#fandom thots
NOTE: This is a version of the response I made to that post going around that is kicked off by someone claiming that AO3 was started “in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works…”
There’s a long list of responses from fandom crones like me, but some of the memory of that whole time is a bit muddied.
Since I was one of the main people in fandom (BtVS fandom at the time) chronicling in real time, I thought it might be interesting to add my .02 and my perspective on what the future holds for Tumblr.
Just to add my voice to the historical context about the foundation of AO3, the Livejournal strikethrough, and mess that Tumblr has started…
I was one of the main people blogging about the LJ strikethrough back in the day while it was all happening. I weirdly ended up being a centralized hub for information about what was happening. Hell, my LJ is even cited as a source on Fanlore, if you can believe it.
Nice to know my journalism degree and my past as a newspaper reporter wasn’t entirely a waste. [j/k – sort of]
If you want a pretty good idea about the chaos and panic and how quickly it spun out of control, you can start with this post here, and then follow all of the links to subsequent posts as the bad news kept rolling in.
By the way, to this day, I was the only one in fandom who managed to get any kind of response out of the “Warriors for Justice,” a right-wing, Christian supremacist group who started the whole mess.
It should be noted that “Warriors for Justice,” while claiming to be an “organization of volunteers who work with law enforcement” was never anything more than a loose band of RWNJ who happened to frequent a chat board. For whatever reason, they got a bug up their collective asses about LJ and decided to target it.
Keep in mind, this wasn’t that long after LJ had recently been sold to 6 Apart (owners of Wordpress) and they were trying very hard to monetize what was a freewheeling frontier of blogspace.
To say it wasn’t going well was an understatement.
They had tried ads. Tiered pricing. Just about everything. To make matters worse, LJ really didn’t have a central identity. It had spheres (fandom spheres, support community spheres, slice-of-life spheres, professional spheres, and yes, some spheres of some really dank shit that would be right at home on 4chan), and there wasn’t much crossover between those spheres.
How badly did it go for 6 Apart? LJ is now owned by a Russian company. That pretty much tells you everything right there.
In any case, that’s the commercial background for strike through. 6 Apart was trying like hell to monetize LJ and not really getting anywhere. Along comes “Warriors for Justice” claiming that they are some big, bad group with big, bad connections in the media and that they were going to start making some noise about all the dank shit on LJ.
And 6 Apart pretty much panicked.
And that’s how we got strikethrough (and eventually bold through and eventually fandom moving off of LJ en masse).
I think I should make one thing clear, though. The main target for “Warriors for Justice” was never the pedos and the other really dank shit on LJ. That was just the handy excuse. Their real target was anything they deemed “unchristian.” Or to spell it out in letters you can understand, their real target was this:
LGBTQA
That’s it. That’s what really pissed them off.
And if you didn’t agree with them, you were branded a “pedo” or a pedo apologist.
(They came to really hate me through all this. I was, according to them, the worst of the worst. They tried to get me TOS’d. One small problem: They had nothing to get me on. There was nothing on my LJ that could be judged obscene under any law or TOS. By the way, the fact that I had to be that “good and nice” online to avoid a TOSing is, simply put, fucked the hell up.)
Read and learn from the posts and the comments on those old LJ posts, young ‘uns. The panic was palpable.People were losing years of their journaled lives, not just fanfic or fan discussions, but also personal entries where they just talked about their lives. And it could all be gone at the snap of a finger with no way to recover any of it. And if you had a paid journal? Too bad. You were out the money, too.
Not everything that squicks you out, not everything that makes you uncomfortable, is inherently bad. It’s your right to be squicked, it’s your right to be uncomfortable. But it’s also your responsibility to curate your own experience. Targeting people because you don’t like their fannish output puts you on the same side as the “Warriors for Justice.” You wind up hurting a lot of innocent people who never did anything to anyone outside of a fictional space.
And if that doesn’t convince you, do one thing for me. Look at the person to your virtual right. Look to the person on your virtual left. Then look in the mirror. Then realize this one simple fact: sooner or later when you get that perfectly sterile and safe online experience you crave, someone, somewhere, is going to decide that it’s not sterile or safe enough. And that means that one of you, either the person on your right or the person on your left or even the person looking at you from the mirror is going to find themselves out in the cold.
It happens every single time. Every. Single. Time.
Now I’m not saying that Tumblr wasn’t allowing some fucked up shit, but there were ways to handle it properly. THIS IS NOT HANDLING IT PROPERLY.
It’s the beginning of the end, my Chili Babies. I’ve been in this movie before (hell, I had a significant supporting role in the previous movie). Tumblr will tick-tock along for awhile, but I guarantee people are feverishly looking for the next fandom thing because Tumblr has now proven to be unsafe.
At least fanfic writers have AO3. Right now it’s the fanartists who are pretty much screwed until the next new thing comes along.
So I guess: Good night. Good luck. And I’ll meet you at the new fandom space when you find it.
Oh, I’m not going anywhere. But I suspect that I will be moving (again) when the time is right.
