if you love art blogs of vintage and antique art and photography, and historical writings and scans of pages covered in the most amazing, wonderful things, please support the internet archive. remember seeing that little 'Internet Archive' link at the bottom of so many gorgeous posts? that's where it comes from, all for free.
centuries of books, including sheet music, ancient manuscripts, contemporary fiction and non-fiction books, films and audio, decades of old radio and television, even archived web pages, all to view for free, and pretty much all of it to borrow, for free.
and all under threat of being destroyed.
it's a digital archive that four multi-billionaire publishing corporations are trying to bring down because of — not real, and entirely imagined loss of profits — that they want their shitty hands on. they've decided books being lended out for free are Bad because monies are Good and therefore libraries must Die
please donate if you can and share, they use the donations to keep the archive running and to fight this court case.
libraries of immense knowledge and research have already been lost and/or destroyed already in the past, by foolishness and fascism.
this one we can save.
don't let corporate greed stomp out a digital archive. archives contain multitudes of knowledge that belongs to the world and histories that can't be found anywhere else. some people owe their degrees, their PhDs, their careers, and even their lives to the Archive, i've read personal testimonies backing the Archive.
please do what you can for a digital database whose importance and worth cannot be underestimated, and one that is under attack by billionaires who only want to watch the world burn so they can make a buck off of it.
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Mizumi deleted the AO3 version of her anti-komahina essay.
I can tell by cross-referencing it to other places where she posted the essay, like on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/danganronpa/comments/x80ksb/why_komahina_and_kamukoma_isnt_canon_and_never/
She first posted the essay in early September of 2022. However, as you can see in the screenshot, there is a large gap in-between other fics she posted, indicating either a long hiatus between posting, or the deletion of something that came out in-between it.
As of this point, I haven't been able to guess exactly why she deleted it. One answer I've come up with is that she finally listened to all the people telling her to stop posting in the komahina tag, but that's hard to believe, given how badly Mizumi still tries to defend that choice to this day.
But the AO3 version of the """essay""" isn't the thing I'm actually interested in. Rather, it's the comments ON the essay I wanted to see.
I made a post a while ago that contained screenshots of @officially-christy breaking off her friendship with mizumi. That conversation took place ON mizumi's ao3 essay, and now, with the essay deleted, it's no longer possible to actually SEE the comments themselves.
But that's not all. Mizumi made two posts on reddit, this one, and this one, about one or some of the comments she received on her ao3 essay. But now, tracking down the source of what she's talking about is practically impossible. Take for example, the second reddit post. A bingo card of all the insults she allegedly received on the essay. Without links or screenshots of these comments, how does she expect anyone to trust her and take her word seriously when she doesn't even have the sources to back up her claims?
Or with the first reddit post. How are we supposed to find that commenter's account and click on their profile to see if they're an actual person (cuz, yeah, some people in fandoms ARE crazy enough to fake having DID), OR just a sock-puppet/Mizumi's friend made for the express purpose of farming internet pity points? (especially since you can make a valid case for the commenter talking with the same speaking style as mizumi; same poor grammar and spelling, same feeling of superiority to others, etc.)
This is just one problem with mizumi; how willing she is to just... delete her old content, without bothering to back it up or archive it. It's such a waste, especially since it makes it impossible to actually track down and debunk/verify her claims of being "harassed and insulted" (Although, given mizumi's track-record, I highly doubt any of the people in the comment harassed/insulted her, and am more willing to believe it was the other way around, but, oh well, looks like we'll never know).
If anyone out there has a link to an archive of the ao3 version of the essay, comments and all, then please let me know so I can update you all on it.
And Mizumi, if you're reading this (I know you lurk on this blog), I'm only gonna say this once: if you actually want other people online to believe your claims of being harassed or whatever, then STOP DELETING THINGS THAT WILL ACTUALLY HELP YOU BACK UP SAID CLAIMS WITH SOURCES!
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Let's have a chat about AO3
Hiya friends and loyal followers! My last post about AO3 blew up yesterday so I figured now would be a good time to continue the conversation about AO3.
As I mentioned in my previous post (and probably in multiple other previous posts):
AO3 is NOT a social media site. AO3 is an ARCHIVE.
So let's delve into that a bit more since people don't seem to be getting that. Fanfiction predates the internet, and was transmitted via the internet way before sites like AO3 and FF dot net. Relatively speaking, I am a fanfiction newcomer, as I first started reading fanfiction in ... 2011? or thereabouts. I say this to say that I obviously don't have as personal of a memory of a time before fanfiction archive sites (my bitty fan experiences were on teaspoon and lcfanfic), but I certainly know plenty of people via fandom online that absolutely do.
