#for example theyre probably not going to lend the above book to a 6 year old

[larnax]

the thing is that ao3 is objectively a terrible archive in large part because its tagging system isn't standardized at all and its community is seemingly dedicated to constantly inventing new worse ways to tag their work in more unhelpful ways.

any actual archive, ESPECIALLY one with millions of works, has a robust tagging system that is standardized, clear, and enforced by moderation because if people can just upload works with zero tags beyond title and author it's impossible to fucking find anything OR filter out results that are irrelevant to what you're searching for. if i go to a library and ask to see the mystery novels and then half of the section is dictionaries, that's a bad fucking library! if i go to a library and ask to see the mystery novels but only two books are labeled as mystery novels and all the other mystery novels are labeled Puzzle Books, Brain ?, Dove History, [+230] that's a bad fucking library! if i go to the library and ask for mystery novels and get told to go fuck myself because this library believes categorizing books by genre is queerphobic, that's a bad fucking library! if i go to a library and ask to see the mystery novels and the librarian gives me CSEM, that's a bad fucking library!

in a good archive, the responsibility is ALWAYS placed on the archival staff to create a helpful search system and enforced rigorous, clear, and useful tags that ensure that when you are looking through their archive, you will find what you are looking for and not what you aren't. that's why archives NEED robust moderation! if you see a mistagged work, you need to edit it to be tagged correctly! if one of your search terms is unclear, actively misleading or redundant, you need to change it so that it's useful! if someone routinely incorrectly or insufficiently tags their uploads, you need to ban them!

but also, more importantly, being an archive doesn't mean that the works uploaded to that archive can't be criticized, and in fact helping people criticize them is one of the MAIN REASONS archives that store works that endorse profoundly terrible shit exist at all! by preserving this stuff we prevent its authors from pretending what they wrote doesn't exist! we can use its example to show people the thought processes of the real people who act on the ideas contained! we can clearly show people what the things we criticize look like and how to avoid or prevent them! archives aren't supposed to protect the creators of the works they contain from criticism at all even a little bit. being able to criticize archived contents and understand how they affect the world where the people who wrote them live is an extremely necessary part of archives that they should aim to support, not prevent.

#c.paradisi #needs to be stressed that ao3's tagging system is like this on purpose #by allowing authors to tag works with csem/etc vaguely or not at all ao3 both desensitizes fans to that stuff #and makes it almost impossible to track down people who write it. which protects them from criticism and discovery #but like yeah if you go to a library and are like hey. can you put this on your shelves #its my manifesto where i state that i plan to kill my spouse and detail how and when i will do it and my motives #theyre not gonna be like. sadly as a neutral archive we can do nothing to prevent this #theyre gonna report you and if they publicize it itll be to use as evidence in your trial #also most libraries have restricted sections because some books itd be irresponsible to lend to people #without at least warning them of the content or in some cases lending them to certain groups of people #for example theyre probably not going to lend the above book to a 6 year old #long post #ask to tag