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250318 · 1 day
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sagegarnish · 11 days
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🦀 Kudos Crab 🦀
If you are scrolling and see Kudos Crab, your fics will be blessed!
You will get good comments and kudos!
You will beat your writers block!
GO AND WRITE!
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runawaymarbles · 27 days
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The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.
Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.
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just got a second official warning for my use of "from the river to the sea, palestine will be free" on the OTW volunteer slack
people are also currently asking board to ban saying that the founding of israel was colonialism—equating this to saying racial slurs—and were complaining about my status back when it was "palestine will be free", too
suffice to say, fuck that place, don't give the OTW your money, and don't fucking volunteer there
EDIT: Please see my pinned post for additional screenshots. There are a lot. Thank you.
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(the second screenshot is from the warning I got a few days ago)
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transformativeworks · 5 months
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AO3 Celebrates 12 Million Posted Fanworks
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The Archive of Our Own has reached the milestone of 12 million published fanworks! Read more about how the archive works (and doesn't) when it comes to algorithms, tags and bookmarks! https://otw.news/02c68e
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azuremist · 4 months
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If you’re just as displeased about the organization that runs AO3 kicking someone for being pro-Palestine (source 1) (source 2) as I am, here are some things you can do…
Use the OTW contact form and the AO3 feedback form to voice your displeasure. Additionally, inform them exactly how you will be withdrawing support until this issue is resolved.
Stop donating to AO3. This is an obvious one, but important. If you have previously donated, but will no longer be doing so, be sure to say it in your feedback form submission!
Switch fanfiction sites. Both for reading, AND for uploading. Alternatives include WattPad, Fanfiction.net, Dreamwidth, Quotev, tumblr itself, or even hosting your fanfiction on a site of your own, via Neocities. Don’t want to stop using AO3’s tagging system? Check out SquidgeWorld, which uses AO3’s open-source code. It even has rules against CSEM and AI scraping! While AO3 doesn’t get money from ad revenue, seeing the number of visitors drop will certainly get the message across.
Encourage others to do the same, and spread the word!
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end-otw-racism · 11 months
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End OTW Racism: A Call To Action
A fan protest against the lack of action from the OTW on addressing issues of harassment and racism on AO3 and within the organization
This is a Call To Action for Fans of Color and Allies
AO3 has acknowledged that they have a harassment & racism problem that its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), needs to address. Currently, people can use AO3 to harass others through fanworks, comments, and tags. Just a few examples include: racist Untamed “spitefic” that used anti-Indigenous slurs and was written specifically to lash out at fans of color; a Transformer fic that used its Black-coded character to reenact George Floyd’s murder in July 2020; someone naming a fandom scholar who criticized their Nazi omegaverse fic in the tags of the fic specifically to incite harassment to the scholar; writers using racial slurs against commenters who pointed out racism in their hockey fic; and so much more.
In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the OTW committed to addressing these issues. It has been nearly three years and they have not yet implemented any of the changes they promised, other than a blocking/muting tool that was already in development before 2020. We need to hold the OTW accountable to their own promises. (See the section further down on “Why Are We Doing This” for even more detail.)
As fans, together, we are powerful. We are organizing to protest the lack of action on promises made by the Organization for Transformative works to deal with issues of racism and harassment on their platform, Archive of Our Own.
We call on fans to do any or all of the following actions any time between May 17 to 31, 2023 to send a message to AO3 and OTW that we will hold them to their promises.
On AO3
Change the title of ten (or more!) of your most recent or most popular fanworks to include ‘End Racism in the OTW’ in the beginning, and provide a link to this post in your summary or first/top creator’s note
Post a new fanwork any time between May 17th to 31st with “End Racism in the OTW” either as the title or at the beginning of the title. The fanwork does not have to be long - it can be a 100-word fic, a quick sketch, a podfic of a ficlet, a 20-second vid/edit, a short piece of meta, etc. In the summary or first/top creator’s note, provide a link to this post
If updating any WIPs with a new chapter, add ‘End Racism in the OTW’ to the title and provide a link back to this post in your summary or first/top author’s note
Update your AO3 icon using the profile pic graphic in our Social Media Toolkit
Plan to maintain these changes until May 31, 2023, or longer if you wish
Send a message to the OTW asking for an update on their 2020 commitments!
