Comment on Proposed Content Policy ToS and FAQ changes

  1. shinetheway Sat 29 Jun 2013 05:28AM UTC

    water sign

    [sighs] This is about meta. Again.

    From my perspective, wanting meta is one thing. I get it, I really do--there's nothing like a well-written fannish essay. Cereta just reposted her brilliant essay on fandom and male privilege, which I read and loved years ago and which is still perfectly pertinent today. It doesn't seem realistic to me to add a new type of fanwork to a site which is still in beta--and whose beta status is occasionally justified by server and code hiccups. But I get it. So you're going to allow meta to be posted.

    But this FAQ makes it clear that your real goal is more unrealistic than that. You want meta--but only the Good Kind.

    The example of "ephemeral" meta given is a particularly dismissive stereotype of a flailing incoherent teenage fangirl, an example of something that's a negative and undesirable text. To my mind this is, by the way, inappropriate in a formal administrative document (why are stereotypically "teenage girl" responses always a shorthand for immature writing?) but that's not the point. The point is, work like that is going to be posted anyway, and who is going to make the distinction using what criteria? You've just set yourselves up as the judge on fandomwide nonfiction content, in communities (manga, RPF, literary, webcomics, slash, het, tv/movies, music, perfume ads, whatever) that you may have absolutely no experience in to gauge relevancy, quality, and context. And you make it clear that you WILL be judging what is and is not fandom nonfiction by clarifying exactly what's permitted, and in fact saying that the things that are not allowable are "potentially limitless". (Maybe we just remove the "potentially" from that statement? ;)

    I don't believe the volunteers' time and energy should be dedicated towards this kind of hairsplitting, in fandoms they might have no experience in, making judgements on the OMG SAM'S HAIR!ness and exactly how much of a post is designed to be experienced "in a moment" to see if it's non-ephemeral enough. It seems like there's only one way to control how much and what type of meta is posted to AO3, and that's to disallow the genre (at least until you can use a slightly better example of ephemera than Becky The Fan). DW and LJ aren't dead yet, and even if they were there are still dozens of platforms where this type of meta can safely and peacefully live.

    Finally, you don't say what you're going to do if you judge content to be inappropriate, so it isn't clear if you'd be deleting user data, and whether you'd do it with their permission or knowledge. You say you can "correct" a misidentified work on your own if a user hasn't responded to your content, and that the servers aren't set up to be able to handle ephemeral postings and that you need to set limits, but you don't go into details. If someone posts something that an admin judges as "ephemeral," will it be deleted by default? Referred to the user to either correct it to a more non-ephemeral text or delete it themselves? If they don't respond, will it be deleted then? Will the user receive a warning or suspension? You've set up a standard, but I don't see how it's being enforced.

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    1. AnonMetaWriter (Guest) Sat 29 Jun 2013 08:58AM UTC

      You've just set yourselves up as the judge on fandomwide nonfiction content, in communities (manga, RPF, literary, webcomics, slash, het, tv/movies, music, perfume ads, whatever) that you may have absolutely no experience in to gauge relevancy, quality, and context. And you make it clear that you WILL be judging what is and is not fandom nonfiction by clarifying exactly what's permitted, and in fact saying that the things that are not allowable are "potentially limitless".

      Thank you. Couldn't have said it better myself.

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    2. Pslasher Sat 29 Jun 2013 12:50PM UTC

      I agree with this. Either you allow it or you don't; I don't think the OTW has any more right to judge what is acceptable meta than they do what are acceptable fanworks of other types. There are plenty of terrible fics that amount to nothing more than "OMG SAM'S HAIR", but no one proposes kicking them off the archive. Nor should they be kicked off the archive. The AO3 has filter and search functions to find the 'good' fic, and that should apply to meta as well.

      Personally, I support Meta on the AO3 as long as we get functioning work types, so this comment refers only to the OTW moderating the quality of meta.

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