I am not active in the Ao3 community, other than reading fics and catching up on memes. I've posted there the same stories I've posted here, like I've promised, and I intend to keep doing it, but I've been focusing mostly on my main project, which is not yet ready to publish despite my better efforts, so my interaction with the community is still majorly just memes and reads. Feel free to correct me where I'm misjudging things or if you have any ideas on how I could enjoy the community side more.
This is an opinion piece. I've been wrong about things before and I will be wrong about things in the future. It's part of the human condition. Feel free to disagree, even argue with me if you feel like there's things I'm blind to, but please make sure I haven't addressed it later in the text 1st, and try be civil about it. I am willing to change my mind about things, but I have feelings same as anyone else.
With that out of the way...
Just saw a tiktok of someone pointing out that ao3 is accessible to anyone over the age of 13, with the literally expressed implication that people should not be posting anything without expecting 13 yos to stumble upon it and read it, they should keep all their adult content hidden in private discords or never publish it, even, and I have a lot of thoughts about this.
If you haven't guessed by now, my problem is with over-censoring. Telling people to hide in discords or pretend they never made any adult content to begin with, all for the sake of curious kids. I strongly disagree with surrendering the entire internet to kids like that, and here's exactly why:
What I mean by friction, is the amount of inconvenience one experiences to get what they want, regardless of goal nature. It's been something I've been increasingly paying attention to since my AuDHD diagnosis, out of both a will to accommodate my needs but also to prevent my attention span from worsening since there's only so much medication I can take. (I can talk about this another time if anyone's curious)
Anyone who's been on Ao3 for longer than 2 minutes has experienced it: the website is rough and hard to navigate already, has no mobile-friendly apps, the best it offers is a minimal responsive design with a few community-accessible skins that you're free to edit on your own, if you're willing to spend the time, which often can also mean extra time in learning the appropriate coding language for it, or working with gpt for it, I guess, although Ao3 explicitly disapproves of that, so maybe don't... but still, a lot of work, a lot of friction.
Take your mind out of the gutter for a minute, I still mean it as inconvenience here.
After figuring out the searches, finding something that catches your interest, if you want to read explicit content, the site sits you down one more time to warn you about it. This doesn't work just as a warning, but also as friction: you can't proceed to reading unless you found this message and clicked the button. Finding it, reading the text, deciding what to do next and clicking the button are all steps that anyone going to a site will take at the very least the 1st time they run into this. It's friction. And it makes sure you know the nature of what you're about to read.
If you want to disable these warnings, you need to make an account (which involved a waiting period, when I made mine, not sure if still the case, but probably, which is another type of friction) and find the option in the settings... This is not something one can just simply disable.
Can you still just see the content, even without an account, if the author didn't specifically made it visible to logged in users only, if you just click on 'yes, continue'? Yes. I'll get to it soon, I promise.
Protecting vs Coddling others
I will address this specifically in terms of risk handling, to my personal understanding of these concepts.
The difference between one and the other is made specifically by the level of risk in question.
In terms of climbing a rock vs accessing adult content
Protection is when one is warned about how slippery and high above ground the rock is, that they may get very hurt, how explicit the content is (age rating), how disturbing it might be, then allowed to decide how to proceed, with this information in mind. This can be referred to as informed consent too.
Coddling is when you may or may not warn the other party as to why they are not to climb that rock or access that consent, while removing their agency entirely, in terms of ever choosing whether to take the risk or not, removing any discussion of consent.
Of course, there is nuance to consider. Like I said, the level of risk makes the difference. Denying any chance for consent is not coddling if the rock is higher and/or more slippery than a supreme leader's hopes and virtues, but it absolutely is coddling if you can climb it in just one or two steps. (oh, look at this... friction again!)
Primarily because of child protection law, of course. A simple google will say as much: you can't legally collect information from a child under 13 without their legal guardian's consent.
But, again, why did the law decide 13 is the line? Why not straight up 18? Corporate greed interests? Could be. But even those need to be able to argue their case to a point, so more likely...
Because every age has its own developmental stage, and 13 is the one where it's been agreed that they enter their teenage years, the years where every parent-raised living being starts developing the skills to live independently from their parents. Feel free to find your own, but for ease of discussion, here's a little article that explains what level of development a 13 yo of any gender is supposed to have (click here), and the other ones up to 18 too, if you keep scrolling.
