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.
AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.
2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost
Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005
Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.
A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.
^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.
these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view
FF.net banning porn isn’t a “fandom purge” though, just a porn purge. Fandom isn’t just porn.
Yahoo/other sites being incompetent/dying isn’t a “fandom purge”, it’s just bad business.
Youtube using content ID so you can no longer use stolen music is a GOOD thing, because YOU DON’T HAVE LEGAL RIGHTS TO THAT MUSIC!!!!!
Megaupload was MEGA FUCKING ILLGAL
God
It’s like none of you know… law.
No, fandom isn’t just porn, but when “porn” gets targeted, it’s always the m/m stuff that gets attacked first, followed by other queer stuff and anything made for women’s taste. To me, that’s a problem.
Queer content tends to be rated higher than straight content, even voluntarily and by the content creators, so deletions based on metadata will hit it disproportionately and include content that isn’t actually explicit. Queer content also attracts more harrassing grudge reports. AO3′s site rules and site culture discourage all of this, but it’s the reality for most internet spaces and was certainly the reality back when many of these FFN deletions happened.
There’s no specific definition of a “fandom purge”. The events people are mentioning here had a major negative effect on fandom and/or destroyed many fanworks. In many cases, they were caused by incompetence or by the host having other priorities, not by some specific targeted attack.
That doesn’t lessen their impact on us.
Megaupload going down and Youtube adding content ID were intended to stop straight up piracy. They also had a side effect of destroying lots of perfectly legal fanwork, specifically vids, which have historically been lost at an even greater rate than fic and collected and archived only rarely.
The way that music is used in vids will generally fall under fair use, though it’s not a defense that often gets tested. Vids have their own sort of vocabulary where the song and the images come together to create a meaning that is more than the sum of its parts. You can’t simply replace the song and have the same work with the same meaning. Vids aren’t piracy, and it is only the creeping, grasping erosion of fair use understanding by corporate propaganda that makes anyone think so.
It’s simply not accurate to call that kind of remix use categorically “illegal” in the US.
Even youtube has reinstated plenty of fanvids after a fair use-based challenge. I’ve done this myself. Many of the challenges about music on there are completely spurious. (There are scam artists who claim rights they don’t actually own.) The ones that do come from the real rights holder are not taking fair use into account.
The actual law is far more permissive than the de facto situation where we’re dependent on hosts that care about advertisers.
The original post was not intended to pass moral judgment on yahoo or ffn or anywhere else, just to suggest that the current tumblr shenanigans are part of a long history. My conclusions are:
1. Fans who got in via tumblr should take heart: fandom won’t be over even when we inevitably leave tumblr at some point (which won’t be just yet anyway).
2. We got tired of all of the deletions and built AO3 to protect fic. It’s time we started doing the same for art and vids and blogging because all of those are still vulnerable.
3. Websites have every right to not care about us… But we have every right to leave them and make our own spaces that value us.
Chinese fandoms are currently experiencing an actual Purge right now. Every fandom. Accounts are getting banned, all shipping wars has been put on hold. Everyone’s hiding their porn and moving them to ao3.
There’s reward money involved. A recent update to censorship law raised the maximum reward for reporting illicit online materials to 50k yuan (7000 USD), so some people are reporting porn like crazy right now, and apparently, BL fandoms have been especially targeted, where some even more tame things got maliciously misreported.
Anyway, it’s a mess. Content creators are just disappearing off the face of the internet left and right. Expect an influx of Chinese porn fics on AO3.
Well… if there’s one thing out of this mess… nothing bands warring ships/fandoms like censorship…
Hey guys, if some awesome person in China translated your fic into Chinese or created fan art, you really should spread the word! This could affect someone you know!
This is also a call out to all you fuckwits that repost art on Tumblr, twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. Your negligence hurts people.
