Re: Why I Do Not Support Emerging Artists

[rynling]

The other reasons why I've moved away from AO3 are:

- Now that recent updates to FFN have made the site almost unusable, I'm starting to see FFN comment culture crop up on AO3. This involves things like random people roleplaying in the comments and users requesting "kudos for kudos" interactions, offering to leave kudos on a story they haven't read if the author will leave kudos on their stories in unrelated fandoms. It's a mess.

- I'm also starting to see a lot of bot-generated spam comments. There's no way to block users on AO3, so you have to report each comment individually as you wait for the beleaguered volunteer staff to delete the account.

- The content warnings that people put on their stories make me unpleasantly self-conscious about what is considered "problematic" these days. Like, one 40yo (but probably immortal) character can seduce another 40yo (and also probably immortal) character into a poorly planned sexual encounter whose fallout will haunt both of them for the rest of their (probably immortal) lives, but there apparently needs to be a serious content warning if one of them takes so much as a single sip of brandy before or after sex. This sort of thing started to affect my writing, and I didn't like that.

- Too much time spent in Zoom meetings has made me want to limit the downtime I spend looking at screens.

- I am very very very lazy.

Comments

[lassarina]

Those are all really good points! It's easy to say like, the kids do not understand that adults make things, but I think the part about adults as caregivers in particular gets at the underlying problem. I do not have children; barring some hideous catastrophe afflicting my in-laws (gods forbid) I will not raise any at any point in my life. That is a deliberate choice. I do not want to be responsible for the well-being of other humans in that way. And so in that sense, teens demanding that I conform my spaces that I've worked my entire adult life to find, build, and maintain, to their needs--it really touches off my temper. I am not responsible for their care and it seems to me that the persons who are have not equipped them to understand how to deal with scary, sad, or hurtful things they find in the wild. What will happen when they go to college? On the one hand it's not my problem but on the other I Have to live in the society they will be contributing to building, so, it really is my problem.

(I also think the entire....everything of people trying to find and use wallet names for the purpose of attacking someone over fiction is a can of worms I am not remotely prepared to deal with, but it horrifies me and is part of why I am chary about a lot of details and do make reasonable efforts to not link who I am as a professional to who I am on the Internet, because my boss does not need to know what kind of fic I write and given I'm pretty sure my existence violates a lot of purity police laws, whew.)

I guess tl;dr there's a lot of expectation of hand-holding that makes me angry and uncomfortable and therefore makes me not want to do anything fandom-related outside the circles I have already formed. I'm missing out on some cool people I'm sure, but also I get to avoid having to directly deal with a lot of the anti nonsense.