I'm of the age where the World Wide Web started, exploded, and became this thing that everyone used. That makes me too young for anything other than the tail end of the era of "if you want your transformative content, you'd better go to convention and hope that someone's selling zines." (Assuming you could have found them in the first place - there's a long and indelible history of the greater fannish community at large thinking the ficcers were weird and unwanted, no matter how much they might be trying to erase it now, having finally noticed they have to either make nice or disappear into obscurity. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
elf suggests expanding the Hugos so that they come back to the proportion they initially were at, where someone might be able to cover, if not everything, enough of a swath of it so that they can reasonably have informed opinions about it.) And I didn't get into transformative fandom until after the era of "if you want your transformative content, you need to find someone, get some trust with them, and have them introduce you to the mailing list or the group where they post." My touchstone event of "I'm far enough into fandom to understand what kind of forces are arrayed against the shippers" is Strikethrough. (Which I still didn't completely understand, because I lacked the history, but that I could go "wait, no, that's entirely wrong" by being able to make good inferences from other spaces I did know about and their operating principles about consent.) So when AO3 (and Dreamwidth) came into existence as things that take explicit stands against those forces arrayed, I understood, but I didn't understand, if that makes sense. It would still take some time and learning before I got a clearer picture of everything. (You've all been wonderful, instructing the lurker, thank you.)
So when Tumblr went after adult content, and when FF.net went after adult content, this time, it made sense as to what they were doing and how very wrong they were. A platform that wants to call itself the whole of Fandom, which used to be Wikia, is gathering data to help advertisers and creators more effectively get fans to part with their money and to do the work of promoting their properties to others. (Which isn't odd, per se, given that the content that most people get involved with in canons and otherwise is really just to keep you there long enough to serve you ads, if it's anything that's been distributed for free. And even some of the things that are behind subscription paywalls.) And, thankfully, many of the people who were particularly lawyerly about seeing the presence of fanfic have since passed on. (Several others have either been found out to be terrible people or had their fandom set very firmly on the back burner until the litigious folk weren't around to sue.)
The lesson that always seems to come from places where fans gather is that being on someone else's platform only lasts as long as you're making them enough money for them to want to keep you, whether through subscription dollars or through ads and data harvesting. If you're not pofitable enough to the advertisers, or there isn't enough subscription money to keep the lights on, then you're going to get the hook. Which means that Yahoo!'s decision to unceremoniously delete the archives of all their Groups come December, means that very suddenly, vast troves of knowledge and fandom history are going to be summarily dismissed because they are no longer profitable enough to be housed there.
This is another reason why the OTW exists, and has specific ideas about archiving and preserving works, regardless of their place of origin. Now, of course, there are a lot more tools and things to help make sure that things do not get lost quite so easily.morgandawn offers instructions on grabbing the content before it's gone, as well as links to coordination efforts to see just how much can be grabbed (and needs to be grabbed) before it's all gone, and siderea links to MetaFilter and a different tool that can be used to archive. tozka has links to Fanlore and ArchiveTeam to get involved in archiving your groups in a preservable way. And,, because we live in a post-AO3 existence, The Organization for Transformative Works is offering space and assistance to admins who want to transfer or archive their groups on OTW space. Here's the Open Doors announcement on the matter.
ruuger points out that there is also a right to be forgotten as well as a scramble to preserve, and for some people, they might very well want the person who was to go into the aether in favor of the person who is. That will raise some interesting questions about "can we preserve the work without using identifying things for the person?" For some small things, that might be all right, but for big projects, if there are people who are instrumental to the creation of the thing, or were involved in a big episode, how much of that gets preserved, even over objections about using a person, because they're critical to the story (or they're the person that started the drama that caused everything to take off in a new and interesting direction)? There's probably something to be learned from journalists about how to balance needing names and telling an accurate story.
The disappearance of information and fic off the Internet is something that fans are regrettably very familiar with, even if there's no advertising dollars driving it, with so many small archives and lists vanishing when their mods stopped or deleted the lists. The argument of "if we don't own it ourselves, it's not safe" is seeing resurgence in the discussions about the Fediverse and whether that's going to be the right set of protocols for fandom to adopt. Because most people do not have the technical know-how nor willingness to invest in the energy (and money, once those nodes get large enough) of running their own node of federation, and that means they become vulnerable to the whims of the administrators where they do stop in. Weirdly enough, when you know a place is going to cater to the advertisers, their behavior becomes more predictable. It's still not the same as owning the servers yourself, but like in the past, where you knew which authors were going to be aggressive if they saw fic, you can generally suss out where the lines are likely to be when it comes to posting content on another entity's space, if you know they're going to be advertiser-driven. The wild cards often come in the form of the factions that are also on that same space who are going to look at your content and decide it is the objective worst and then engage in a concentrated harassment campaign against you ad your fellows to drive you off the platform or get the content host to delete your stuff. And thus, the circle closes itself again, and the snake eats its own tail, because now we have a swath of fandom that's being hostile to the presence of transformative works, being loud about it, and insisting that those icky people not get their cooties all over their pure and pristine fandom.