^^^
This is literally shitty and it has become worse and worse
Hopefully it will stop before long but just take care of how yiou take your stances on ao3 or what’s happening with Tumblr
A chinese homoerotic novel writer is sentenced to 10 years to prison because of “illegal publication”* and “spread of obscene materials”. After that, China government set up bounty for reporting “illegal publication”. Everyone on weibo, lofter etc. is deleting thier posts.
China is using this act as a way of controling the freedom of speech, it’s not just a matter of “no homo”. They just use the fandom content creators as an easy target and a way to scare people off from writing and publishing things the government doesn’t like.
China is living the Nineteen Eighty-Four novel. Please don’t post chinese fan works, especially not with their original chinese artists/writers right now. You could literally ruin their life.
* in China every book has to be approved by the government before
publication. Anything against the government or with “the wrong idea” will be banned. Their government didn’t pay too much attention to fan books before, but in recent years, they are tightening their grip on their people. Fandom and their activities as a whole has become a target because 1) fandom and their creative community make self-publishing a thing and China doesn’t like that the people know it’s easy to print stuffs (to spread unwanted information/ideas etc. 2) fandom and their creative community is the easiest and obvious target because of the general anti LBGT+ envirnment, general public will support the gornment for “cleansing the society from obscenity” withouth thingking about 1)
hey folks, I’m gonna introduce you to two very important fandom terms and they are watsonian and doylist
they come (obviously) from the sherlock holmes fandom, and they are two different ways of explaining something in a story. say I’m a fan and I notice that, in the original books, watson’s war wound is sometimes in his leg and sometimes in his shoulder. the watsonian explanation is how watson (that is, a person within the story) might explain it; the doylist explanation is how sir arthur conan doyle (a person in real life) would have explained it.
sherlock explains the migrating war wound by making the shoulder wound real and the limp psychosomatic. the guy ritchie films explain it by having the leg wound sustained in battle before the events of the film and the shoulder wound happen onscreen. the doylist explanation, of course, is that acd forgot where the wound was.
this is very important when we’re discussing stuff like headcanons and word-of-god. I see this when people offer watsonian explanations for something, and then a doylist will say something like “it’s just because the author wrote it that way,” and I see it when a person is criticizing bad writing/storytelling (for example, the fact that quiet in metal gear solid v is running around the whole game in a bikini and ripped tights) and someone comes back with “but there’s an in-story reason why that happens!” (that reason being she breathes through her skin).
there’s nothing wrong with either explanation, and really I think you need both to understand and analyze a text. a person coming up with a watsonian explanation has likely not forgotten that the author had real-life reasons for writing something that way, and a person with a doylist interpretation is likely not ignoring the in-universe justification for that thing.
but it’s very difficult (and imo often useless, though there are exceptions) to try to argue one kind of explanation with the other kind. wetblanketing someone’s headcanon with “or it could just be bad writing” is obnoxious; dismissing someone’s criticism with “but have you considered this in-universe explanation” is ignoring the point of the criticism. understanding where someone is coming from is important when making an argument; acting like your argument is better because you’re being doylist when they’re being watsonian or vice versa is not.
Making Watsonian interpretations is also part of playing “The Game” (AKA “The Great Game”, or “The Sherlockian Game”)–analyzing the stories under the premise that Holmes and Watson are actual people, and Doyle was merely Watson’s literary agent, if he was involved at all. This game often (but not always) involves researching things from the time period and using outside sources to tie up loose ends in the stories, clarify details, and make sense of Watson’s broken timeline.
Playing The Game is a long-established pastime among Holmes fans, so I think when reading analyses of Holmes stories people probably encounter Watsonian-style interpretations much more often than they would with other literary works. I can see how someone who is used to interpreting literary works based off of the author rather than the narrator might see it as strange for people to be so fixated on Watson’s voice and intentions if they didn’t realize that making in-universe explanations for questions about Holmes stories was a game that Holmes fans have been playing for decades.
you shouldn’t have to be embarrassed or ashamed of the things you like!!!! if someone tries to make you feel bad for enjoying something enjoy it 10x harder to spite them!!!!!!
willowfoot 
