So I just found out that there are more people making works on AO3 with a million tags on them in protest to AO3 not removing that one fic (you know the one). I would just like to state my own personal opinion about that right up front: if youâre trolling AO3, no matter your reason for doing so, youâre the asshole.
I know we all call it AO3, but the a stands for Archive. Itâs a site built on the premise that fanworks deserve to exist and shouldnât be taken down, unless the author is making that decision for themselves.Â
This means that there are lots of works on AO3 that I think suck. There are works that are poorly written or boring or morally reprehensible. And guess what? All of that is protected because itâs not about a single work, itâs about fanworks in general and all of us having a place we can rely on to have our backs.Â
The whole point of AO3 is not deleting works just because someone complains about them. The work needs to violate the Terms of Service and if it doesnât, then it shouldnât be removed. The rules that protect me protect those other works too.Â
The volunteers at AO3 take the siteâs goals and premise very seriously. They arenât going to make snap judgements about a work, not even a work with a million tags. They also arenât going to make snap judgements about implementing a limit on tags when there hasnât been one before.Â
They need to talk things out and discuss the short and long term ramifications. They need to talk about where to draw the line, and how can they explain why they decided to draw the line there? Will this decision affect works that already exist on the Archive? What do we do about them? Those authors posted before this new rule came into being, so you canât punish them for a rule that didnât exist at the time.Â
Creating more works with the same issue just means that volunteer tag wranglers have even more work to do. Mass reporting a work that has already been reported just means that Policy & Abuse volunteers have even more work to do. If you fill up their lives with nonsense tags or repeat reports, you know what they canât do? The thing that everyone (including them) wants them to be doing.Â
People who volunteer for AO3 also read on AO3. They are as annoyed about these works as you are. But making more work for them to do isnât the answer. Being patient is. Itâs going to take time for them to make decisions about things like tag limits. Itâs going to take time for them to code the limit into the site. Itâs going to take time for them to test the code and make sure it doesnât break anything. And in the meantime:
Filter out the author and bookmark your filter in your browser so you donât have to enter it every time.
Add the work-blocking code to your site skin so you never need to see that work again, as long as youâre logged in.
There are tools you can use to avoid the things you donât want to see. Creating a bigger problem isnât the solution. Itâs just a dick move.
