fandom history

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Tell you what – when I was back at LiveJournal, in ye olden days of 2003, Harry/Draco shippers had a habit of taking sort of NSFW-y pictures (two naked adult bodies lying together, that sort of thing) and Photoshopping Daniel Radcliffe and Tom Felton’s heads on them. And it made me SO uncomfortable, because I was sixteen, the same age as those actors, and the undertones and the fact that obviously neither of them could have possibly consented to having ‘them’ arranged into sexual positions…god, I hated it.

But the kids doing the Photoshopping were YOUNGER THAN ME. What do you even do in that situation?!

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x-cetra:

sarapsys:

Man 80s fandom must have been so hardcore

I’m just so used to being able to find a show or comic people are talking about online somewhere, with English translation, reasonable video quality, screenshots and sometimes even transcripts, episode synopses and fan wikis with character references and episode lists, like within ten minutes of thinking it would be handy, fanfic and art in color and all of it tagged and relatively easy to find with some hunting

Meanwhile these gals were trading third copy videotapes just to watch an episode, waiting months to go to a con just to get an index of local zines that might have fic they like, I’m getting frustrated and peeved just thinking about it

I will never forget receiving a mysterious brown paper package with the return address “The Nome King” (and nothing else) at about the time the Unabomber was sending deadly packages through the mail. I decided that he and copycats would not use that as a return address, so I opened it. Inside was a VHS tape hand-labeled “Beetlejuice”, but when I put in my VCR, which was honest to gosh hooked up to the b&w TV my parents had watched the moon landing on (it was free, and Babylon 5 and DS9 actually worked really well in b&w), the tape turned out to be My Neighbor Totoro. In Japanese. With no subtitles.

This was before Miyazaki was well-known in the states. I followed it pretty well up until the giant 18-legged Cheshire Cat pulled up to the bus stop.

I eventually located and printed out a fan translation found on a regional college network using archie/veronica.

Also the college dorm rooms at Bryn Mawr had fanzines other women had picked up at cons. i remember Jabberwocky, a longrunning Blake’s 7 series, and an anthology of Sarek/Amanda fluff by Jean Lorrah.

Doctor Who fandom in the early 80s was mostly a solitary affair, and the primary activity was amassing as complete a collection as possible of reruns recorded off TV. It took years of dedication. It meant keeping up with one’s local PBS station broadcasts, programming the VCR, pleading with the parents for more tapes, elbowing out anyone else’s wishes to record something, all with the goal of catching and recording reruns of episodes one didn’t yet have.

And then one had the magic notebook keeping track of which tape had Hand of Fear (interwoven with episodes of TNG and Monty Python and possibly Robin of Sherwood or Red Dwarf) and where ep 5 and 6 were since that tape had run out (interwoven with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers talking mythology). DItto trying to make sure one had recorded all the TNG eps and had spent a whole summer forbidding ANYONE to touch the tape that ended with “I am Locutus of Borg” so that one could record the second half right after the cliffhanger.

The prize, of course, was going back to college with some handpicked episodes, and 17 people (that was our record) crammed onto one bed to watch an episode on a teeny tiny TV perched on someone’s fridge. Or else fighting to reserve a slot on the dorm TV’s VCR, which was usually booked weeks in advance. My job was to provide Blake’s 7. Susan was in charge of keeping us supplied with Robin of Sherwood. KIm and Kimi specialized in Robotech and Queen music videos. Angela brought vampire anime. And so on.

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lotesseflower:

shadowedhills:

shitifindon:

spaceshipoftheseus:

odditycollector:

I found my favourite del.icio.us explanation:

I learned a lot about fandom couple of years ago in conversations with
my friend Britta,  who was working at the time as community manager for
Delicious. She taught me that fans were among the heaviest users of the
bookmarking site, and had constructed an edifice of incredibly elaborate
tagging conventions, plugins, and scripts to organize their output
along a bewildering number of dimensions.     If you wanted to read a
3000 word fic where Picard forces Gandalf into sexual bondage, and it
seems unconsensual but secretly both want it, and it’s R-explicit but
not NC-17 explicit, all you had to do was search along the appropriate
combination of tags (and if you couldn’t find it, someone would probably
write it for you).    By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about
folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation retrieval, collaborative
editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of
friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock.

from the guy who runs Pinboard, which took in some number of the fleeing users.