For Readers: leave encouraging comments on fanworks with the "End Racism in the OTW" title to show your support of this initiative.
On tumblr
Reblog this Call to Action with the tag #End OTW Racism
Update your profile pics and banners using the graphics in our Social Media Toolkit
Follow this account for updates and signal boost our posts
On Twitter
Follow @/EndOTWRacism (remove the backslash) and signal boost our pinned tweet
Update your profile pics and banners using our graphics, and change your display name to include #EndOTWRacism
Use sample tweets and graphics from our Social Media Toolkit to tweet about your fanworks, and use the hashtag #EndOTWRacism
Help us make this a long-term campaign - sign up to help with other anti-racism projects and future actions!
What Do We Want?
Since their June 2020 statement, OTW has been working on updating their Terms of Service (TOS) to address racist and bigoted harassment, but with little transparency and only the vaguest of updates. It has been three years since their commitment to this update - we want to see the results of their work implemented in the next 6-12 months. Their TOS updates and complementary policies should include:
Harassment policies that can be regularly updated to address both on-site harassment and off-site coordinated harassment of AO3 users, with updated protocols for the Policy & Abuse Team to ensure consistent and informed resolutions of abuse claims
A content policy on abusive (extremely racist and extremely bigoted) content; by abusive, we are talking about fanworks that are intentionally used to spread hate and harassment, not those that accidentally invoke racist or other bigoted stereotypes
These points are not particularly new and are not our own innovation; please refer to Stitch's article written over two years ago, asking for several of these very things.
OTW has also already committed to various process-based actions for longer-term works towards centering antiracism, including hiring a Diversity Consultant. The last update that OTW published said that the consultant would be hired within the next five years (after already having had three years to work on it since their original commitment). That is not soon enough. We want to see the following process-based actions implemented:
Hiring a Diversity Consultant within the next 3-6 months
Committing to a policy of transparency on this topic, with quarterly updates on the progress of these projects including challenges and their plan for overcoming those challenges. These quarterly updates should be published on OTW News page and newsletters, not solely discussed in Board meetings
Why Are We Doing This?
16 years ago, Astolat famously published her manifesto calling for a fandom Archive of One’s Own. In that time, AO3 has grown to be a central pillar of fandom, likely far outstripping its founders’ original vision. It is more than just an archive now; it is a central hub of the modern fannish experience. AO3 and the OTW must continue to grow and evolve with fandom over time to remain a healthy and functioning pillar of fandom. To that end, there are several areas in which the organization, as it admits itself, is lacking.
In June 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the uprising of the Black Lives Matter Movement, The OTW published a “This Week in Fandom” referencing the works of Dr. Rukmini Pande and Stitch, among others in which they discussed ‘making change for a better society’ through ‘conversations about race and racism’. In response, Dr. Pande and Stitch submitted a letter to the OTW calling for a more formal public statement than an offhand reference in a News Roundup that only served to call for thoughts and discussion without any indication the organization intended to do anything, policy wise, to address the issues being raised.
Eventually, the organization did remove the references to the works of Dr. Pande and Stitch and then made an official statement on the issue of racism within the organization and AO3. In it, they identified several things they would be prioritizing to combat harassment and benefit users. Some of those have been implemented (notably those that were already under development). However as of this writing, little else has been done especially in regards to:
Improving admin tools for the Policy & Abuse team
Reassessing the current mandatory archive warnings with the possibility of implementing others
And, most importantly, reviewing the Terms of Service (TOS) to allow the Policy & Abuse team to address harassment that is currently not covered by the existing TOS
By their own admission, the current tools and policies of the OTW are not sufficient to deal with issues of harassment and racism.
Several people who were involved in the founding of the OTW, including previous OTW Board members and staff on the original OTW Content Policy Committee, acknowledge that the founding of the OTW in 2008 and early board iterations failed us as a fandom by not doing enough, and by not even considering the way racism is perpetuated in fannish spaces, despite a long history of racism in fandom.
It has been nearly three years since the original commitment by the organization with little visible, measurable progress on these three crucial issues and a complete lack of transparency on where they are in regards to even beginning to deal with these issues. In fact, in Q&As, it was heavily implied by a member of the board that those calling for OTW to deal with issues of racism (which OTW had already acknowledged as a problem!) were not really fans but outside agitators.
