Let's have a chat about AO3
Hiya friends and loyal followers! My last post about AO3 blew up yesterday so I figured now would be a good time to continue the conversation about AO3.
As I mentioned in my previous post (and probably in multiple other previous posts):
AO3 is NOT a social media site. AO3 is an ARCHIVE.
So let's delve into that a bit more since people don't seem to be getting that. Fanfiction predates the internet, and was transmitted via the internet way before sites like AO3 and FF dot net. Relatively speaking, I am a fanfiction newcomer, as I first started reading fanfiction in ... 2011? or thereabouts. I say this to say that I obviously don't have as personal of a memory of a time before fanfiction archive sites (my bitty fan experiences were on teaspoon and lcfanfic), but I certainly know plenty of people via fandom online that absolutely do.
For the newest children to fanfiction please check out the following pieces of reading to get started on your fandom history education:
“Fanfiction.” Fanlore Wiki. Accessed June 15, 2023. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanfiction. Archived [https://archive.is/yJpOq].
“So I’m on AO3 and I See a Lot of People Who Put ‘I Do Not Own [Insert Fandom Here]’ before Their Story.” sonicenvy.tumblr.com, July 2, 2016. https://sonicenvy.tumblr.com/post/146818589611/mikkeneko-thepioden. Archived [https://archive.is/FRNCy]
ofhouseadama, Emily. “A Brief History of Fandom, for Those on Here Who Somehow Think Tumblr Invented Fandom.” sonicenvy.tumblr.com, May 21, 2014. https://sonicenvy.tumblr.com/post/131935827010/ofhouseadama-a-brief-history-of-fandom-for. Archived [http://archive.today/j2Rfq]
mizstorge, fantastic-nonsense, and fanculturesfancreativity. “The Places Fandom Dwells: A Cautionary Tale.” fantastic-nonsense.tumblr.com, June 29, 2017. https://fantastic-nonsense.tumblr.com/post/162395547190/the-places-fandom-dwells-a-cautionary-tale. Archived [https://archive.ph/QK2wI]
As you read through this stuff, three things should become apparent to you:
Fanworks have always existed in tenuous space -- that is, they have always been under threat of removal, or threat of loss, whether this loss was through events like the livejournal strikethrough, the loss of a fandom specific website, destruction of physical copies of the work, or C&D/legal action from original creators of the work.
Fandom has a long and colored history with many of the most defining events of early fandom history being related to threats to the community.
A need was ripe for a place to save and ARCHIVE fanworks and protect them from deletion, legal action, corporate sanitization efforts, site deaths due to the deaths of admins, etc etc.
Out of all of this, comes The Organization For Transformative Works (2007), and their brand new site Archive of Our Own (2008). The stated intention of Archive of Our Own (AO3) (bolding mine):
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization, established by fans in 2007, to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. We believe that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate. We are proactive and innovative in protecting and defending our work from commercial exploitation and legal challenge. We preserve our fannish economy, values, and creative expression by protecting and nurturing our fellow fans, our work, our commentary, our history, and our identity while providing the broadest possible access to fannish activity for all fans. The Archive of Our Own offers a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting place for fanworks using open-source archiving software.
Source: Works, Organization for Transformative. “Archive of Our Own Beta.” Archive of Our Own. Accessed June 15, 2023. https://archiveofourown.org/about. Archived [http://archive.today/QYtbM]
You may also want to check out the original LiveJournal Brainstorming sessions for AO3 by astolat as archived here [https://web.archive.org/web/20220627134339/https://astolat.livejournal.com/150556.html] if you need further clarity on this point.
Some neat stuff from astolat's original posts that I find are relevant:
making it easy for people to download stories or even the entire archive for offline reading (thus widely preserving the work in case some disaster does take it down)
code-wise able to support a huge archive of possibly millions of stories.
allowing ANYTHING -- het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult ...