For the newest children to fanfiction please check out the following pieces of reading to get started on your fandom history education:
“Fanfiction.” Fanlore Wiki. Accessed June 15, 2023. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanfiction. Archived [https://archive.is/yJpOq].
“So I’m on AO3 and I See a Lot of People Who Put ‘I Do Not Own [Insert Fandom Here]’ before Their Story.” sonicenvy.tumblr.com, July 2, 2016. https://sonicenvy.tumblr.com/post/146818589611/mikkeneko-thepioden. Archived [https://archive.is/FRNCy]
ofhouseadama, Emily. “A Brief History of Fandom, for Those on Here Who Somehow Think Tumblr Invented Fandom.” sonicenvy.tumblr.com, May 21, 2014. https://sonicenvy.tumblr.com/post/131935827010/ofhouseadama-a-brief-history-of-fandom-for. Archived [http://archive.today/j2Rfq]
mizstorge, fantastic-nonsense, and fanculturesfancreativity. “The Places Fandom Dwells: A Cautionary Tale.” fantastic-nonsense.tumblr.com, June 29, 2017. https://fantastic-nonsense.tumblr.com/post/162395547190/the-places-fandom-dwells-a-cautionary-tale. Archived [https://archive.ph/QK2wI]
As you read through this stuff, three things should become apparent to you:
Fanworks have always existed in tenuous space -- that is, they have always been under threat of removal, or threat of loss, whether this loss was through events like the livejournal strikethrough, the loss of a fandom specific website, destruction of physical copies of the work, or C&D/legal action from original creators of the work.
Fandom has a long and colored history with many of the most defining events of early fandom history being related to threats to the community.
A need was ripe for a place to save and ARCHIVE fanworks and protect them from deletion, legal action, corporate sanitization efforts, site deaths due to the deaths of admins, etc etc.
Out of all of this, comes The Organization For Transformative Works (2007), and their brand new site Archive of Our Own (2008). The stated intention of Archive of Our Own (AO3) (bolding mine):
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization, established by fans in 2007, to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. We believe that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate.
We are proactive and innovative in protecting and defending our work from commercial exploitation and legal challenge. We preserve our fannish economy, values, and creative expression by protecting and nurturing our fellow fans, our work, our commentary, our history, and our identity while providing the broadest possible access to fannish activity for all fans.
The Archive of Our Own offers a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting place for fanworks using open-source archiving software.
Source: Works, Organization for Transformative. “Archive of Our Own Beta.” Archive of Our Own. Accessed June 15, 2023. https://archiveofourown.org/about. Archived [http://archive.today/QYtbM]
You may also want to check out the original LiveJournal Brainstorming sessions for AO3 by astolat as archived here [https://web.archive.org/web/20220627134339/https://astolat.livejournal.com/150556.html] if you need further clarity on this point.
Some neat stuff from astolat's original posts that I find are relevant:
making it easy for people to download stories or even the entire archive for offline reading (thus widely preserving the work in case some disaster does take it down)
code-wise able to support a huge archive of possibly millions of stories.
allowing ANYTHING -- het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult ...
As we can see both from the mission statement of OTW/AO3 and from astolat herself in the brainstorming sessions, AO3 is an ARCHIVE. It is a project that is meant to preserve and provide access to fanworks. Run for fans, by fans and meant to host any and all kind of content with none of the commercialization or censorship that fans found elsewhere. Before AO3 there were certainly numerous, disconnected, fandom specific archives for fanfiction or other fanworks. Many of these old sites have been archived (see we're getting that word again) via the opendoors project. Some, like teaspoon or lcfanfic still exists and are semi-active.
A common thread is that writers and readers weren't just using the archive site to connect. They were doing more connection through other sites like dreamwidth, livejournal, facebook, their emails and later tumblr or twitter. Archive sites were meant as a supplement to other fan spaces like message boards, blogs and journals.
So, dear friends, you might ask, what is an archive?
An archive is a place where documents, artifacts and records are kept and preserved for future reference, use and access. Archives help us maintain a better understanding of the past and protect objects, writings, documents, records and more in longevity. In the context of fanwork archiving, this means preserving fanworks in longevity/perpetuity so that fans can continue to access them for enjoyment and for historical purposes. Archiving fanwork is vital to preserving and, indeed creating fan culture and identity.
To read more about archives in general, check out this article from the American History Museum of the Smithsonian (https://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/about/what-are-archives) or this one from the US National Archives (https://www.archives.gov/about/info/whats-an-archives.html).
So AO3 is an archive. Why does this matter?
