AO3 is an excellent website and I encourage everyone who can afford it to donate
While I agree that people should donate, do we REALLY need to have the “men vs women” rhetoric in order to do it? Its very off putting.
That’s literally the origin of AO3 though (reactions to FanLib), and AO3′s name is a reference to building a place for female writers (A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf).
👏🏼
“But what about the men?!?”
Also, (very very long) aside: folks in the notes complaining that AO3 allows uploads of incest/rape and other nasty stuff whereas FFN doesn’t. Um. Wow.
You’re so wrong.
1) FFN doesn’t (in theory) allow explicit stuff to be posted, but that’s because it would lose them advertising revenue since, as I understand it, they have to have certain standards with regard to how explicit stuff can be and how easy it can be to find mature content on the site which is displaying the advert.
It’s about the money.
However, even in the context of these supposed standards, people upload explicit stuff over there all. the. time, and it generally takes considerable effort (see Critics United, I think that’s the forum?) to get even the most egregious breaches of the TOS taken down. The rating guidelines themselves are also (to put it kindly) a confusing mess that does not give sufficient insight into what is and isn’t allowed, and frankly I think that’s by design. Explicit and mature fiction could, if discovered, lose FFN advertising income, but those rating brackets are also what drives most traffic there. It’s in FFN’s interest to not make standards clear, to say they don’t allow X but be incredibly lax about enforcing said standards, and to curate a ‘wholesome’ image whilst actually allowing all sorts of crap as long as their attention isn’t brought to it in a forceful way.
(I’m not endorsing CU here BTW. Apart from anything else their standards for what they will and won’t mass report are shaky at best.
Nevertheless the fact it takes concerted, combined effort to get fic that breaches the TOS taken down shows that FFN’s commitment to not having explicit fiction on their site is driven by their desire to keep advertisers, not because they’re Good People who Don’t Like Porn as opposed to the Bad People over on AO3. One person can report a story that is wildly misrated/contravenes the TOS, and it can still be there years later at the same rating. A whole bunch of people can report a story which is sensual rather than sexual and which (given the vagueness of the ratings) could definitely be argued as not being explicit, and poof, it’s gone. So gimme a break with this notion that FFN is somehow objectively more moral, it’s absolute bullshit.)
2) FFN absolutely does not disallow uploads based purely on the basis of containing unsavoury subjects, I have seen plenty of dubcon and noncon posted (oftentimes with an inappropriate rating, which as mentioned, FFN is lousy at policing), there are undoubtedly incest and rape fics there (it takes seconds to find that out), and there’s likely plenty of vile stuff on FFN beyond what I care to think about. Suggesting it’s somehow a bastion of Good and Pure or even that it has restrictions about this is simply wrong.
I couldn’t say if there is or isn’t child porn on there, because I read and write in fandoms which don’t involve a lot of kids - hell, I’ve only come across one truly gross story on AO3 in any of the fandoms/pairings I surf - and I go out of my way to avoid that shit. There’s definitely stuff that’s labelled as underage smut. I can say from experience that I’ve seen worse on FFN than I’ve seen on AO3. In part, that’s because problematic stories are in general much easier to avoid on AO3 because of robust tagging and warnings, and so it’s easier to curate your experience to eliminate that stuff.
That’s not to say FFN is Bad whereas AO3 is Good and Pure, either. I’m not naïve enough to say that because I’ve not seen it, it must not exist. I’m just saying that the notion “FFN doesn’t allow XYZ” isn’t even true intheory. Look at the guidelines for posting - there’s no mention of incest or of rape. Doing a simple search on there for “rape” gets me 20K+ results, and that’s just (insofar as I understand how the search engine works on FFN) things that mention rape in the title/summary. These are stories where the lack of consent isn’t even covered up, these are stories where the fact someone gets raped have been advertised. And sure, some of them may well be thoughtful, nuanced explorations of the nature and impact of sexual assault, but I (very) gingerly dipped my toe into a couple to check (I regret everything 😬), and lemme tell ya, there’s plenty of FFN rape porn if that’s a representative sample 🤢
As for incest? Some of the highlights of a search for the word incest:
‘at its best’ ‘XD’ 'Everybody’s favourite invest pair’ 'incest is wincest’
Ditto any other nefarious combinations of words that I care to put into the search engine. Underage smut exists on FFN. No, I’m not going to go look and see how bad it is.
