AO3 and teenagers
I’ve been pondering the AO3 discourse pretty seriously today. Antis and purity culture don’t think offensive material should exist, or at least not where its easy for kids to stumble over. And I have no time for that argument. But I do think as AO3 continues to get bigger and more publicly known, there are a few things that would make a huge difference to 13yos signing up for their first account, or people of any age trying to avoid being grossed out or triggered while searching for fics.
The single biggest problem, the thing that’s going to create antis out of people just stumbling in, is that there isn’t any rating or content guideline for summaries and tags. You can easily see XXX material on an AO3 search without clicking on a single fic. It’s the situation in place and it’s not going to change, even if people agreed it should, because it would be nearly impossible to make any changes retroactive. But it does mean that AO3 is not 13yo-friendly, even though 13yos can sign up for accounts.
What would make a huge difference to users who aren’t looking for porn, or who are looking for porn but maybe not at full-force-of-AO3 levels, would be to have account settings for Please Don’t Ever Show Me Fics Rated Higher Than _ _ _. The option to never see whichever of the four Archive Warnings are particular Do Not Wants would be a close second in terms of usefulness, and maybe even, if this is a wishlist unconstrained by server practicalities, the ability to blacklist other common tags. This would solve the fundamental problem that as wonderful as the new “Exclude” function is, it’s still very much a two-step process: enter a term in the search bar, then filter, or click on a tag, then filter. Casual users are inevitably going to try scrolling down the results before deciding to filter, so an option which would actually keep adult content summaries from those who don’t want to see them seems like it should be right in line with AO3‘s philosophy.
I don’t know if there’s any ongoing discussion about this or not, but it does seem like one worth having. How much work, technically, would it be to implement? How much would it increase server load? I don’t have any idea! Where would I even suggest it to AO3? A support ticket? I don’t know that either! I just know that it’s going to get to a point in the not-too-distant future where it has to decide if it’s a website by and for adults, or if it’s going to genuinely be welcoming to non-pornseekers who currently inhabit FanFiction.Net and Wattpad: not, I suspect, because their interfaces are better, but because they don’t want to deal with or see all the porn on AO3. AO3, Wattpad, and FF.net all say users can sign up if they are 13 or older, but in practice, the differences are enormous.
This entry was originally posted at https://alyndra.dreamwidth.org/25475.html.