This has cast significant doubt on the organization's sincerity and commitment to their stated goals, and on their position as leaders of a central fan tent-pole. Fans of color are not outsiders. They are right here, members of our community, and they are being harassed and targeted and driven out while space and platforms are being given to racists.
We, as fans of color and our allies, find the current state of fandom and current actions (and lack thereof) unacceptable. Fandom is our space, all of ours. We, as a fandom, have a right to a racism-free space and have a duty to our fellow fans to create that space. Unlike so much of the world, this is a space we can control and make better. It is a space we must make better. To read even more about this movement, visit our FAQs.
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Yeah, no, heads up, we've got a Republican Christian Karen type, Audrey Richards, running for the AO3/OTW board. I love how the US has devolved to the point where we risk Christofascists in our fucking GAY FANFICTION WEBSITES. I think a Republican party candidate whose main platform is literally "think of the children" is the absolute antithesis of everything AO3 stands for, but that's just me.
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strangerinaholyplace · 4 months
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If you haven't heard, otw (in other words ao3) have forced a volunteer to resign because they had "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" as their status on messaging platfrom slack, which otw use for communications.
They were denying that Israel is an apartheid settler state or that the genocide in Gaza is even happening.
This is unforgivable in my opinion, and I have sent a message to otw through their official contact form here, and I suggest you do the same. Below you'll see my message as well, in case you want to copy and paste, or just use it as a template of sorts.
I urge you also not to donate to otw anymore, unless the zionist volunteers and members of otw are removed from their positions and banned from otw.
"I am disgusted and enraged about the treatment of otw volunteer bjorn due to their pro-Palestine message status on slack, and even more so about the fact that zionists are allowed to run free amongst otw/ao3 volunteers, claiming that what Israel is doing in Gaza is not genocide, and claiming that Israel is not an apartheid settler state. As a person who has donated to the otw many times i wish I could revoke my money. But also as a donor I as well as many others demand the otw to resign fully, ban all zionist volunteers, have a written apology to bjorn and all users repudiating zionist actions in Gaza, donate to the Red Crescent to support Palestine, and reinstate bjorn as volunteer. If this is not done I as well as many others will no longer post on ao3, use it, volunteer for it and definitely not donate any more. You should be ashamed of yourselves. "
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. 🇵🇸
PS. If anyone decides to start talking about ao3 tagging systems or content allowed on the platform on this post you are getting blocked immediately. I dont care about your views on this, and you should think for 2 seconds before putting silly fanfic discourse on the same level as the murder of thousands.
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copperbadge · 11 months
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Hey Sam! Since it's currently AO3 donation time, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on it? I'm asking because you've written RPF and it's one of many "anti-AO3/anti-AO3 donations" people's favourite things to bring up when they're complaining about AO3 getting so many donations that it continuously obtains an excess of its donation goal whenever donation time rolls around? (Wow, how many times can I say "donation" in an ask?) Sorry if this question bothers you! I don't mean to offend or annoy.
Hey anon! Sorry it took a while to get to this, I don't even know if the drive is still going on, but the question came in while I was traveling and I didn't really have the time for stuff that wasn't travel-related. In any case, let's dig in! (I am not offended, no worries.)
So really there are two issues here and as much as some people who are critical of AO3 want to conflate them, they are different. While some criticism of AO3 may be valid, rhetoric against AO3 tends to misinterpret both in separate ways.
First there's the issue of what AO3 hosts -- RPF, yes, but more broadly, varied content that some people find distasteful or think should be illegal, which is a misunderstanding of the purpose of the archive and more broadly a dangerous attitude towards the concept of freedom of expression.
Second, there's the issue of AO3 generally outpacing its fundraising goals while not allowing monetization, which is a misunderstanding of the legal status of AO3 and to an extent a misunderstanding of philanthropy as a whole.
The longer I watch debates about content go on, the more I come to the conclusion that I was fortunate to have a teacher who really wanted to instill in us an understanding of free speech not as a policy but as an ongoing dialogue. It's not only that freedom of expression "protects you from the government, not the Justin" as the meme goes, but also that freedom of expression is not a static thing. It's an ongoing process of identifying what we find harmful in society and what we want to do about it.
Should the freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater be restricted? Should the freedom to yell slurs at drag performers? Should the freedom to teach prepubescent kids about gender, sexuality, and/or safe sex? Should the freedom to wear a leather puppy hood at Pride? Who gets to say, and why?