Oh, boy, I am about to get LIS nerdy on y'all. At this point in the post we can all agree that AO3 is and always has been an archive (it's in the name...). When we view and understand the site starting from this premise, a lot of, frankly stupid as fuck arguments that people have about AO3 look even dumber. Understanding AO3 primarily as an archive helps us understand:
The tagging system. Given AO3 is an archive, the tags for content on the site function exactly the same as headings in a library archive. They are designed to store information about the fic (that is, they are intended as metadata) which is then used to find the record of the fic in the archive. This is why it is important to tag what is in your fic, and to use tags properly, using the agreed meanings of particular tags.
The kinds of content that are permitted and excluded under TOS IV. The archive permits fanworks, which include: fanfiction, fanart, podfic, and fan videos. The archive thus excludes things that are not fanwork (records with no content (aka "placeholder fics"), posts asking for writing prompts or submissions, posts looking for fic, commerical promotions of ANY kind, original fiction with no relation to fan content, spam etc). Every library and archive has their own collections policies, and AO3 is not an exception. Collections Policies are generally guided by the mission statement(s) of the archiving party/library. As we saw above in both the official about page and the original brainstorming posts from astolat, AO3 is a library for fanworks, meant to preserve fanworks and is in opposition to advertising and commercialization. Therefore, if the thing you want to add to the library of AO3 is not a fanwork or contains commercialization, it does not qualify to be an object of the archive. Re: the "placeholder fic" post that I didn't know was going to blow up so much: imagine you go to the library to get a book and open it to find that it is empty or you get a DVD and play it only to find that it is the movie theater trailer for the movie. Doesn't that make no sense?
Why there is NO censoring of "adult" or other quote on quote "objectionable content". The archive does not chose to preserve works based on subjective quality or "moral purity" type standards. This is true in libraries and museums as well. We keep and save materials that people find objectionable as archiving and librarianship are and have always been diametrically opposed to censorship. As an archive AO3 follows this. Moreover, you can see in astolat's original post "allowing ANYTHING -- het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult" as a founding idea.
Why there is no advertising, and why this includes you adding your Ko-fi or paypal or whatever the fuck. Outside of the fact that doing this violates TOS and invalidates OTW lawyer arguments for the legal existence of fanworks under US Fair Use, AO3 as an archive is meant to be a keeper of fan records, not a space for promotions. Archives do keep records (and indeed some archives keep records of advertising) but they, themselves are not using their platform to advertise for anything else.
Why there is no "AO3 algorithm". The kinds of algorithmic feed generators that sites like the t*kt*ok or whatever use are antithetical to the mission of archiving stuff and providing access to it. In an archive you search for content based on terms and headings and self-select. I'm not on the t*kt*k or whatever and I actively block and disable all "suggestion" type things so I don't entirely understand what y'all are looking with this.
Ok, that's great, why are you telling us all of this?
There is a concerning trend of newcomers both young and older to fandom and fanfiction that have not taken off the social media brain filter before coming on board. Some excellent tags I've seen on The Post™ that spawned this one include:
#guys quit bringing the worst elements of capitalism to AO3 (via @watchtowersystem)
#algorithms have rotted people's brains i swear (via @pearly--rose)
#omg stop trying to social mediaify ao3 (via @greyduckgreygoose)
There were also some bangers on my reddit post on this topic as well, but the reddit I posted it on is (rightfully) on blackout at the moment.
I think the sociamediafying of fanfiction that a lot of these people are bringing has a few major negatives:
social mediafied fandom views fanwork soley as consumable content, creating more passive, entitled participants in fandom. For fanwork=content social media brain folks, the fact that fanwork is meant to be an active and engaging thing is lost. Fanwork is a gift from one fan to other fans, it is a point for discussion, a result of people's passion and creativity. It is transformative, out of the box and part of building a niche community. When you start to see it as "content" like a random object on a feed you stop valuing it, analyzing it, and interacting with it in the same way, and are more likely to passively consume what you see as content. Social media has made "content" out of everything, and everything becomes something to scroll past in a few seconds, always looking for more stuff, the newest stuff, etc etc. It's obviously very tied to the experience of social media being used to sell you shit, but that's another conversation I think.
fanwork=content social media brain also allows some of these people to post incredibly demanding comments for "more content" on fancreators works or makes them think it's ok (and indeed creates the same result as what the writer is creating) to feed someone's incomplete fic into an ai to get a "completion".
fanwork=content social media brain also means that when these folks start creating content they feel entitled to views, hits, kudos, etc etc, and feel like it is ok to do things that they see as "gaming" the system to get their fics to be at the top of the pack. They begin to care too much about posting to get their "content" the most views because that's how things work on social media.
fanwork=content social media brain also makes some of these people think that "fic" that is "written" by an ai is acceptable fanwork, because they do not view fanwork as artwork/writing with merit, as much as an entertainment property to be consumed. How the meat gets made becomes irrelevant, because the end result is the only thing that is important.
