2009 – GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 – FFN forums deleted
2011 – Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 – major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 – Quizilla shuts down
2015 – Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
… they deleted Fandom Wank???
Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.
2007 – Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
2009 – Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
2012 – Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost
I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.
I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.
Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.
Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down.
Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.
Yahoo owns Tumblr.
1356: 50% of monks.
People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.
…is this supposed to be considered weird? I don’t get it.
I think it’s more that it was an unexpected feature. I’m glad it’s there.
Yeah I actually found it while prepping for brain surgery, and was incredibly relieved that it was a built-in feature and not something I’d have to leave convoluted instructions about or whatever. It’s a bit morbid, sure, but it’s a great feature.
…an unexpected but very appreciated feature.
This is a feature designed by women who’d been in fandom for decades, and who had faced the issue of, “X is dead, and we know she loved fandom, so… can we reprint her stories? Who can decide? Her family knows fuck-all about fandom. Who was her best friend? Do they know if she would’ve liked her story to be reprinted in the Best Of OTP Fic zine?”
Running across that once doesn’t make you think about a policy, but by the time it’s five to ten times, and then you’ve seen people vanish from the internet (might be dead; might just be not interested anymore) and nobody knows whether it’s okay to collect their fic in an archive or transfer it to a new one….
Yeah, the FNoK policy is one of the awesome things about AO3.
People who want to shut down Ao3 are the antivaxers of fandom tbh
Ao3 & OTW: is the crowning achievement of fandom, protects all fans’ right to create content, maintains a safe and stable archive to host that content without profiteering or interference from corporate interests
Someone too young to remember the dark days of C&D letters and arbitrary deletion: but even though I have no data to support my position I just KNOW it’s harming children!!!
This blogger remembers when we had to put disclaimers at the head of our fics and pray that someone didn’t take it into their heads to sue us for what we created.
This blogger remembers brilliant artists and writers getting decades of work obliterated on LJ because someone who wanted to tell people what they were allowed to create went running to someone who wanted a profit, and told them the artists and writers had been naughty.
This blogger remembers just how hard the creators of AO3 worked to build the thing we all seem to take for granted now.
This blogger watched friends dive into the creation process so heartily and determinedly that they all but disappeared from the writing/gaming/artistic side of their fandom for YEARS while they worked to make the archive happen.
This blogger remembers the sense of giddy wonder that there would possibly be LAWYERS involved, willing to defend our right to create these works, and not leave us hanging at the mercy of corporate legal teams.
This blogger is aware that she reads between twenty to fifty books’ worth of material every year on AO3, and is never REQUIRED to pay a penny for the privilege of getting access.
This blogger is aware that she will not ever see advertisements on AO3, and that her personal data and reading preferences won’t be sold to advertisers in order to raise the money that AO3 needs to pay for the services they provide.
This blogger is aware that AO3 is, and has always been, a labor of love; by fans, for fans, and not for profiting off fans – and this is what makes it unique in the whole of the media universe.
This blogger has NEVER taken AO3 for granted, and has ALWAYS been damned glad to have access to it. Even in years when this blogger didn’t have the means to support it financially.
you haven’t truly experienced Rarepair Shipping™ until you have to read your own fanfiction because it’s the only content that has ever been created for your otp
uses of the terms “lemon” and “lime” (apparently there was a difference. lemons were porn but i’m STILL not sure what a lime is. i also have NO idea how “lemon” came to mean “porn”. not sure i want to, tbh.)
soooo many “i do not own please don’t sue me” disclaimers
fics where the whole premise that the whole cast was trapped someplace together and the reviewers would leave questions in their comments and then the characters would answer them in-story. like “ask that guy with the glasses” except shitty and usually self-indulgent towards the author’s preferred ships. (i may have written one of these when i was 12.)
authors who legit updated on a schedule (and stuck to it). some every fucking day. (you still see this on ao3, but not NEARLY as much.)
fanfic authors who basically had a following and fandom of their own. (again, this still happens, but not as much. not sure if that’s a good thing or not.) not bad considering most of them were 13.