I was nine when my teacher did a unit on freedom of speech and the intersection of "harm prevention" and "censorship", which is (and should be) a discussion, not a set of ironclad rules. This ambiguity has thus been with me for over thirty years, and I'm comfortable with the ambiguity, with the process; I'm not sure a lot of people critical of AO3's content truly are. Perhaps some can't be, especially those affected by hate speech, but RPF is not hate speech. It's just fiction. Or is fiction "just fiction"? This is a question society as a whole is grappling with, although fandom seems to be a little out ahead of society in terms of how explicitly we discuss it.
The idea that prose can incite violence or cause harm is both valid to examine (witness the rise of fascism on the radio in the 20s, on Facebook and Twitter in the past ten years; they're very similar processes) and a very slippery slope. Because again: who decides what harm is, and what causes it, and what we do about it? Our values align us with certain beliefs, but those are only our values, not universal truths. So AO3 is part of the ongoing question of harm and benefit both to society and individuals.
AO3 itself, however, has a fairly defined policy that it is not meant to police content; it is an archive, not a bookstore or a school board. AO3 refines its TOS and policies as necessary, but the goal is always open access and as much freedom of expression as possible, and if that's uncomfortable for some people then that's a discussion we have to have; ignoring it won't make it go away. But it has to be a discussion, it can't be a unilateral change to the archive's TOS or a series of snaps and clapbacks, and I don't see a lot of people ready to move beyond flinging insults. Perhaps because they were taught a much more binary view of freedom of expression than I was.
So, self-evidently, I support AO3 and I don't have a problem with RPF. Whether other people do is something we're going to have to get to grips with, and that's likely to be a process that is still going on when most of us are dust. I'd rather have a century of ambiguity than a wrong answer tomorrow, anyway.
But whether AO3 hosts RPF is truly a separate issue from its donation drives, because it's a criticism some people level at the site which exists whether it's fundraising or not. So people can criticize AO3's open policy and they can give it as a reason not to support the site, but it's just one aspect of the archive and the fundraising as a whole should be examined separately.
I think AO3's fundraisers are deeply misunderstood (sometimes on purpose) because even people who are anticapitalist get a little crazy when money gets involved, and this is, to fandom, a lot of money -- a few hundred thousand, reliably, every fundraiser. To me, a fundraiser that pulls in three hundred grand is almost quaint; my current nonprofit pulls in better than ten million a year and my previous employer had an endowment of several billion dollars. At my old job I didn't even bother researching people who couldn't give us a hundred grand.
On the other hand, AO3 is an extreme and astounding outlier in the nonprofit world, because basically it's the only one of its kind to work the way it does. It is entirely volunteer-run on the operational side (ie: tag wranglers, coders, lawyers, etc) and has no fundraising staff (gift officers, researchers, outreach officers) as far as I'm aware. To pull in three hundred grand from individual one-time donations, without any paid staff and without even a volunteer fundraising officer? That's insane. That doesn't happen. Except at AO3.
What people misunderstand, however, is the basic status of a nonprofit, which is a legal status, not simply a social one. (I'm adding in some corrections here since it gets complicated and the terminology can be important!) The Organization for Transformative Works, the parent of AO3, is a nonprofit, which indicates how it was incorporated as an organization; additionally it is registered federally as tax-exempt, which carries certain perks, like not paying sales tax, and certain duties, like making their financials transparent to a certain extent. (Religious nonprofits are exempt from the transparency requirement.) If you're interested in more about nonprofits and tax-exempt status a reader dropped a great article here.
Nonprofits, unlike for-profit companies, cannot pay a share of their income to stakeholders. Nonprofits don't have financial stakeholders, only donors. They can have employees and pay them a salary -- that's me, for example -- but if a nonprofit pulls in $10M in donations, my salary is paid from that, I don't get a percentage and nobody else does either. That's what it means to be a nonprofit -- the money above operational costs goes back into the organization. The donations we (and AO3) receive must be plowed under and used for outreach, server maintenance, further fundraising, services expansion, et cetera. You can see this in the 990 forms on Guidestar or ProPublica, or in their more accessible breakdowns on Charity Navigator. Nonprofits that do not put the majority of their income towards service provision tend to get audited and lose their nonprofit status. So nobody's getting paid from all that money, and the overage that isn't spent goes into what is basically a savings account in the name of the nonprofit. (I'm vastly simplifying but that's the gist.) Using that money for personal purposes is illegal. It's called "private inurement" and there's a good article here about it. The money belongs to the OTW as a concept, not to anyone in or of the OTW.