social mediafying of fandom is something that has helped a lot of advertising and commercialization sneak its way into our spaces, which actively hurts our chances of building good communities.
social mediafying of fandom turns fanwork creation and fandom into popularity contests, which is bad for all fan spaces. The point is that we're being weird together. I've seen new, young authors post on reddit about how they feel so bad about their fic because it doesn't have 1000s of hits or because they feel incapable of writing things (even things they might want to explore) because "no one will read it, and it will not become popular". This makes me very sad.
social mediafying of fanwork also turns right around into .... wait ... you guessed it .... censorship! people are now practising self-censorship that is utterly unnecessary and completely sad to me because they are afraid of getting deleted from anywhere for "objectionable content". This carries over into new users on AO3 doing things like using leet speech for curse words, sexual content and more in the TAGS or the body of their AO3 fics. Stop Don't. You can say fuck, dead, kill, murder, cunt, cock, and whatever the fucking hell you want on AO3. That was the whole goddamn point.
These people are trying to bring fanwork=content social media brain to places like AO3. I'm not entirely sure why.
tldr; AO3 isn't a social media site for talking with your following or posting about ideas that you've had. It isn't a popularity contest. It isn't a place where there will be no inappropriate content. It isn't a place for advertising or commerical promotion. It is an ARCHIVE OF FANWORKS meant to be "allowing ANYTHING -- het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult."
Anyone of you fans older, wiser, more well versed in fan history, and more articulate than me, please feel free to add to this. Ditto on any of you other funky LIS friends out here on tumblr dot hell.
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My takeaway from the past 24+ hours...
There are so many of us that rely on ao3, whether you're a reader or writer. It brings us joy, it gives us an escape from the real world, and it lets us come together as a community to share stories and scenarios about our favorite fandoms and characters. The amount of posts I have seen on multiple platforms lamenting over the DDoS attacks is overwhelming - but with most of them comes a delightful cheer to the volunteers working to resolve this issue.
I've seen so many statements of praise for those volunteers, which is exactly what they deserve, and more. Can you imagine working for over 24 hours straight, on a volunteer basis, against something like this? They're the real MVPs, and I think our appreciation for them gets lost until moments like this rise.
With that said, here is my first real takeaway...
Don't bitch when ao3 does a donation drive. They work hard to keep the archive up and running, and with that costs money. Every server, every new addition or feature you want to see added to help make the site better, it costs money. The legal team that is defending fanfic authors??? MONEY. SO! DON'T! COMPLAIN!
I'm not saying you have to go out and donate your paycheck to ao3 - but I will say that, especially with this situation, if you can donate even a little bit to show your support, it means more than you probably realize, and even if you can't donate (which is totally okay), be kind to those who work on the archive. Send them kind words of encouragement, rather than flaming the archive because it's under attack - because yeah, I've seen people bitching AT ao3 for not working fast enough, or for it still being down. STOP IT.
My second takeaway...
Don't believe everything you see on the internet. Ao3 themselves have advised that the group claiming to take credit for this attack is to be treated with skepticism. And not only that, let's NOT automatically make assumptions about who is responsible just because of an organization's name. It's just a NAME, it doesn't identify a person's origin, background, etc. But I'm not here to dive into that much further. Point: I better not see any Sudanese hatred on my dash, or I will bite you.
My third takeaway...
Treat your fanfic writers with respect. We all now see first hand how much we depend on these stories. As I said above, for some it's an escape, a creative release, and a way to communicate with other people through similar interests. It's a beautiful creation, neither above nor below any other kind of literature.
Consider commenting, reblogging, kudos, anything you can to let the authors know you enjoyed and appreciate their works. Everyone is free to communicate in the way that suits them best, but every little bit is appreciated - as a fanfic writer myself, I can tell you that even a little heart emoji has made my day. It's like receiving a second kudos, and tells me that someone appreciated my efforts enough to give me a double thumbs up.
Any form of communication with the authors is appreciated. It lets them know that people are genuinely interested. We live in a world where INSTANT GRATIFICATION is taking over, but creations such as this take time. Talk with the authors, ask them about their wips, tell them they're doing a great job. Do NOT pester about "when are you updating next?" or the dreaded AI option - again, I will BITE PEOPLE if I see you doing this. Just...have some respect, show your appreciation, it's more than JUST FANFIC.
At the end of the day I guess this post is about being kind. Not pointing fingers or slandering people due to a name. It's about appreciating the things we do have, and not taking them for granted. Whether it's the brave cyber warriors currently fighting these DDoS attacks on the frontline, or the authors writing for not only their enjoyment, but for others too. Let's all respect one another, and show our support when and where we can.
HUGE THANK YOU TO THE VOLUNTEERS AT AO3, YOU ARE THE REAL MVPS!!!
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