#and yet that's exactly what happens when a giant mob of tumblrfandom overreacts *so hard* in such overbroad terms to such small fry

[shinelikethunder]

Listen, if the conversation happening around third-party AO3 apps were any of the following, we’d be cool:

“this app doesn’t even offer useful features in exchange for ads/subscriptions, it just looks like a skeevy cash grab”

“this app may be misleading users into thinking they need an ad-ridden app to access something they can already get for free”

“authors are bound by the ToS to keep their work strictly noncommercial, so it’s pretty fucked-up that third-party app developers can monetize all they want”

“monetizing this shit could draw the ire of corporate legal departments, and creators and/or AO3 could end up in the crossfire”

“does this app respect edits and deletions? does it bypass access controls on NSFW and archive-locked works?”

“wait, this random app is collecting login credentials?”

“whose ire will be drawn towards AO3 if Apple decides this app isn’t bowdlerized enough for their tastes?”

But that’s not the conversation you’re having, is it? That’s all secondary. Y’all are talking as though any third-party viewer app whatsoever is somehow “stealing” your work by existing. You know, the way an RSS reader is “stealing” your blog when it requests the full text of a post. Or the way you “didn’t consent to have your work taken out of context” when someone views your Tumblr posts in the Washboard app. Or the way Discord’s auto-embed previews are “stealing” fanart. Any online RSS reader is probably running ads to cover its server costs, btw. What are the ethics of that?

And once it’s been framed as “stopping content thieves,” apparently that end justifies absolutely any means of takedown, regardless of the actual nature of specific apps. Brigading, finding the dev’s personal accounts and harassing them there, doxxing, review flooding, sending spurious DMCA notices about apps that aren’t even hosting content, tugging Mama Apple’s skirts and pointing at the exact content AO3 exists to protect as reason to nuke it for Purity Crimes... what the fuck, guys. What moral high ground could you possibly hope to occupy by tattling about all the icky, nasty porn on AO3, all to force an arbitrary takedown of an access point you find dodgy for unrelated reasons? I sure as fuck didn’t consent to having my fic used for that.

Do you have any idea what kind of chilling effect this all has on fans who might want to create third-party apps with actual, useful additional features? Because y’all aren’t exactly drawing distinctions between the sinners and the saints, here--you’re at “see AO3 app, burn it to the motherfucking ground.” Right now, one of my Discord servers has multiple members completely reassessing whether/how to share fandom-related coding projects and how to keep their identity firewalled, so they don’t get fucking doxxed if some underinformed moral panic lumps them in with whatever witches are getting hunted next week. Is that likely to happen to fans trying to contribute helpful extra functionality, noncommercially, out of their own pockets if necessary? I don’t fucking know! I realize the vehemence of this incident is mostly driven by the monetization, but the way y’all are talking sure isn’t giving me faith in your willingness to even consider that distinction.

Just... take a step back. Be willing to make distinctions and articulate the boundaries of your wrath. Consider what you’re actually objecting to. Consider analogous cases. Ask yourself if whatever you’re saying goes for them, too, and if not why not. Fan, as the old saying goes, is a tool-using animal--consider which tools your condemnation applies to before you put it on full blast. Also, you know, put the fucking pitchforks down and take a step back from whatever the mob mentality is telling you would be totally proportionate and justifiable as a response. It doesn’t have a great track record of holding up the next morning.