Taking my toys and going away...

[sekiharatae]

I don't know how many, if any, of you are aware of the whole RedBootton uproar on fanfiction.net, but I've been encountering rumblings here and there and finally did some digging. 

What I decided, after reading what info I could find that came direct from the author, is that I don't like it.  Not because of the MA scare that has so many people upset, but rather the failure of the ff.net admins to address the rampant concerns of its members. Not because of the current searching the program is reported to do -- although I think the details of what criteria it uses are far too sketchy for comfort -- but rather because I worry what it will be searching for in three months time. When these self-appointed policemen have reported every MA story, every story in script format, every story that has a 'trollish' percent of grammar/spelling errors, what will they go after next? I've checked the sort of stories the 'Literate Union' consider to be 'shit' (as it was put by one of their members), and they have far fewer errors than what they are, currently, looking to have removed from the site. Will that change? Given the self-righteous nature of the program's author, I suspect the answer is yes.

I could be wrong -- I hope I'm wrong -- but I don't want to be there if or when the escalation happens.  I also don't want to post anywhere that I feel I have to constantly worry about a false positive getting my stories deleted -- and I do feel that way.  I feel that way, and I don't think I should have to.  I feel like... Big Brother is watching, and even if he's not watching me, it's not comfortable to know he's there. 

For the record, I acknowledge that the admins are not required to make a statement or acknowledge member concerns; but it is still something I feel they should do. In addition, I acknowledge that ff.net is a public site, and 'Lord Kelvin' and the 'Literate Union' have every right to report stories that are in violation of the TOS. Anyone in violation of the TOS has no room to whine if they get caught: you can think the rules are silly, and you can even decide to break them, but you do so willfully and have to be willing to accept the consequences. Admittedly, the chances of facing those consequences were far more slim before the 'Literate Union' decided to police the site. They grew exponentially with the release of RedBootton. But, the risk was always there. Complaining that it's unfair now is both foolish and overly self-entitled.

However, I also I think this move by Kelvin and the LU is a mistake, and can't imagine what they think they're going to accomplish in the long run. To use an analogy, ff.net is our little suburb, and instead of creating a neighborhood watch, these people have decided to become vigilantes. While super heroes are cool, nobody really wants one patrolling their neighborhood with his xray vision, reporting every minor infraction -- and if one did, it wouldn't really improve our quality of life. People would move away, property values would drop, and the last man out would be left holding the keys to a house he couldn't sell. To top it off, it really wouldn't matter that the vigilante had been obeying the letter of the law, because he'd completely failed to uphold the spirit. He's supposed to protect us, not make us feel persecuted, contantly needing to look over our shoulder for our own good. I don't know about anyone else, but I didn't feel (and still don't feel) threatened by the existence of poorly written fic on ff.net, but I do feel threatened by someone who apparently has a 100% success rate getting stories banned, and seems to have an axe to grind.

Even if he's not waving his axe at me, I don't like his attitude.

So:  I will be posting my stories on AO3 over the next few days, and deleting them off ff.net as I go.  
 
ETA:  Here's a link to my home on AO3. 
 

Comments

[lucifer-hatter.livejournal.com]

I am very sad with this whole business, and thank you for posting your opinion/ what you will be doing now. I just checked out this new AO3 site, and i love it! Of course it could use a few tweaks- for instance, more descriptive categories like on ff.net (specify genre of story, complete/ not complete ect) but I think this site will go far! Thank you for posting your stories there! And once again, thank you for always writing such fabulous work- I'm always cheering for you

[sekiharatae.livejournal.com]

One of the neat things about AO3 is that you can, essentially, add your own descriptive categories on the fly. If you are publishing a story that you think needs to be tagged as darkfic, you can just enter that as a tag, and it will be displayed and become searchable. There's supposed to be a way (I think) to tag existing stories with additional flags that you, as a reader, think they need... but I don't know how to do that.

[franzeska]

Heya. I do tag wrangling on AO3, so I can answer questions about tags if you have any. The thing with story labeling is that we're trying to let writers (and in the future artists and vidders) choose their own styles for that. If they want to add extra information like "darkfic" or the name of the person they wrote the story for (if any) or "I wrote this years ago and it's really embarrassing now but someone asked to see it" or anything else, we want to let them. But if they just want to post quickly and not have to spend hours filling out that information, we want to let them do that too.

On the other hand, the site is new and people aren't used to the tag/header styles yet. Many authors may not be familiar with all of the site features yet. If people like descriptive categories, they can use them and encourage their friends to use them, and they may catch on more. Hint, hint. ;D

***
Here is some TL;DR about the posting form: when you go to post a new story, you see the required categories of 'Rating' and 'Archive Warnings'. Those are a specific set of mandatory categories that relate to site rules as laid out in the Terms of Service.

Below that is a box for Fandoms. If you start typing, various suggestions will come up on the autocomplete. You don't have to use those! You can type in whatever you want, regardless of whether anyone has posted things in that fandom before.

That's it for mandatory information. The rest is optional.

Category: We give people the option of selecting F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, and Other.

Relationships: These can be pairings ("A/B") or friendships ("A & B"). People can format these any way they want (e.g. "A x B"), but the tag wranglers will eventually make official versions that show up in site filters. Currently, the guidelines for official versions use slashes and the & symbol and are alphabetical by family name. Lots of users have their own styles like putting the name of seme first or putting the names in the order that sounds nicest when you read it aloud.

Characters: Again, we tag wranglers have some guidelines for the versions that show up in site filters. Users can add anyone they want in any format they want. It doesn't matter if people have tagged with that character before or not.

Additional Tags: And, finally, there's the category where you add what people normally think of as "tags". Darkfic, aliens made them do it, women being awesome, juvenilia, fluffy romance, lemon, lime, oh my god dinosaurs, I wrote this when I was drunk, my best story ever, winner of the blah blah award, etc. Anything you want can go here.

You can also write a summary and/or add author's notes at the beginning and/or end of the story. You can include the story in a particular collection or indicate that it's your assignment for a fic exchange. There's a field to list recipients (fic exchanges or plain old presents). The recipient will get a notification when you post. There are also checkboxes for if the work is a remix/translation/was inspired by something, if it's part of a series, if it has multiple chapters, and some other stuff.
***

Basically, if you're finding that you don't have enough information about stories, you could encourage authors to make more use of the summary text box and especially the "additional tags" field. Additional tags is the place to list genres. A lot of authors also list things like "incomplete and discontinued" or "movie canon" ("book-movie canon fusion", "based on the third game", etc.) there. We don't want to make this kind of thing mandatory, but if you tell authors that it helps you find their fics and that you appreciate seeing it, I'm sure lots of them will start using those fields more.