purge of 2002? of 2012? what ARE those?
Oh, how quickly the past is forgotten.
They are part of the reason A03 is a thing now. Not the whole reason, but part of it.
The Great Purges of 2002 and 2012 are when ff.net got a wild hair up their ass about THINK OF THE CHILDREN and nuked any fic posted on there that was explicit. Thousands upon thousands of nc-17 smutfics were lost.
It’s what led to the creation of alternate hosting sites for smutty fic…AdultFanfiction was the one I went to…but thousands of fics would never be recovered.
Shit like the Great Purges and the Strikethrough of Livejournal eventually led to fans banding together to create A03, which I would have absolutely KILLED for when I was 15.
Back up ao3 was created by fans?
It’s…right on the main page.
I love this because I will bet you that persefv has read that bit we are all so inundated with hyperbole and advertising that says that the consumer is somehow in charge of whatever product they are shilling that we all just assumed this was another sales tactic.
But we’re not even… selling anything… *quiet sobs*
No ads. No subscriptions. No data selling.
We are the definition of “what it says on the tin.”
Is there any way to spread this info?
THE OTW WAS CREATED BY FANS SO WE’D HAVE AN ARCHIVE THAT WASN’T SUBJECT TO CORPORATE REVIEW.
Nonprofit, so that nobody could ever say, “this isn’t making enough money; it’s getting shut down.” (See: Geocities, Quizilla, Figment, G+.) With lawyers involved and a firm awareness of the legalities of fanfic, so nobody would decide “we’ve gotten a nasty letter from a megacorporation with lawyers, so we’re hiding because we can’t afford to face a lawsuit. (Jedi Hurtaholics, Trevizo’s Millennium site.) With teams, so that an argument between co-mods didn’t result in the destruction of a whole archive. (Gryffindor Tower, Detention.)
AO3 IS OUR SITE.
It is by fans, for fans. Fans do all the coding. All the legal paperwork. All the abuse/tos violation complaints. Fans make all the choices about policies. Fans decide how to run the fundraisers. Fans write the blog posts. All the volunteer staff are fans; all the people who train them are fans. Fans wrangle all the tags.
(And the other OTW projects, too. Fans manage the entries at Fanlore. Fans run the Open Doors project. Fans publish Transformative Works and Cultures.)
EVERYONE WORKING FOR THE OTW LOVES FANDOM. Wants it to survive. Wants it to be awesome for everyone.
(Knows that it can’t be awesome for everyone; some approaches to fandom just clash hard. But they strive to minimize those clashes as much as possible, because they love fandom.)
AO3 is not some company that decided, “we’ll make a site for fanfic and then…” I don’t know what people are thinking is the reason. Money? Data harvesting? Tax shelter? Amusement and pity?
Nope; AO3 was fans saying, “Livejournal sucks; we’re tired of this fucked-up ‘rebuild every three years’ garbage; WE NEED TO OWN THE DAMN SERVERS.”
That’s the “of our own” part of the name. OTW isn’t a “them” running the site “for us.” It’s “us” making places for “us” to share what we love with others of “us.”
This this this.
I was there for all of that shit, and AO3 is a godsend. If you enjoy or create fanworks, support AO3, donate if you can, and remember why it’s there in the first place!!
Fandom history really does get lost quickly. For current 20-something fans, AO3 has always been there.
CAN CONFIRM. I was there in the dark times. I remember the purges. The fights. The servers wiped and the sites removed and the thousands upon thousands of works lost. I remember how hopeless it felt, like every time we got something going, it was doomed to failure. What was the point of even trying to create something if it would just be deleted anyway?
Y'all think fandom infighting is bad now? Picture it with sites where the ban system worked like YouTube and TikTok - you could get slapped with one for any reason or no reason at all. No way to appeal it. Picture it with fans getting in legal trouble because someone didn’t like their work and reported it. Picture it with people getting sued over fanfiction. Because it happened.
That’s why so many fics written by oldtimers like me have that knee-jerk, “I own nothing, please don’t sue.” There was a time when that was necessary.
AO3 changed all that. No more crashes, no more purges, and at least some protection under the law. (We all knew the bit where fanfic is technically covered under the “parody” clause of copyright law, but not a single one of us could have made a case in court cause the thing that unites fans apart from their fandoms is that we are by and large broke.) And OTW has endured not because it’s got all the funding or corporate backing in the world, but because it’s run by people who give a damn.
Always support the existence of fandom, but more importantly, support places and organizations that help fandoms continue to exist.
