Category: Uncategorized

athenagray:

decepticonsensual:

cleo4u2:

THIS. I saw a post the other day that literally said if you do it to a fictional character, you’ll do it in real life.

No. Just NO.

I’m so glad someone put it into words.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a legend, and he’s absolutely right.

And I really feel like there are parts of fandom that don’t get or don’t believe this, and I think that’s troubling.  I’ve seen arguments that people shouldn’t have dark fantasies, or that bad impulses in themselves make a bad person.  I’ve seen so much shaming over thoughts.

And if you get to a point where it’s bad to have dark thoughts and it’s bad to wonder what something would be like and it’s bad to put yourself in the shoes of anyone who isn’t “pure”, if fiction is no longer a realm where you can confront and explore, but an ongoing test of moral purity… well, maybe not everyone’s brain works like mine, but I feel like that takes away something incredibly important to being human.

Purity culture is gonna kill art if y’all let it.

athenagray:

decepticonsensual:

cleo4u2:

THIS. I saw a post the other day that literally said if you do it to a fictional character, you’ll do it in real life.

No. Just NO.

I’m so glad someone put it into words.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a legend, and he’s absolutely right.

And I really feel like there are parts of fandom that don’t get or don’t believe this, and I think that’s troubling.  I’ve seen arguments that people shouldn’t have dark fantasies, or that bad impulses in themselves make a bad person.  I’ve seen so much shaming over thoughts.

And if you get to a point where it’s bad to have dark thoughts and it’s bad to wonder what something would be like and it’s bad to put yourself in the shoes of anyone who isn’t “pure”, if fiction is no longer a realm where you can confront and explore, but an ongoing test of moral purity… well, maybe not everyone’s brain works like mine, but I feel like that takes away something incredibly important to being human.

Purity culture is gonna kill art if y’all let it.

A History of Fandom Purges

bokunoherokomikuko:

greywash:

elder-lemon:

cameoamalthea:

tsuki-chibi:

whitmerule:

liz-squids:

pearlmaser:

elfwreck:

olderthannetfic:

unclutterme:

olderthannetfic:

I’m curious how many related deletions we can come up with.

  • 2002 – FFN bans porn
  • 2002 – FFN bans RPF
  • 2004 – FFN bans script format
  • 2005 – FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic
  • 2007 – Strikethrough, Boldthrough
  • 2009 – GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
  • 2010 – FFN forums deleted
  • 2011 – Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
  • 2012 – major FFN crackdown on porn
  • 2014 – Quizilla shuts down
  • 2015 – Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank

Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.

… they deleted Fandom Wank???

Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.

  • 2007 – Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
  • 2009 – Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
  • 2012 – Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost

I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.

I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.

Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.

Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down. 

Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.

Yahoo owns Tumblr.

1356: 50% of monks.

People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.

AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.

2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost

Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005

Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.

A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.

^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.

these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view

You missed some:

Fandom purges are almost never just about one thing. Fannish content both relies on fair use exemption and is frequently sexually explicit, so it gets attacked on both copyright/legal grounds (thank you, OTW Legal Team, for protecting us!) and TOS/hoster rules about porn/specific fictional content (thank you, AO3, for being an open archive!). On top of that, there is a nontrivial history of fannish content being lumped in with content that criticizes authoritarian governments, and targeted by sweeps by those governments and their censorship agencies when they purchase or put pressure on the commercial entities that own the servers (thank you, OTW, for being a nonprofit and owning and defending our servers!).

If you care about fannish content, you have to fight for fanfic on all three fronts. And if we hop off of HTTP and onto one of the decentralized protocols like dat et cetera, like people are starting to talk about in response to Article 13 and the Tumblr purges, we will inevitably be targeted along with a) people pirating media, b) porn distributors, and c) anti-government protestors, because those groups are also going use those protocols, too. I’m not saying, don’t think about migrating. I’m saying: there is a systemic problem within fandom, regarding the fact that we routinely get hit on three fronts: legal rights to the material we transform, sexual content, and governmental disapproval. Protecting fandom means fighting for fandom on all three fronts and putting thought and effort into how to make an archive robust against all three prongs of the attack.

This is what’s made AO3/the OTW so special: we have lawyers protecting our right to make what we make, we have a TOS that protects our right to make things that are sexually explicit, and because the OTW is a nonprofit, it’s more robust to the pressure that can be brought to bear upon commercial entities by both corporate and governmental powers (though, I note, especially when it comes to governments, it’s not immune, and we have to keep actively protecting it, and we have to protect other fans). If you are in fandom but you think that copyright upload filters are fine, because, well, you don’t want to put fanvids on YouTube, you are part of the problem. Your community is under attack. The powers that be have always come for us by attacking us in pieces, and we have always only ever successfully fought back by banding together.

