"AO3 is a safe space for writers to post without threat of deletion" - but don't writers already have that on their own hard drives, or something like pastebin? I swear, I'm not trying to bad-faith, but do "right to write things without anyone stopping you" and "right to access an audience as effectively as possible" really belong as one?
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It's irrelevant.
AO3 was set up to preserve fic from deletion. And it fulfills this purpose.
If you want to critique the entire founding philosophy behind AO3, that's totally valid. What you're asking for then is for no archive like AO3 to exist and for fic archiving to look more like Wattpad or FFN. That's a reasonable stance, just one I personally strongly disagree with.
The "stay on your own hard drive" thing goes both ways. I could equally say that readers who don't like AO3's philosophy and style should stay offline--or that they should take the much more reasonable approach of reading fic on one of the many other options out there.
There is no guaranteed right to other people's labor.
What anon is really saying: “Stay in the closet where you freaks belong and don’t dare to express yourselves creatively or look for a welcoming community of consenting adults if you cross any one of my arbitrary lines.”
Anon, if you truly are trying to argue in good faith... yeah. This is what your argument boils down to. “You can think gay thoughts, but you can’t act on them because other people don’t like it.”
It also sounds an awful like telling victims to shut up about their trauma. “It’s okay to write it, but why do you have to share it?”
There are some darkfic writers who are just into the dark shit because we’re wired that way. But a lot of darkfic writers write to process trauma. Sharing that trauma, even through fiction, is a way to be seen, to be validated, to represent their experiences. And unless an author discloses it, you have no way of knowing.
Yup.
Honestly, I think there’s also a misunderstanding going on here about how much AO3 seeks to give a given author a platform. Yes, AO3 is now wildly popular, and so a fic in a popular fandom will get a lot of eyeballs on it. AO3 is also well organized, like a library, so one can actually find things. But also like a library, stuff just sits there in the stacks. If you want to come have a look, great. If you don’t, great.
“Accessing an audience as effectively as possible” isn’t really AO3′s aim. It’s more a side effect of everywhere else wanting to sell your data and banning content. The minute you do either of those things, library-style organization is anathema. You want people to sit on the site for as many minutes as possible so you can serve them ads and record and sell their behavior. Banning content means people post said content with misleading labeling. AO3 does not care if you spend five minutes or five hours on the site and does not sell your data or show you ads. This allows it to have actually useful metadata that gets you to what you want fast so you can move on with your day.
Unless people resort by kudos (a stupid practice I never use, personally), the fic of a massive BNF and of a nobody are on the same footing, there in the search results side-by-side. There’s no algorithm. There’s no special account level where you can dick around with the posting date more than others can or boost your visibility. AO3 is giving each of these people a tiny, tiny platform amidst the sea of other content on it.
That extremely effective access to audiences is just a side effect of proper labeling and site popularity. Proper labeling is only possible when people aren’t sneaking content in under the radar. Popularity... well... AO3 is popular for its philosophy, not despite it.
I get that there’s a lot of talk of deplatforming lately, but allowing bigoted books in the library is very different from allowing a bigoted politician to spread lies on social media with a retweet feature.