Dubious/non-con, “less-than-consensual”, underage smut. Well done, FFN, for being better than those nasty folks at AO3 *faceplants into nearest wall*
Tell me again how FFN doesn’t allow the nasty things AO3 does 🤦🏻♀️
Moreover, in practice, plenty of stuff gets past the radar on FFN even though, in theory, it’s banned. It’s not at allll hard to find explicit fiction on FFN, I’ve seen (and read) plenty myself.
So give it a rest with the “FFN doesn’t allow XYZ” schtick, because what FFN doesn’t allow is very much theoretical, and in the TOS, rape, incest and underage aren’t even mentioned. Consent is only mentioned in the context of consent to upload/use/read stuff, and there is one mention of pornography where it says it reserves the right to decide that something isn’t appropriate and includes porn and obscenity as reasons it might decide to take something down. FFN doesn’t have robust or helpful guidelines about what is and isn’t okay, and it doesn’t even reliably stick to the guidelines it has.
3) Yes, AO3 has some stories that I personally find absolutely repulsive. So does FFN. So do many, many other archives. (Hell, there are entire archives based around tropes and kinks that revolt me.) So does professionally published original fiction.
A couple of years ago I read a professionally published book set in Saudi Arabia, from a regular, mainstream, non-fetish, non-kink publishing house, that was praised and had numerous 5-star reviews, that IMO was barely disguised rape-porn and not even well written. That author got paid and got loaded with plaudits for her loving descriptions of how her female main character was raped so badly she nearly died. Thinking about that book makes me feel sick, years later, even though I started skimming and then skipping huge passages because it was so awful and I just wanted to reach the end.
(Credit where credit is due, the hook of the story was such that I needed to understand why the main character had made the choices she did. Sadly, the reasons were never really clarified, the payoff was a complete damp squib, and none of it was remotely worth the time I spent reading then skim-reading then skipping large chunks of rape porn. I have seldom been so disappointed (and horrified/disgusted/sickened) at the chasm between how a book was characterised and what it was actually like to read. I’ve never been sideswiped so badly in a fanfic, just sayin’.)
Do some of these topics and stories horrify me? Hell yes. Do I wish I could permanently filter out certain tags/warnings/users forever? Oh God, so much yes you don’t even know. Please can someone tell me how to do this irl?
Are they worse than stuff you can find on FFN? No. Is FFN a beacon of non-problematic shit? HELL TO THE NO. Is AO3 uniquely problematic in this respect? So much no that I gotta say:
NO
Because a simple 'no’ just would not suffice.
In summary: Donate, don’t donate, it’s up to you. I don’t see anyone’s arm being twisted. I’ve been on AO3 for about 5 ½ years now, I’ve donated exactly once, and it has never made a single difference to my experience of using the site, which I’ve done extensively both as a reader and a writer. Literally no one is being made to donate against their will, and the donation banner disappears if you tell them you’re not interested.
But there’s a false division being made between AO3 and FFN, there are a lot of lies being thrown about, and AO3 is being held to a standard that FFN, many other archives, and professionally published fiction are not being held to.
For a voluntary donation drive that can be ignored with a single mouse click, the ignorance and the hypocrisy (wrt the latter, especially how many people outright say they use AO3 but would never, ever donate towards its upkeep - seriously, do you hear yourselves?) is 100% maddening.
/rant
TL;DR: you don’t have to donate to AO3, but don’t be such damned hypocrites, and stop whining about FFN being morally better for what it allows to get posted, for fuck’s sake.
Critics United, Literate Union, and their ilk are exactly why I advocated for maximum inclusivity of content on AO3. I was very conscious of that dynamic on FFN while we were writing the AO3 TOS. When the stuff that the userbase thinks should be allowed and the actual site rules are too different, you get a lot of potential for groups selectively reporting only rules violations committed by a group they don’t like.
I have yet to see a fandom site where people haven’t tried to use the moderators as a bludgeon against rival shippers or some other faction of “enemies”. AO3′s rules are specifically crafted to make this as difficult as possible…
Which is exactly why antis are screaming now because they come to a site expecting to be able to police content or at least overwhelm the moderation team with so many duplicate reports that they cave just to get rid fo the nuisance. AO3 only allows up to a certain number of reports on a given work precisely to thwart this kind of behavior. I haven’t been on the Abuse team in years, but we took a dim view of organized reporting campaigns. That nonsense can get the reporting person’s account frozen if it’s bad enough.
Antis are horrified by this and have been spreading false rumors based on it for a number of years now. Most of the “They won’t delete problematic thing X, but they punished innocent thing Y!” posts on Tumblr are actually about somebody trying to sic Abuse on their fandom enemies and getting a slap on the wrist for bullying.
