie if there is only one fic in your fandom posted to Anonymous—larger fandoms don’t have to worry about this as much.)

4. Create a whole new account?