For the sake of brevity, I will focus on Thinking and reasoning
screenshot from earlier mentioned link (joincoralcare).
Does this mean that ALL kids hit these benchmarks at the age of 13? No, of course not.
Does this mean that kids under this age won't just lie, since it's just a click of a button, after all? Oh, please, nobody with the attention span to read this far was born yesterday, least of all I. Of course they'll lie. We lied plenty when we were kids too. And paid the consequences.
Kids understand the concept of consequences at far earlier ages than 13, and if they don't, their caretakers have plenty of time to realize that their kid is not developing at a similar pace to their peers and other measures are put in place by then.
As the list above mentions, 13 is the age where they even start predicting the consequences and plan accordingly. This implies that, even if not explicitly warned about what the consequences are, they are increasingly capable of figuring them out by themselves too. And if they don't, they find out to reference for the future.
Do I mean just let them mess around and find out? In as much as we stay within the definition of protection, yes. That's exactly what I mean.
The 'Dead dove inside' lesson
If you've seen at least 10 memes related to Ao3 by now, you've already seen this meme at least once. The community brings it up AGAIN and AGAIN for a reason:
THE WARNINGS ARE THERE TO BE READ!
And you may complain that a lot of the warnings use slang or unfamiliar language, but if you go to a foreign country and ignore all the friction they put to deter you from doing something, plus the warning signs, even if you don't understand the language, you'll still be held accountable in a court of law. It's your responsibility to make sure you understand at least the bare minimum or consult a guide, when in another country. It's the same when you've already been warned that you're about to read content meant for people much older than you.
Sometimes it's simply a canon event.
The internet is not the only place a kid can find adult content on. The real world is full of such risks too.
I was 11 when I saw (and understood what it was) porn for the 1st time. It wasn't accidental either: some kids I was playing with, even younger than I (youngest was 7), found their dad's porn magazines stash and brought it over to show their friends, me included. I know others whose 1st encounter was video, some even live (running into parents is not just a meme. It happens and had happened since forever). And will keep happening, because kids are nothing if not curious and eager to push boundaries.
Sure, just because it happened before, doesn't mean it has to keep happening. After all, just because the previous generations were raised with yelling and beatings doesn't mean the current and future ones have to as well. It's the same for adult content, for sure. We can't just shrug and let it happen... and we don't do that.
Remember the friction I started with?
We've learned to lock the doors, to cover the keyholes, to soundproof our adult rooms, to send our kids to school, relatives or extracurricular activities... we've learned to use parental controls, we added age checks and so forth. We've added friction.
Sure, asking someone to press a button is not that much friction, really. But that's not the only available measure one can take, is it?
Ao3 is run mainly by volunteers, and those don't come in easily in a time where many people need to have 2 jobs just to pay rent and food. This means that every change to their functions needs people to do it. They removed a lot of friction in terms of website development, in fact, as you can see on their github wiki here . You can help without even going through the volunteer sign up process. All you need is knowledge in the necessary languages, time and will to do it.
There are other ways you can volunteer too, it's just a google away.
But for most users out there, the biggest thing they can do is use the tools the website already offers.
Responsibility is a two way street
I've been going on about how we shouldn't coddle them kids. Learning about the consequences of their own choices is a valuable life lesson, yes.
But the adults around them should have already learned this lesson already. And yeah, if you think you're adult enough to write adult content (albeit I hear there's this law that can prosecute you if you create adult content as a minor, so please be aware), then you're adult enough to take responsibility for whomever accesses it too.
This is why the website has always offered the option to rate your content accordingly, why you can tag and overtag your content, and so forth. You're responsible to do it, and if you don't, you're going to suffer the consequences, as you should. Even more than that, there are so many options to keep your content private. Just take your time and read the entire form before pressing 'post'. You already spent so much time writing it, put so much effort in it, it deserves the respect of being managed properly upon posting too.
And most Ao3 users already do.
So, yeah, I agree that we need to make sure there is friction between curious kids and adult content. But we can add it without regressing in terms of censoring, and we shouldn't. There's a point where we need to respect each other's free will, and friction makes it. Throwing things under the discord rug is not the solution and it never should be.
Leave AO3 alone! Leave adult creations alone! Get off my lawn!