“yaoi!!! that means boy kisses!!! don’t like don’t read!!!”
putting “————-” or “xxxxxxx” bc ff.net wouldn’t let you insert a horizontal line to show the end of a section
very long, very rambley author’s notes
some of which had the authors interacting with/talking to the characters in the fic.
fics that weren’t so much stories as they were a chapter-by-chapter detailing of all the cliche plots and tropes used in that fandom’s shitty fanfics. (i actually sorta miss these, tbh)
songfics. no, not fics inspired by songs. fics where the lyrics were put in between every paragraph, with some lyrics altered to fit the characters. it was horrific.
fics that were up-front about the oc being a stand-in for the reader so they can read about themselves getting with their fave character. as in, it was written in second person and the summary outright said the pov character was meant to be the reader.
the forums being used for roleplay before tumblr rp was a “thing”
long, LONG author profiles, filled with things like “copy/paste if you’re a [whatever] shipper!” or obviously fake sickly sweet anecdotes (think chain email levels of bad), or worst of all (in my opinion), a pro-life anti-abortion story from the point of view of a fetus. it was as bad as it sounds, if not worse.
listing all your ships on your author profile page
seeing a title that was all lowercase letters and thinking “lazy” rather than “aesthetic”
“101 one ways to annoy [insert character here]” (voldemort was popular for these things)
it being fucking impossible to find f/f fic that wasn’t porn
writing ships as “characterxcharacter” instead of “character/character”
author’s notes in the middle of the story. literally you would be reading a fanfic and all of a sudden, in between paragraphs… “A/N: awwww isn’t it cute how they’re thinking the same thing!!! XD”
for that matter, author’s notes using the XD emoticon
people FLIPPING THEIR SHIT whenever their fave author (or just a well-established author in the fandom) changed their username. ESPECIALLY if they changed it from something fandom-specific to something more neutral.
“character x/character y. NO CHARACTER X/CHARACTER Z.” bc apparently you think i’d think your fic clearly marked character x/character y would be nothing but character x and character z making out.
trollfics trying to capitalize on my immortal’s infamy. there are still trollfics, of course, but they tend to be more subtle.
for that matter, trying to pass a trollfic off as a legitimate fic rather than just admitting it’s a parody
specifically reading fics for your notp just to bash it in the reviews
people putting replies to reviews for the previous chapter in the author’s notes (this died down a LITTLE once ff.net finally added a reply function, but not much)
the great fanfiction.net purge (ahh yes. history lesson time. basically, back in the olden days of fanfiction, when everyone actually used ff.net, one fateful day, back in biblical times – 2011 – ff.net decided to make MA rated stuff – basically porn – not be allowed on the site anymore. ofc people kept posting it anyway, but then ff.net started deleting stories from the website with no notice to the authors. just poof! gone. the aftermath was HORRIFIC. people were FURIOUS, as a lot of people had no backup and just lost their stories. so ff.net stopped enforcing the rule, but the damage was done. this was when people began to officially leave for ao3, i think.)
lots of harry potter fanfics about the my immortal versions of the characters interacting with the canon characters. some of these were actually quite funny – i think they’re still around, but i don’t see them as much. (i actually wrote one of these stories. it is still, to this day, the most popular story i ever wrote.)
drabbles that were ACTUALLY 100 words long.
fictionpress (a sister site for original fiction. it was like wattpad before wattpad was wattpad. it never really took off. come to think of it, i may still have some stuff on there from when i was 12 i need to take down)
“crackfics” that consisted mainly of “lulz iM SO RanDOm!!!111!!!!!oneone XD cheeeeeeeese!!!!!!” humor
“i suck at summaries”
“this is my first story so please be nice”
“i’ll only update if i get 10 good reviews”
AUs before “AU” was a really widely used term, so the author’s note would have a length explanation for why they had to change things for the story and apologizing over and over instead of just noting the AU in the summary
AUs out of laziness rather than for creative/plot reasons (ie, “luna’s a gryffindor in this fic because i couldn’t find another reason for her to be here”)
authors notes apologizing for late updates
being genuinely shocked when you found a GOOD fanfic
I never used ff.net, but I used Quotev.com in ye olden days which had much of the same problems.
clintbbarton 