On the AO3 all these years later
drst:
drst:
The tenth anniversary of the OTW and all the AO3 discussion going around this week inspired me to go look at astolat’s original post about creating an An Archive Of Our Own, and found my comment on it:
“I think this is needed and long past needed.
There are of course huge fanfic archives out there like ff.net, but the bigger and more public the site, the more restrictive it is, the more stuff around the edges gets cut off. I don’t WANT the public face of fanfic to be only the most easily palatable stuff, with the smut and the kink and the controversial subjects marginalized and hidden under the table.
And I particularly don’t want to see us all sitting around feeling frustrated while this fabulous community is commodified out from underneath us.
I’m not fit to be a project manager, but I’m great with details and general organizational work. If someone takes this and runs with it, I’d love to help.“
Eleven years and rather a lot of volunteer-hours later, I stand by every single word.
And then I found my original post on the idea that became the OTW/AO3, which says in part:
“However, as I was reading the comments over there, I noticed a frustrating, but not surprising number of comments along the lines of “well, it’s a good idea, but it’s way too ambitious”
I’m not talking about the really useful and practical comments bringing up pitfalls and difficulties to be aware of from the get go with something this massive and complex, I’m talking about all the comments that go something like this:
–
And this:
–
Or this:
–
Oh god.
I like what you’re saying, I really do, but I think it’s actually impossible to achieve.and all the various comments that start with
“It sounds like a cool idea…but”
or words to that effect.
Taken separately, these comments don’t seem like much, but every time a new one showed up I couldn’t help but be reminded of
this post by commodorified, and her oh so brilliant and beautiful rant therein:
“WOMEN NEED TO LEARN TO ASK FOR EVERY DAMN THING THEY WANT.
And here are some notes:
Yes, you. Yes, everything. Yes, even that.
All of it. Because it’s true. We’re mostly raised to live on table scraps, to wait and see what’s going when everyone else has been served and then choose from what’s left. And that’s crap, and it’ll get you crap.
Forget the limited menu of things that you automatically assume is all that’s available given your (gender, looks, social class, education, financial position, reputation, family, damage level, etc etc etc), and start reading the whole menu instead.
Then figure out what you want. Then check what you’ve got and figure out how to get it. And then go after it baldheaded till either you make it happen or you decide that its real cost is more than it’s worth to you.”
And THAT is what Astolat’s post is about. It’s about saying “THIS is what we want, let’s make it happen.” It’s about aiming for the ideal, not for some artificially imposed, more “realistic” option.
And I think that’s fabulous. And I think we CAN do this, we CAN make this amazing, complicated idea happen. But in order to do so we’re going to have to be careful about those little voices inside our heads saying “well, it’s a nice idea, but” and “there’s no point in trying for that impossible thing, let’s aim for this ‘more realistic’ goal instead.”
Because, damn it, why shouldn't we ask for every damn thing we want. And why shouldn't we go out there and get it?”
I am so pleased to have been proved correct.
(And also, in the category of “women need to ask for every damn thing they want”? I took those words to heart, which is one of many reasons Marna/commodorified and I have been married for going on eight years.)
ETA: I know some of the links are broken, they copied over from my original post and I didn’t have the energy to either delete them or track them down elsewhere.
Asking for it and doing it!!!
So inspiring. And yes - at the time this seemed such a pipedream, but look at it now!
Yup. I remember saying I’d support it regardless, but it would only really be useful to me as a poster if it allowed every kind of content. Heh.
God this brings it back. People saying we couldn’t do it, that we would never be able to do it, etc. And then there was the sort of six months later moment where people were like, but where is it? (!) Dudes, we had to found a nonprofit company first! so we could be legal and raise money and pay taxes and have a bank account and enter contracts - and moreover, the archive was written from scratch: from a single blinking cursor on the screen, custom-designed from the ground up. I remember that I had the job of tracking wireframes in the early days as the real designers figured out how the flow of pages in the archive were going to go. Amazing.
Anyway, I want to say that the group that came together around the OTW /AO3 in those first years had a track record like WHOA: so many of those people had been archivists, web-admins, fannish fest-runners, newsletter compilers, community moderators, listmoms (kiddies, you won’t know what this is) or had other fannish roles that gave them enormous experience in working collaboratively in fandom and keeping something great going year after year. And OTW continues to attract great people–and so also, while I’m blathering, let me say that volunteering for the OTW also provides great, real world experience that you can put on your resume, because AO3 is one of the top sites in the world and TWC has been publishing on time for ten years and Fanlore is cited in books and journalism all the time and Open Doors has relationships with many meatspace university libraries and archives etc. so if you think you have something to bring to the table, please do think about volunteering somewhere. It’s work, believe me, but it’s also pretty g-d awesome.
I remember when people started going on about “Where is it? Is it DEAD?” at the six month mark. You know what that was?
Laura Hale trying to start shit.
Her glowing FanLib writeup originally had some language about OTW being dead, and she was actively promoting the idea that it had failed while FanLib remained. It was all cloaked in meta trappings on Fanthropology, but it was her usual PR campaign stuff. People were skeptical independently too, but she was definitely stirring up a lot of the specific “Six months is long enough to build an archive” stuff.
Didn’t she end up selling FanLib to someone, or let bots scrape it and steal shit or something?
Nah. Laura Hale didn’t own FanLib. She was employed by them in some dodgy capacity, apparently? But the site itself was more of a venture capital startup bro thing. They sold it to Disney, who shut it down.
Hale did fill her wiki (the Fan History Wiki) with scraped crap from ffn and other sites. She tried and failed to sell that wiki. She had an embarrassing pitch for it on some kind of pitch site, which caused wank.
I wouldn’t have even known who she was except that she threw a fit when OTW announced the idea of Fanlore–since an actually community-sourced wiki covering fandom history would cut into her power/marketshare/ability to hawk hers to sucker investors.
Right FanLib was the venture capital bros site, I think. I got into a conversation with one of them via email and they forgot to clip out previous parts of the conversation and learned they were calling me “hostile” for my comments.
I remember Hale trying to create a wiki and stealing a bunch of content for it from people too.
Good old Fan History Wiki! /sarcasm
(See Fanlore link here for more detail on its shitty history.)
It wasn’t just that it was full of scraped content. It’s that she used it to out people and was generally a jerk about everything. (Well, “out”. She did out one of us, but then she “outed” me as cesperanza, so… yeah, good job there, Laura.) I think that’s what really did in her various projects: she was so relentlessly self-serving and even her “positive” efforts seemed more like PR tools to subtly tear down somebody else’s fandom thing than an attempt to share fandom history or actually analyze anything.
She had a policy of causing wank as a way of increasing visibility. While drama does stir people up and sometimes makes them go rubberneck, if there isn’t anything more there, they tend to leave in disgust. (So, yes, current discussions made a bunch of people go donate to AO3, but they already liked AO3 before the discussions. This is the piece Laura never seemed to get.)