ardwynna:

I am disgusted by the insistence of some younger fans that AO3 be made child safe and fit to be an electronic babysitter. AO3 was dreamed up and built out of the ashes of the ff.net purge, Strikethrough, Boldthrough, and any number of smaller scale attempts at silencing us, isolating us or making us create less than we can. It was built by adults for adults from the ground up. It’s entire purpose was to give fandom a hub nobody else could drive us from.

And now these young folk, some of them well-meaning but misguided, but too many of them just thrilling on the ‘power’ they think comes from their pseudoactivism, are demanding that we abandon what we made and why we made it, and turn it over to their control, in the fine tradition of the lawsuit-happy lazy parents and homophobic fundamentalists before them.

They could go to ff.net, there’s still plenty of traffic there and the work of content limitation is half done. They could revive something tame as they like on LJ. They could even learn to code and build their own damn site if they really cared to. But no, they’d rather have AO3. Because it’s the cool place. The place with all the views. With no thought to how long it would stay the cool place if all the adults moved on like they think we should. Who’s paying for the servers and tweaking code? Not them. Who’s making that crowd they want to be viewing their works? Not them.

The censorship and fake activism was bad enough but this attitude of theirs, that they’re entitled to what we built and what we made, entitled to change it for their purposes and profit while we get fuck all, but that we should still stick around and do the heavy labor behind it for them of course, that needs to be driven the hell out of these little neo-colonizers before they start trying it on a bigger scale. Had quite enough of that already, children. Stop.