Comment on Fandom nonfiction: seeking feedback

  1. Z (Guest) Fri 15 Mar 2013 09:15AM UTC

    I think that essay is pretty much what it says on the tin.

    To give some context, this essay was at the top of a fandom (probably more than one, given its high counts) sorted by kudos, hits, and comments sort since almost immediately after it was posted. The essay included exactly one word remotely related to the fandom I had followed and searched for: "pedo" after the name of a pairing. I think it not too much to ask that someone write at least a sentence about a subject before tagging with it.

    The Archive is not responsible for figuring out what readers want to read, but 1) since its current plan for mistagging issues is to tell us to engage with each other, we are doing our best to engage each other and create community norms and 2) there may be no "shit" filter but if you are arguing there ought to be no relevance filter, there is zero point to tagging left at all. This was not a grey case of someone not executing a trope or pairing, etc., to readers' taste, and if it was I wouldn't be complaining about it. This was a blatant and admitted example of tagging to receive attention from people (as noted here) who the writer knew were not going to have glanced at their personal thoughts otherwise.

    Since AO3's decision on tagging conflicts is... having us discuss it in comments, and the writer previously ignored a more concise comment to the effect of "this is mistagged", what else could anons have done? I think this is a very relevant example of why the implementation details on meta should have been decided before allowing it onto the archive.

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    1. Aiffe Tue 19 Mar 2013 08:28PM UTC

      Tahno

      +1. I don't advocate the anon borderline bullying above, but since there is apparently no higher authority to deal with issues of categories being spammed with content not applicable to them, addressing the poster seems the most sensible solution. The tags were changed and the user says they won't do it again, so mission accomplished and we probably shouldn't continue to harass them.

      I don't see how this is different from fiction. If someone posted a fic tagged with like 20 popular fandoms and pairings, that barely mentioned most of them if at all, I think the community would respond in the same way. If meta posters seem more likely to do this, it isn't the community's fault for still reacting the same as they would to an offending fic.

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