At least now there's AO3 and different ways of getting the content out and keeping it somewhere that will not delete it or bow to the pressure of the advertisers, so there are some safe(r) havens where things can go and be read by appreciative fans. But Yahoo! Groups is still closing, and all the information contained within will need to be archived somewhere else and preserved. This is a problem that's already at a massive scale, and the problem is only going to accelerate as time goes on and bigger archives and lists need to be migrated before their closures. Long live AO3, and hopefully there are already plans in place in case it should have to pull up stakes and have its own archive imported somewhere else.
elf suggests expanding the Hugos so that they come back to the proportion they initially were at, where someone might be able to cover, if not everything, enough of a swath of it so that they can reasonably have informed opinions about it.) And I didn't get into transformative fandom until after the era of "if you want your transformative content, you need to find someone, get some trust with them, and have them introduce you to the mailing list or the group where they post." My touchstone event of "I'm far enough into fandom to understand what kind of forces are arrayed against the shippers" is Strikethrough. (Which I still didn't completely understand, because I lacked the history, but that I could go "wait, no, that's entirely wrong" by being able to make good inferences from other spaces I did know about and their operating principles about consent.) So when AO3 (and Dreamwidth) came into existence as things that take explicit stands against those forces arrayed, I understood, but I didn't understand, if that makes sense. It would still take some time and learning before I got a clearer picture of everything. (You've all been wonderful, instructing the lurker, thank you.)So when Tumblr went after adult content, and when FF.net went after adult content, this time, it made sense as to what they were doing and how very wrong they were. A platform that wants to call itself the whole of Fandom, which used to be Wikia, is gathering data to help advertisers and creators more effectively get fans to part with their money and to do the work of promoting their properties to others. (Which isn't odd, per se, given that the content that most people get involved with in canons and otherwise is really just to keep you there long enough to serve you ads, if it's anything that's been distributed for free. And even some of the things that are behind subscription paywalls.) And, thankfully, many of the people who were particularly lawyerly about seeing the presence of fanfic have since passed on. (Several others have either been found out to be terrible people or had their fandom set very firmly on the back burner until the litigious folk weren't around to sue.)
The lesson that always seems to come from places where fans gather is that being on someone else's platform only lasts as long as you're making them enough money for them to want to keep you, whether through subscription dollars or through ads and data harvesting. If you're not pofitable enough to the advertisers, or there isn't enough subscription money to keep the lights on, then you're going to get the hook. Which means that Yahoo!'s decision to unceremoniously delete the archives of all their Groups come December, means that very suddenly, vast troves of knowledge and fandom history are going to be summarily dismissed because they are no longer profitable enough to be housed there.
This is another reason why the OTW exists, and has specific ideas about archiving and preserving works, regardless of their place of origin. Now, of course, there are a lot more tools and things to help make sure that things do not get lost quite so easily.
morgandawn offers instructions on grabbing the content before it's gone, as well as links to coordination efforts to see just how much can be grabbed (and needs to be grabbed) before it's all gone, and siderea links to MetaFilter and a different tool that can be used to archive. tozka has links to Fanlore and ArchiveTeam to get involved in archiving your groups in a preservable way. And,, because we live in a post-AO3 existence, The Organization for Transformative Works is offering space and assistance to admins who want to transfer or archive their groups on OTW space. Here's the Open Doors announcement on the matter.ruuger points out that there is also a right to be forgotten as well as a scramble to preserve, and for some people, they might very well want the person who was to go into the aether in favor of the person who is. That will raise some interesting questions about "can we preserve the work without using identifying things for the person?" For some small things, that might be all right, but for big projects, if there are people who are instrumental to the creation of the thing, or were involved in a big episode, how much of that gets preserved, even over objections about using a person, because they're critical to the story (or they're the person that started the drama that caused everything to take off in a new and interesting direction)? There's probably something to be learned from journalists about how to balance needing names and telling an accurate story.The disappearance of information and fic off the Internet is something that fans are regrettably very familiar with, even if there's no advertising dollars driving it, with so many small archives and lists vanishing when their mods stopped or deleted the lists. The argument of "if we don't own it ourselves, it's not safe" is seeing resurgence in the discussions about the Fediverse and whether that's going to be the right set of protocols for fandom to adopt. Because most people do not have the technical know-how nor willingness to invest in the energy (and money, once those nodes get large enough) of running their own node of federation, and that means they become vulnerable to the whims of the administrators where they do stop in. Weirdly enough, when you know a place is going to cater to the advertisers, their behavior becomes more predictable. It's still not the same as owning the servers yourself, but like in the past, where you knew which authors were going to be aggressive if they saw fic, you can generally suss out where the lines are likely to be when it comes to posting content on another entity's space, if you know they're going to be advertiser-driven. The wild cards often come in the form of the factions that are also on that same space who are going to look at your content and decide it is the objective worst and then engage in a concentrated harassment campaign against you ad your fellows to drive you off the platform or get the content host to delete your stuff. And thus, the circle closes itself again, and the snake eats its own tail, because now we have a swath of fandom that's being hostile to the presence of transformative works, being loud about it, and insisting that those icky people not get their cooties all over their pure and pristine fandom.
At least now there's AO3 and different ways of getting the content out and keeping it somewhere that will not delete it or bow to the pressure of the advertisers, so there are some safe(r) havens where things can go and be read by appreciative fans. But Yahoo! Groups is still closing, and all the information contained within will need to be archived somewhere else and preserved. This is a problem that's already at a massive scale, and the problem is only going to accelerate as time goes on and bigger archives and lists need to be migrated before their closures. Long live AO3, and hopefully there are already plans in place in case it should have to pull up stakes and have its own archive imported somewhere else.