As we can see both from the mission statement of OTW/AO3 and from astolat herself in the brainstorming sessions, AO3 is an ARCHIVE. It is a project that is meant to preserve and provide access to fanworks. Run for fans, by fans and meant to host any and all kind of content with none of the commercialization or censorship that fans found elsewhere. Before AO3 there were certainly numerous, disconnected, fandom specific archives for fanfiction or other fanworks. Many of these old sites have been archived (see we're getting that word again) via the opendoors project. Some, like teaspoon or lcfanfic still exists and are semi-active.
A common thread is that writers and readers weren't just using the archive site to connect. They were doing more connection through other sites like dreamwidth, livejournal, facebook, their emails and later tumblr or twitter. Archive sites were meant as a supplement to other fan spaces like message boards, blogs and journals.
So, dear friends, you might ask, what is an archive?
An archive is a place where documents, artifacts and records are kept and preserved for future reference, use and access. Archives help us maintain a better understanding of the past and protect objects, writings, documents, records and more in longevity. In the context of fanwork archiving, this means preserving fanworks in longevity/perpetuity so that fans can continue to access them for enjoyment and for historical purposes. Archiving fanwork is vital to preserving and, indeed creating fan culture and identity.
To read more about archives in general, check out this article from the American History Museum of the Smithsonian (https://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/about/what-are-archives) or this one from the US National Archives (https://www.archives.gov/about/info/whats-an-archives.html).
So AO3 is an archive. Why does this matter?
Oh, boy, I am about to get LIS nerdy on y'all. At this point in the post we can all agree that AO3 is and always has been an archive (it's in the name...). When we view and understand the site starting from this premise, a lot of, frankly stupid as fuck arguments that people have about AO3 look even dumber. Understanding AO3 primarily as an archive helps us understand:
The tagging system. Given AO3 is an archive, the tags for content on the site function exactly the same as headings in a library archive. They are designed to store information about the fic (that is, they are intended as metadata) which is then used to find the record of the fic in the archive. This is why it is important to tag what is in your fic, and to use tags properly, using the agreed meanings of particular tags.
The kinds of content that are permitted and excluded under TOS IV. The archive permits fanworks, which include: fanfiction, fanart, podfic, and fan videos. The archive thus excludes things that are not fanwork (records with no content (aka "placeholder fics"), posts asking for writing prompts or submissions, posts looking for fic, commerical promotions of ANY kind, original fiction with no relation to fan content, spam etc). Every library and archive has their own collections policies, and AO3 is not an exception. Collections Policies are generally guided by the mission statement(s) of the archiving party/library. As we saw above in both the official about page and the original brainstorming posts from astolat, AO3 is a library for fanworks, meant to preserve fanworks and is in opposition to advertising and commercialization. Therefore, if the thing you want to add to the library of AO3 is not a fanwork or contains commercialization, it does not qualify to be an object of the archive. Re: the "placeholder fic" post that I didn't know was going to blow up so much: imagine you go to the library to get a book and open it to find that it is empty or you get a DVD and play it only to find that it is the movie theater trailer for the movie. Doesn't that make no sense?
Why there is NO censoring of "adult" or other quote on quote "objectionable content". The archive does not chose to preserve works based on subjective quality or "moral purity" type standards. This is true in libraries and museums as well. We keep and save materials that people find objectionable as archiving and librarianship are and have always been diametrically opposed to censorship. As an archive AO3 follows this. Moreover, you can see in astolat's original post "allowing ANYTHING -- het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult" as a founding idea.
Why there is no advertising, and why this includes you adding your Ko-fi or paypal or whatever the fuck. Outside of the fact that doing this violates TOS and invalidates OTW lawyer arguments for the legal existence of fanworks under US Fair Use, AO3 as an archive is meant to be a keeper of fan records, not a space for promotions. Archives do keep records (and indeed some archives keep records of advertising) but they, themselves are not using their platform to advertise for anything else.