REMEMBER YOUR HISTORY

A History of Fandom Purges

bokunoherokomikuko:

greywash:

elder-lemon:

cameoamalthea:

tsuki-chibi:

whitmerule:

liz-squids:

pearlmaser:

elfwreck:

olderthannetfic:

unclutterme:

olderthannetfic:

I’m curious how many related deletions we can come up with.

  • 2002 – FFN bans porn
  • 2002 – FFN bans RPF
  • 2004 – FFN bans script format
  • 2005 – FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic
  • 2007 – Strikethrough, Boldthrough
  • 2009 – GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
  • 2010 – FFN forums deleted
  • 2011 – Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
  • 2012 – major FFN crackdown on porn
  • 2014 – Quizilla shuts down
  • 2015 – Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank

Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.

… they deleted Fandom Wank???

Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.

  • 2007 – Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
  • 2009 – Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
  • 2012 – Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost

I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.

I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.

Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.

Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down. 

Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.

Yahoo owns Tumblr.

1356: 50% of monks.

People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.

AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.

2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost

Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005

Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.

A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.

^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.

these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view

You missed some:

Fandom purges are almost never just about one thing. Fannish content both relies on fair use exemption and is frequently sexually explicit, so it gets attacked on both copyright/legal grounds (thank you, OTW Legal Team, for protecting us!) and TOS/hoster rules about porn/specific fictional content (thank you, AO3, for being an open archive!). On top of that, there is a nontrivial history of fannish content being lumped in with content that criticizes authoritarian governments, and targeted by sweeps by those governments and their censorship agencies when they purchase or put pressure on the commercial entities that own the servers (thank you, OTW, for being a nonprofit and owning and defending our servers!).

If you care about fannish content, you have to fight for fanfic on all three fronts. And if we hop off of HTTP and onto one of the decentralized protocols like dat et cetera, like people are starting to talk about in response to Article 13 and the Tumblr purges, we will inevitably be targeted along with a) people pirating media, b) porn distributors, and c) anti-government protestors, because those groups are also going use those protocols, too. I’m not saying, don’t think about migrating. I’m saying: there is a systemic problem within fandom, regarding the fact that we routinely get hit on three fronts: legal rights to the material we transform, sexual content, and governmental disapproval. Protecting fandom means fighting for fandom on all three fronts and putting thought and effort into how to make an archive robust against all three prongs of the attack.

This is what’s made AO3/the OTW so special: we have lawyers protecting our right to make what we make, we have a TOS that protects our right to make things that are sexually explicit, and because the OTW is a nonprofit, it’s more robust to the pressure that can be brought to bear upon commercial entities by both corporate and governmental powers (though, I note, especially when it comes to governments, it’s not immune, and we have to keep actively protecting it, and we have to protect other fans). If you are in fandom but you think that copyright upload filters are fine, because, well, you don’t want to put fanvids on YouTube, you are part of the problem. Your community is under attack. The powers that be have always come for us by attacking us in pieces, and we have always only ever successfully fought back by banding together.

REMEMBER YOUR HISTORY

winteriron-trash:

WinterIron Discord Server?

So in light of the great Tumblr purge, I’ve been wondering, would the fandom be interested in a WinterIron discord server?

I know one exists already, but as far as I know, it’s 18+, I’d want this one to be for anyone, hosted by yours truly.

It’d have to have some thought going into it but I already have ideas for different channels and all that shit. I would probably need a few people to help me mod, but I think I could probably pull it off.

Obviously there’s no point if people don’t want this, but I think it’d be a good place to have discuss of WinterIron and sharing of our own works without worry of getting our asses purged. I’ve been a mod to two previous Discord servers so I know the gist of it. The rules would be pretty lax, basically just don’t kill each other.

So please spread the word and let me know if you guys would be interested!

winteriron-trash:

WinterIron Discord Server?

So in light of the great Tumblr purge, I’ve been wondering, would the fandom be interested in a WinterIron discord server?

I know one exists already, but as far as I know, it’s 18+, I’d want this one to be for anyone, hosted by yours truly.

It’d have to have some thought going into it but I already have ideas for different channels and all that shit. I would probably need a few people to help me mod, but I think I could probably pull it off.

Obviously there’s no point if people don’t want this, but I think it’d be a good place to have discuss of WinterIron and sharing of our own works without worry of getting our asses purged. I’ve been a mod to two previous Discord servers so I know the gist of it. The rules would be pretty lax, basically just don’t kill each other.

So please spread the word and let me know if you guys would be interested!