Guys, I’m watching the situation with AO3/OTW because I think it’s an important moment in Fandom-with-a-capitol-F, but I don’t think it’s time to panic about your favorite fics suddenly disappearing. Yes by all means please have a backup of your fics - throw them in google docs and/or another cloud storage and keep them on your hard drive and make a half dozen usb drive sticks and hell even go get them printed and bound if you like.
But that because they’re art that you should take ownership and responsibility for, and not because you think AO3′s going to suddenly go poof! I’ve been in fandom for over a decade now, and believe me, as someone who was around before AO3, it’s not going anywhere.
I am curious to see the direction the new management is going to take things, however. I’ll admit I didn’t vote in the last election - it was a busy time for me, and while I read a couple of the posts from some of the newer candidates on why they wanted in, I didn’t really have the time to look into the situation fully and I didn’t want to jump on a bandwagon to vote in a whole slew of people just because a post about them had a decent number of notes on Tumblr.
And that, I think, is the thing to watch for. Every couple of months or so I see conversations about LJ fandom vs Tumblr fandom, usually with people bemoaning the good old days. My own LJ is old enough to make a social media account of it’s own, but I’m leery to indulge in too much nostalgia. Yes there are things that I liked better about LJ than Tumblr/Twitter, but I was the first to whine in the mid-2000s about how I missed my old messageboards and Yahoo Groups. I finally shifted over to google chat (or hangouts, I guess they’re called now) but I still run Trillian with my old AIM and Y!M handles running in the background. Just in case.
(and don’t even get me started about IRC rooms)
My point is, I get the impression that we may be seeing OTW/AO3 shift a bit to some of the new school fandom ways. There are good things about bad things about that. I think we’ll see increased transparency and accountability because new school fandom sees fandom as being more of a legitimate business/artform. It’s gone mainstream, and with that it can no longer be run in private backrooms - even if those backrooms are virtual.
With that said, fandom would have never gained a lot of that legitimacy if it wasn’t for the passion and persistence of old school fandom. The very existence of AO3 was born out of the desire for fandom to run, well, an Archive Of Our Own. I still shake my head in awe at the people who turned building fandom infrastructures into their full time careers - very often on top of other full time careers (and raising a family on top of that).
To the folks over in the new school fandom camp, my only caution is to avoid getting drowned out by the details. You will never please everyone, and if you try to you’ll just drag everyone down into failure with you. There will always be someone who gets offended by what you do, or how you do it, or why or who or when. Tumblr fandom in particular gets caught up in being non-offensive to a fault, but as any business owner can tell you, the customer is not always right.
Anyhow, this has gotten long, so I’ll just end with this:
- Back up your fics - because you should always back up your fics, not because there’s any need for panic.
- To the outgoing OTW board members - thank you for the time/energy/sweat/tears you’ve poured into fandom
- To the incoming/future board members - I wish you the very best of luck, and I hope you’re ready for a wild ride
- To everyone else in fandom: take a moment to appreciate not just the authors/artists whose works you love, but the hidden people behind the scenes who make sure it’s always available to you at your finger tips
I am going to bold a part that speaks to me in the language of my peoples:
“With that said, fandom would have never gained a lot of that legitimacy if it wasn’t for the passion and persistence of old school fandom. The very existence of AO3 was born out of the desire for fandom to run, well, an Archive Of Our Own. I still shake my head in awe at the people who turned building fandom infrastructures into their full time careers - very often on top of other full time careers (and raising a family on top of that).
To the folks over in the new school fandom camp, my only caution is to avoid getting drowned out by the details. You will never please everyone, and if you try to you’ll just drag everyone down into failure with you. There will always be someone who gets offended by what you do, or how you do it, or why or who or when. Tumblr fandom in particular gets caught up in being non-offensive to a fault, but as any business owner can tell you, the customer is not always right…..
….To everyone else in fandom: take a moment to appreciate not just the authors/artists whose works you love, but the hidden people behind the scenes who make sure it’s always available to you at your finger tips.”