A History of Fandom Purges
I’m curious how many related deletions we can come up with.
- 2002 - FFN bans porn
- 2002 - FFN bans RPF
- 2004 - FFN bans script format
- 2005 - FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic
- 2007 - Strikethrough, Boldthrough
- 2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
- 2010 - FFN forums deleted
- 2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
- 2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn
- 2014 - Quizilla shuts down
- 2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
All these had horrible formatting and became outdated though. Consider how reddit had a purge of their worst subreddits and now it’s more popular then ever. I don’t think framing this as an attack on fandoms is correct either. Unlike most sites of this size tumblr had no effective way of censoring and reporting child porn and they got in trouble for it. If this site gets shut down it’s not because the fandoms are being attacked it’s because tumblr staff couldn’t keep up with the rest of the internet. Their own incompetence will kill this site not because the internet has a vendetta for people who write porno fanfics.
This isn’t about blame. This is about the reality that our history keeps getting deleted.