So the biggest misunderstanding that I see in people who are mad at AO3 fundraisers is that "they" are getting all this money (who "they" are is never clearly stated but I'm pretty sure people think @astolat has a special wifi router that runs on burning hundred dollar bills) while "we" can't monetize our fanfic. But "they" get nothing -- nobody even earns a salary from AO3 -- and you can easily prove that by looking at the 990 forms they file with the government, which are required to be made public. You can see the most recently available 990, from 2020, here at Guidestar. Page seven will show you the "highest compensated" employees, all of whom are earning zero dollars or nonmonetary perks (that's the three columns on the right).
Either AO3 is entirely volunteer-run or someone's Doing A Real Fraud. The money the OTW spends is documented (that's page 10 and 11 primarily) and while they may pay for, say, the travel and lodging expenses of a lawyer going to DC to defend a freedom-of-expression case, they don't pay the lawyer for their time, or give them a cut of the income.
Despite what you've read, the reason "we" can't monetize our fanfics on AO3 has nothing to do with the site being the product of volunteer handiwork or AO3 having it in their terms of service or it being considered gauche by some to do so; it's because
IT'S ILLEGAL.
I cannot say this loudly enough: It is against the law for a nonprofit to be used by its staff, volunteers, or beneficiaries to earn direct profit from the services provided by the nonprofit.
You can be paid to work at one, but you cannot side-hustle by selling your handmade friendship bracelets for personal gain on the nonprofit's website. If the nonprofit knowingly allows monetization of its services, it can lose nonprofit status, be fined, be hit with back taxes, and a lot of other unpleasant bullshit can go down, including prosecution of those involved for fraud. If you put a ko-fi link on your fanfic, you are breaking the law, and if AO3 allows it, they are too.
Okay, that was a sidebar, but in some ways not, because it gets to the heart of the real complaints about AO3 fundraising, which is that people in fandom are sick or unhoused or in some form of need and other people in fandom are giving to AO3, a fan site that is financially stable, instead of giving to peoples' gofundmes or dropping money in their Ko-Fi or Paypal. And while it is a legitimate grievance that there are people who are in such desperate need while we live in an era of unprecedented abundance, that's not AO3's fault. AO3 doesn't solicit actively, there's no unasked-for mailings or calls from a gift officer. They just put a banner up on their website, and people give. (Again, this is incredibly outlier behavior in the nonprofit world, I'd do a case study on it but the conclusion would just be "shit's real, yo.") You might as well be mad that people give to their local food bank instead of someone's ko-fi.
You cannot lay at AO3's feet the fact that people want to give to AO3 instead of to your fundraiser. That's a choice individuals have made, and while you can engage with them in terms of why they made the philanthropic choices they did, to blame an organization they supported rather than the person who made the choice to give is not only incorrect but futile, and unlikely to win anyone over to supporting you. We know from research that guilt is not a tremendous motivator of philanthropy.
It is also not necessarily a binary choice; just because AO3 gets a hundred grand in $5 donations doesn't mean most of the people giving don't also give $5 elsewhere. I support the OTW on occasion, and I also fundraise for UNICEF and the Chicago Parks Foundation and BAGLY and others, in addition to giving monthly to several nonprofits that I have longterm relationships with -- my alma mater, the animal rescue where I got the Cryptids, my shul. And I give, occasionally and anonymously, to fundraisers that pass through Radio Free Monday, which are mainly individuals in need, because I was once in need and now I pay it forward. These are the choices I have made. Nobody twisted my arm. I respond poorly to someone making the attempt to do so by attacking places I've given.
I think the upshot is, after all of this that I've written, that we cannot begin to come to grips with questions of institutional inequality in philanthropy, or freedom of expression and censorship, until people actually understand what's going on, and too few do. So all I can do is try and explain, and hopefully create a forum for people to learn and grow when it comes to charitable giving.