Why there is no "AO3 algorithm". The kinds of algorithmic feed generators that sites like the t*kt*ok or whatever use are antithetical to the mission of archiving stuff and providing access to it. In an archive you search for content based on terms and headings and self-select. I'm not on the t*kt*k or whatever and I actively block and disable all "suggestion" type things so I don't entirely understand what y'all are looking with this.
Ok, that's great, why are you telling us all of this?
There is a concerning trend of newcomers both young and older to fandom and fanfiction that have not taken off the social media brain filter before coming on board. Some excellent tags I've seen on The Post™ that spawned this one include:
#guys quit bringing the worst elements of capitalism to AO3 (via @watchtowersystem)
#algorithms have rotted people's brains i swear (via @pearly--rose)
#omg stop trying to social mediaify ao3 (via @greyduckgreygoose)
There were also some bangers on my reddit post on this topic as well, but the reddit I posted it on is (rightfully) on blackout at the moment.
I think the sociamediafying of fanfiction that a lot of these people are bringing has a few major negatives:
social mediafied fandom views fanwork soley as consumable content, creating more passive, entitled participants in fandom. For fanwork=content social media brain folks, the fact that fanwork is meant to be an active and engaging thing is lost. Fanwork is a gift from one fan to other fans, it is a point for discussion, a result of people's passion and creativity. It is transformative, out of the box and part of building a niche community. When you start to see it as "content" like a random object on a feed you stop valuing it, analyzing it, and interacting with it in the same way, and are more likely to passively consume what you see as content. Social media has made "content" out of everything, and everything becomes something to scroll past in a few seconds, always looking for more stuff, the newest stuff, etc etc. It's obviously very tied to the experience of social media being used to sell you shit, but that's another conversation I think.
fanwork=content social media brain also allows some of these people to post incredibly demanding comments for "more content" on fancreators works or makes them think it's ok (and indeed creates the same result as what the writer is creating) to feed someone's incomplete fic into an ai to get a "completion".
fanwork=content social media brain also means that when these folks start creating content they feel entitled to views, hits, kudos, etc etc, and feel like it is ok to do things that they see as "gaming" the system to get their fics to be at the top of the pack. They begin to care too much about posting to get their "content" the most views because that's how things work on social media.
fanwork=content social media brain also makes some of these people think that "fic" that is "written" by an ai is acceptable fanwork, because they do not view fanwork as artwork/writing with merit, as much as an entertainment property to be consumed. How the meat gets made becomes irrelevant, because the end result is the only thing that is important.
social mediafying of fandom is something that has helped a lot of advertising and commercialization sneak its way into our spaces, which actively hurts our chances of building good communities.
social mediafying of fandom turns fanwork creation and fandom into popularity contests, which is bad for all fan spaces. The point is that we're being weird together. I've seen new, young authors post on reddit about how they feel so bad about their fic because it doesn't have 1000s of hits or because they feel incapable of writing things (even things they might want to explore) because "no one will read it, and it will not become popular". This makes me very sad.
social mediafying of fanwork also turns right around into .... wait ... you guessed it .... censorship! people are now practising self-censorship that is utterly unnecessary and completely sad to me because they are afraid of getting deleted from anywhere for "objectionable content". This carries over into new users on AO3 doing things like using leet speech for curse words, sexual content and more in the TAGS or the body of their AO3 fics. Stop Don't. You can say fuck, dead, kill, murder, cunt, cock, and whatever the fucking hell you want on AO3. That was the whole goddamn point.
These people are trying to bring fanwork=content social media brain to places like AO3. I'm not entirely sure why.
tldr; AO3 isn't a social media site for talking with your following or posting about ideas that you've had. It isn't a popularity contest. It isn't a place where there will be no inappropriate content. It isn't a place for advertising or commerical promotion. It is an ARCHIVE OF FANWORKS meant to be "allowing ANYTHING -- het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult."
Anyone of you fans older, wiser, more well versed in fan history, and more articulate than me, please feel free to add to this. Ditto on any of you other funky LIS friends out here on tumblr dot hell.
