Fandom migration stuff

[lettered]

This post by greywash is the best post I've seen that discusses a lot of the ideas going around about fandom spaces, ideal fandom spaces, etc. In particular, I found the part about an ideal fannish platform addressed all the needs I'm seeing people discussed elsewhere, while the part about problems they foresee with such a space seemed more thoughtful and better articulated than most. Highlights include:

• Mention of a "whisper space," which is (imo) a neat term for how people used tags on tumblr as a way to comment on something and have conversations without that part being reblogged. In discussions about reblogs on DW and elsewhere some of the discussion is centered around things you might not want to get reblogged, or tags you might want for you but not for universal purposes, and the complications in coding that causes.


• Discussion of the OTW, how useful it would be for them to be involved and the difficulties in that. They point out that the OTW has done a whole lot to secure a legal standing for fanfic, which is great. But when you are talking a social network platform you are talking images, and images open up a much bigger can of worms. It would be nice to work with the OTW, but it remains unclear whether there are really enough resources to commit to that when they are already working on something else (namely, defense of fanfic).


• Discussion of actual child porn, which frustratingly gets left out of a lot of these conversations. Basically, any time you make it easy and free to host lots of images, lots of people want to host images there, including pornographers. If you want to allow the fandom content we want but prevent actual exploitation of children, then you've got to have a way to monitor and sort, which requires time and resources.

Anyway, check it out, it's good.

Comments

[starlitshore]

That's fair. Maybe this will be an opportunity to create new ones that are a bit more open? Fingers crossed...

Oh! By the way. I don't remember if I've said this yet to you, but I loved Away Childish Things.

Exactly. And I wouldn't want to have to deal with it, so it's like who do you hire for that purpose? Ugh.

[lettered]

Oh, thanks! Glad you liked the fic!

I bet it would be an awful job (checking for CP), but there are people who do it. Like, I think it's basically a tech support team job--those who answer all the reports when people report something. So on AO3 there's a team of volunteers who do stuff like that, but of course AO3 is bad enough for image hosting that that's not a big part of what they do.

[starlitshore]

I have plans to rec it in my next post. :)

Yeah, I can't imagine. You'd have to be a really strong person to do that kind of job. Total respect for the people that can handle it for the rest of us.