I mean, there are literally hundreds of thousands of places where fandom nonfiction/meta/whatever is posted now. No one (that I know of) has ever been TOSsed because of fandom nonfiction. I've always understood the entire point of AO3 to be that We Own The Servers--and that need existed because of the risks people run when posting fanfic, particularly explicit fanfic, to corporately-owned servers. That argument doesn't hold for fandom nonfiction. Fandom meta is posted everywhere, all the time, and no one bats an eye.
There's no need that you're serving here. Based on this post, it's going to be a massively confusing and complicating enterprise, serving no real need and no purpose, and using volunteer time and labor that you can ill afford. You're going to be completely revamping the site in order to offer a service that many people can and do get on their own for free at DW or LJ or Tumblr.
My vote, for whatever it's worth (probably not much) is to just roll back the policy and leave everything the way it was. Save time and effort for the things that only AO3 can do and the fannish works that are at serious risk of being taken down--if you want to change something, why not start with hosting vids?
This. I feel like it's ill-advised to direct sparse volunteer hours and resources to re-coding the archive and re-writing the policies to accomodate nonfiction when making the ao3 the multimedia archive for transformative fanworks it was always supposed to be is still not even close to being tackled. ("Beginning stages of discussion!" after five years - it's unbelievable that the people who were responsible for groundwork development were so unable to put their private fannish focus on dealing only with text-based works aside and now we have a fic archive.) I'm not against hosting nonfiction, for the record, but I just don't see it as a priority issue at this time.
In fairness, the re-coding that would be required to make the inclusion of meta remotely feasible (namely, a mandatory work-type designation) is also necessary to make multimedia usable. Granted that other things need to be in place for multimedia, but that's definitely one of them.
Yes, I definitely concur. But I still think it is a little disingenious to open the floodgates for the hosting of content that isn't part of the archive's core objective (and yes, piled up a lot of text takes as much space as a smaller amount of images) while claiming that the servers wouldn't be able to handle multimedia traffic.
This. I'm hoping that because of the decision to include meta/non-fiction that changes will finally actually get made to the archive to make it more multimedia-friendly.
I agreed entirely. AO3 already faces user major challenges in areas that are key to its core function (e.g. searching). I enjoy reading meta very much, but AO3 is not the place for it. Not unless you think it is fine for the core purpose of the archive to be lost among a sea of laundry lists. Can you imagine how much 'fandom nonfiction' is going to get tagged with The Hobbit when the next film comes out? It won't matter than the rules say "don't post ephemera"; I would bet a large sum on huge numbers of reaction posts. Why not? It's fannish nonfiction, isn't it? Besides, many will probably be within the rules. But tough luck if you are looking for something else.
There are indeed thousands of places where meta is posted. Journals, forums, email lists, Wordpress blogs, Geocities sites...
Oh wait. There is no more meta on Geocities.
*That's* why I want meta on AO3.
AO3 isn't a host for "fanworks that might get TOS'ed if they were somewhere else." If it were, AO3 wouldn't need to allow fanworks based on public-domain works, nor anthropomorphic works. AO3 is a host for "fanworks that might vanish if they were somewhere else, or are hard to track down in their original locations, or are hard to read in those locations, or are otherwise wanting to be preserved/publicized."
Yes, setting up a Works Type system is going to be a pain. But it was always part of the plan, and hosting meta doesn't change that. Hosting meta now may push the coders into working on it, and sorting out better filter systems for the tags, sooner than they otherwise would have.
("Why not start with hosting vids?" -- Because vids take huge amounts of server space to store, huge amounts of bandwidth to access, and require extensive changes in the software to host, unless they're just uploaded and not displayed. Meta takes no changes in the software to host, only to serve effectively to only those people who want to see it--and they won't know how to arrange filters until they've got enough diverse content to work with.)
This. All of it. As much as I would rather have a parallel "Meta of Our Own" archive (and dread beyond words the metastorms in certain fandoms), the Archive only needs relatively minimal amounts of tweaking to host it. As opposed to the massive back-end adjustments and capacity adjustments to deal with images (or Clu forbid, video).
