So I’ve been seeing posts about people reporting AO3 to the FBI
First, let me laugh at you. I know people who have to look at horrible, hideous images all day long just so they can catch a very small percentage of the child pornographers out there today. Reading a story on AO3? Completely a waste of their time. Because regardless of how disgusting that fic might be, no children are actually being harmed, and that’s the core of what theses agents care about.
But let’s say this complaint reaches some upper echelon bureaucrat who got kicked upstairs because he was screwing up too many cases. (Sadly, this happens.) He takes it on as a crusade, and because no one at the Bureau cares so long as he’s not messing with any real investigations, AO3 gets taken down.
What will we be left with then, I wonder?
LJ? Nope. We’d always be fearing another event like Strikethrough.
Fanfiction.net? Nope. We’d always be fearing another Purge.
Dreamwidth? Nope. Nothing against Dreamwidth, but for some reason, it hasn’t caught on as a Fandom Home. Maybe because it was too much like LJ for too many people, and that brought back painful memories.
Tumblr? Maybe a little bit. But eventually someone here will complain about the lack of tagging and warning on certain fics and that will go away too.
A new site like AO3? Nope. Why in Fandom’s name would anyone put in the kind of time and money a site like that would require after seeing what happened to AO3?
Individual sites for individual authors? Yeah. I think we’d be looking at that. Only this time they’re all going to be gateposted with those lovely messages that we all loved so much back in the day: “You must send me an email swearing that you are 18 before I’ll send you the link for the actual fics.” You know, the ones that didn’t actually keep kids from reading porn, but covered the site owner’s ass so they felt somewhat safe about posting their fic.
Yeah, this is exactly what I can see happening. A return to the days when you needed your own web site in order to write and post fic. And you had to wait at least a day before you could take a chance that you might like somebody else’s fic.
What’s that line from Santayana? Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it?
Like I said above, I doubt that any of this could ever truly happen. But if it does, we might be in for a major wake-up call, George Santayana style.