What Sen said. It's a bit concerning to me that people are using in 2021 some of the discourse that was used back in the day by the HP fandom in order to purge the fandom of the content AND SHIPS some people didn't like... which ACTUALLY LEAD to the creation of ao3 + https://twitter.com/SenLinYuWrites/status/1384321964643389442

I'm not going to give people a crash course on fandom history because there's loads of people who did it better. But the big reality is that once you start censoring and policing content and fic authors there's no going back. Who decides what goes and what doesn't? & with what+

right? There was a time when gatekeeping in the HP fandom got so bad and intense that people couldn't even write certain pairings.
When the Strikethrough of 2007 happened and a lot of content, including but not limited to fics was deleted over night without warning on LJ +

(& other platforms), at first under the guise of "this content is problematic," it soon got turned into a tool used to censor all type of content they simply didn't like. Because once you start down that route people will always find more content to be outraged over.
If you+

think anti shipper discourse is bad now, you're so so wrong.
Also this discussion about ao3 allowing and thus "encouraging" whatever is deemed "problematic" content comes back every damn year around the time ao3 does its fundraising. It's as tiring and baseless every damn year.+

Because people STILL don't get the purpose of ao3, which is "to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms" [side note but platforms profiting off fics without a dime to the authors themselves was+

the other big reason why ao3 was made]. It's basically a library. Just because a "darkfic" exists
doesn't mean you have to read it or that it shouldn't exist. Doesn't mean the author condones the actions of their characters. It is fiction.
Sorry yall but this gives off big+

Strikethrough vibes. Which funnny enough, out of all the impacted fandoms HP was one of the most affected by it back then. You want to know who got the most impacted by this mass policing of content? Survivor communities. Because people used LJ as a way to find support and those+

groups had nothing to do with fanfiction, but their content was deemed problematic so it was banned. Do you even know how many works are on ao3 now? It is humanly impossible to comb through it and decide what goes and doesn't.

And any tool given to the community to report the "bad" works will be weaponised by those who THINK they are in the right. Mob mentality and mass reports weren't invented in 2021 and neither was this type of fandom wank.
What CAN you do? If you're an author TAG YOUR WORK+

use extra tw in the author note at the top of the work and name the exact thing that might be triggering. See the ao3 FAQ for how to use tags and ratings to brush up on those.
If you're a reader, use the aforementioned tags and FILTER the works. You are responsible of the+

content you consume. If you were properly warned and you know that content is harmful for you, what are you doing searching & reading those kind of works?
Lastly the EXCLUDE filters are just the best tool ao3 has ever implemented. Learn how to use ao3 properly.
Thank you.