i tried ao3 after years of writing privately, and it damaged my relationship with sharing work online. maybe it was the fandom i wrote for, but the experience became a mess of entitlement, weird hierarchy games (don’t upset the fandom nobles!), copying/plagiarism anxiety, ai scraping concerns, and the realization that ao3’s blocking tools don’t actually stop people from accessing your work.
i know people say “curate your experience,” but that only goes so far when the tools don’t give writers meaningful control over who can read their work. i’m abandoning my account and going back to writing offline. i feel bad for any readers who cared, but public posting took more joy from me than it gave.
i guess i don’t really have a question. i’m just tired of pretending ao3 is always this harmless, writer-friendly space when for some of us it can be corrosive.
I understand your decision not to post your works on ao3. and whatever you do with your works, whether or not you’ll post them, is not my business. I also can’t talk about the issues within your fandom because it’s not my place or something I can just fix (I don’t know what your fandom is, but unless it’s squid game, I’m not in it — I don’t even get myself involved in drama within the fandom I’m in).
but there is a reason why blocking someone on ao3 doesn’t prevent them from reading your works, and the reason is that ao3 is not a social media where blocking people should automatically stop them from seeing your contents entirely. (I’m saying “should” because a specific social media platform, previously known as twitter, just doesn’t do that, but it’s irrelevant to what we’re talking about here.)
ao3 is an archive and a library. when you post your works on ao3, you’re letting an archive/library archive your works for you.
now assuming a writer has a beef with a specific person, they (the writer) unfortunately cannot go to the library that has their works and tell the librarian “hey, keep my books away from this person”. that’s just… not something a library can do.
a library cannot withhold a specific book from a specific visitor just because the writer has a beef with them.
a library can, however, ban a person from entering the building if said person has broken its rules. and this is actually what ao3 does — people who break their terms of service and, for instance, harass other people, risk having their accounts suspended.
listen, I too would love for it to be the case where blocking someone on ao3 prevented them from reading my works entirely. but I can understand why ao3, as an archive and a library, cannot do that. at least not right at this moment.
if anything, I think ao3 is actually very fair and generous — because they still allow you to block people and keep those people from interacting with you/your works on their platform (so even though they can technically still read your works, they cannot interact with you or your works in any way).
I think it’s super amazing that ao3 has these efficient tagging systems — to help people seek or avoid anything they want — that you literally cannot find on any other platforms.
I think it’s extremely cool how ao3 is run purely by fans, for fans. no ads. no capitalism bullshit. just fans sharing their love and passion with each other. you literally cannot find anything like this anywhere else. at least not at the time this post is being made.
not to mention, ao3 actually has a whole team of lawyers ready to step in and defend their writers, should someone were to ever take legal actions against their works. that is huge. like. no other platforms ever care this much about their users. no other platforms protect their users like this.
as a writer myself and as someone who’s been posting on ao3 for years, I can very confidently say ao3 is the safest place for me to be. and I don’t want them to ever change.
baratheonpilled
romaincrisis
2087
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