Archive Of Our Own and the Organization for Transformative Works are products of our community and as that community changes, we will necessarily continue to re-evaluate what aspects of it mean and how AO3/OTW express the community sentiment. I hope that the ongoing discussion of support for AO3 also leads to people learning more about their philanthropic options. But criticizing AO3 for fundraising by attacking it for fulfilling one of its stated purposes is silly, and attempting to guilt people into giving in the ways one thinks they should give rather than how they do give is just going to make one extremely unlikable.
As members of this community, we have to be a part of the push and pull, but it's difficult to do that competently in ignorance. So, I do my best to be knowledgeable and to educate my readers, and I hope others will do the same.
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250318 · 14 hours
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© 마지 | do not edit and/or crop logo
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darkheart-darlings · 10 months
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"but they might have broken the law!!"
And?
Are you forgetting the "do crime" in "be gay, do crime" again today?
👉 "failed to fully comply with the law" does not mean "did something harmful or evil".
👉 "fully complied with the law" does not mean "acted with compassion, justice, or mercy."
Don't fall back on legalism when you're evaluating the goodness or badness of a person, idea, or organization.
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moki-dokie · 2 years
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AO3 donators, it’s voting time. And one particular candidate not only doesn’t understand AO3 on a fundamental level (somehow, despite being a tenured user and an unfortunate volunteer) but actively wants to push censorship. They are the exact kind of person we don’t need involved with OTW or AO3 for that matter. The same kind of person we have to actively fight against like, all the time. I frankly don’t know how the hell they even became a volunteer but, anyway. Got vote for people who won’t actively work to destroy it.
Tons more info in the reddit thread here https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/comments/wlxk3m/otw_board_election/
There’s already several posts around here on tumblr of people with the same worries, but not enough imo.
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Guys, do NOT vote for this canidate if you value Ao3 being anti-censorship and a friendly space for LGBTQ+ creators.
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We don't want another wattpad. Or fanfiction.net. Ao3 is great because it does not censor creations or allow harassment of creators.
I'm sure you can imagine how someone like this gaining a position of power in a queer-friendly space is going to go.
Tell me, what is the number one false flag that republicans hide behind when pushing agendas that are designed to target and oppress LGBTQ+ people and minorities? tHiNk oF tHe cHiLdReN!
The above is their policy lead, which screams pro-censorship and anti-kink.
She answered the OTW Q and A's like any republican who is hiding pro-censorship and evangelical agendas would.
And how many republican candidates have you seen do a complete 180 and go back on their promises to NOT target and oppress minorities and the most vulnerable groups?
Pretty much fucking ALL of them.
Guys, we cannot let her get into our safe space. The archive is one of the last frontiers we have where we are not monetized by corporations, and we can be safely queer and create without judgement.
If Audrey gets in, we can kiss it all goodbye.
Be damn sure to vote this year.
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transformativeworks · 3 months
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AO3 Is Always Free to Use
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AO3 does not have an official app, and is unable to assist users using unofficial ones. AO3 is always free to use on your mobile browser and charging for use violates our Terms of Service. Read more at https://otw.news/a38538
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fiercynn · 9 months
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yo so here are some things the ddos attack on ao3 should NOT provoke you to do:
decide that this is an excuse to be racist and islamophobic about who you think the attackers are (which is likely a front anyway)
assume that the people who care about fighting racism and the mistreatment of volunteers by otw are in alignment with this (if we were, why would we be doing all this work to try and make otw better)
use this as a reason to defend any lack of change on ao3 because it's too "at-risk" (fixing otw's dysfunction could only better serve the organization in emergencies)
think that the only way you can support the volunteers who are working hard to fix this is by donating to otw (the volunteers aren't going to be paid, and otw has $2.5 million in surplus that not only isn't being used for anything but has only earned $90 in interest in a year because it's not even invested well, it's just sitting there)
what it should provoke you to do – push the otw board to make changes, including:
addressing the racism that already makes ao3 and otw a hostile space for many fans of color, including volunteers
paying for workers and services with that budget surplus to help keep volunteers from burning out constantly
hold the board and the legal committee accountable to the volunteers who have already been mistreated and put at risk by their actions
probably more things! these are just off the top of my head idk!
tbh there's so much dysfunction in this org that it's really hard to know where to start. but the knee-jerk racist and "it's the antis out to bring ao3 down!!!" reactions are ridiculous, come on
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