Can we please differentiate between webhosts stopping their service because of business reasons and fanworks that get taken down/soundtracks being deleted/etc because of alleged copyright infringement? Works getting TOSed somewhere else was, in fact, a motivator behind founding the OTW and building the AO3. It's why owning the servers was considered so important.
Also to some of us it is just really insulting that only kerfluffle about the hosting of yet more text-based works would be what inspires the demand for development of those features that should have been developed from the start. Who cares about what people want, except it's an annoyance to someone's fic reading habits, right? Because we all only care about fic.
Can we please differentiate between webhosts stopping their service because of business reasons and fanworks that get taken down/soundtracks being deleted/etc because of alleged copyright infringement?
Certainly. They're different. And being ToS'd is one of the big reasons behind AO3's creation, perhaps the biggest reason. However, "bored or angry fangirl deletes entire archive out of apathy or pique" was also part of it, and so was "platform hosting the archive is going to stop existing in two months." The first almost never applies to meta (the occasional accusation of trademark infringement is possible), but meta's just as vulnerable to the other two as fic. More, perhaps; there are no general-purpose meta archives.
Hosting other fanworks has been in development since the start. AO3 always had the intent to host art and vids. Direct progress toward that goal--an upload system, display system, appropriate label/headers system--was delayed in favor of getting a functional text archive, but hosting of art and vids is not being set aside for this.
This may put fanworks-type labels and sorting on a faster track (possibly at the temporary expense of other features like search improvements); it's not going to delay anything in development.
The key issue is, "is hosting meta/nonfic consistent with AO3's purposes?" A lot of fans, including the board, think it is. Once that's established, there's no excuse for saying "people cannot upload met yet because we're not ready"--the archive isn't ready for art or vids, and entries for those are being uploaded.
We'll just have to disagree on out assessment of the development. Polishing the text-based side of the archive to perfection before even *starting to discuss the requirements for other works* and putting bells and whistles on the features for Yuletide, which is not even an AO3 project, still shows a clear bias in favor of text-based works to me. I don't believe building a simple gallery system is inherently more difficult, it's just different. Also the hosting side of the Audiofic archive, for example, is taken care of by one fan who I'm sure has less funding available than the OTW. So if I hear one more time how omg so huuuuge other files are though, poor servers, I'm going to puke. I feel like if there was a will to actually develop these features and host other works there would have been at least one concrete, visible step towards it after five years.
I'm first and foremost a fic writer, but I agree with you.
The Archive has been and still is promoted as a multimedia fanworks archive - but essentially the only thing that was built in five years was a text based Archive. There isn't even a real timeline, yet, for when it will be able to host more than texts. So it's not surprising that people who produce non-textbased fanworks are getting annoyed by now. Especially when meta wasn't a part of the agenda before, but now gets in because "we can already host it anyway", while people waiting for the actual multi-media hosting are still waiting for any sign of it actually happening.
The Archive of Our Own offers a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting place for fanfiction and - eventually - other transformative fanworks: i.e. it is free to use and does not make any money. (Right now, we can only host text, but you are welcome to embed other media!) It is multifannish and built on open-source archiving software designed and built by and for fans. It is hosted on servers owned by the Organization for Transformative Works and therefore not vulnerable to a commercial hosting company deciding they don't like our fanworks.
That's from the About page in the FAQ. Emphasis mine.
Look, it sucks that Geocities shut down and took all that meta with it. But Geocities shut down because NOTHING is permanent--not AO3, not Google, not the internet itself.
The individual decisions of a company or business that lead it to go bust are always a risk on the internet (and elsewhere). But that's not really what this archive was initially created to provide. It was created to provide a safe space for fanfic and other fair use material that would be otherwise at risk of being kicked off perfectly healthy and functioning websites because of the content issues (not just copyright infringement, but obscenity, etc.)
Comment on Fandom nonfiction: seeking feedback
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