He also gave a talk about what happened when he *succeeded* at getting fandom’s attention during the exodus, which I didn’t see before just now, but its kinda funny to look at normal fandom culture stuff from the POV of an outside observer who didn’t mean to get caught in the middle.

this whole thing is super interesting

oh my god that talk is gold

There is no God, life has no meaning, it’s all over when you can’t search on the slash character.

Having worked at large tech companies, where getting a spec written
requires shedding tears of blood in a room full of people whose only
goal seems to be to thwart you, and waiting weeks for them to finish, I
could not believe what I was seeing.

The transcription of his talk is amazing, everyone who has an interest in fandom and platforms and the way we interact with the sites we use should read it. 

(As someone who ran a fandom newsletter at the time of the Great Delicious Disaster, this guy saved my fucking life – so much of that process was automated in Greasemonkey and independent user scripts, and after Delicious shit the pot we were able to move it over to Pinboard with relatively little issue. And then newsletters and LJ fandom in general went away relatively quickly, but that’s a different story. The point is, this dude was amazing when fandom needed someone to be amazing for us.)

But man, I feel like his talk should be required reading for anyone who runs an online platform that attracts fandom, or wants to attract fandom, or really just wants to foster community. 

I’m still haunting the ruins of delicious with my bookmarks all by myself – but the linked talk is genius ++good would read again.

The Places Fandom Dwells: A Cautionary Tale

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calystarose:

for-the-other-shoe:

fanculturesfancreativity:

mizstorge:

Just about seven years ago, on 29 May 2007, hundreds of fans with accounts at Livejournal made the shocking discovery that their blogs, and those of some of their friends and favorite fandom communities, had been deleted without prior notice.

It’s estimated that Livejournal suspended approximately 500 blog accounts. The only notice of this was was the strike through the names of the suspended blogs, which led to this event being called Strikethrough.

At the time, Livejournal was the primary blogging platform for fandom. Its friends list and threaded conversations enabled fans to find each other and have discussions. Its privacy settings allowed fans to share as much or as little as they chose. It was a place to publish and archive fan fic, art, and meta. These features give some idea why the deletions of so many fandom blogs was devastating.

Speculation and uncertainty were rampant during the two days it took for Livejournal to finally respond to demands from users for information. At first, LJ stated only that it had been advised that journals listing an illegal activity as an interest could be regarded as soliciting for that illegal activity, which put the site at legal risk. It was eventually revealed that Livejournal and its owners at the time, Six Apart, had been contacted by a group calling themselves Warriors for Innocence, a conservative Christian organization with ties to the militia movement who accused of being a haven for pedophiles and child pornography.

LJ had based the account suspensions on the tags used in LJ blogs. LJ users list their interests in their profiles, and those interests functions as tags. LJ took the blanket view that there was no difference between blogs listing “rape”.”incest”, or “pedophilia” among their interests, and blogs with posts tagged “rape”. “incest”, or “pedophilia”. As a consequence, some of the accounts that were suspended were support sites for people like rape survivors and gay teens, as well as the fandom sites that posted book discussions, RP, fan fiction, and fan art.

Livejournal grudgingly issued a partial apology to users on 31 May, but it took months for the organization to sort through the suspended blogs. According to Livejournal, most of the suspended accounts were restored. Not all of the suspended accounts were restored, and some of those that weren’t belonged to the support groups and fandoms.

One result of Strikethrough was that many communities and individual fans locked their blogs so the content could be viewed only community members, or those on their friends lists. Other fans opened accounts at blogging platforms like JournalFen, The Greatest Journal, or Insane Journal. There was definitely an atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia that hadn’t previously existed, and part of the problem was that Livejournal had not come through with promised clarification about what sort of content violated the ToS.

So, of course, it happened all over again.

On 3 August, Livejournal once again suspended a number of accounts without warning. This time, the account names were bolded, and the event became known as Boldthrough.

These deletions were the result of decisions made by a group consisting of members of LiveJournal’s Abuse Prevention Team, made up of LiveJournal employees, and Six Apart staff, that had been set up to review blog content. This group was had been empowered to declare blog content offensive, a violation of the ToS that was defined by the team as content not containing enough serious artistic value to offset the sexual nature of the material. The team was empowered to terminate accounts without warning.

Anxious and angry LJ users had to wail ten days until LJ issued a response. Eventually, the ToS was changed to state that accounts deemed in violation of the ToS would in future be deleted only if the offender refused to delete offending content.

Just a few days before Strikethrough, LJ user astolat proposed a new blogging platform and fan fic archive be created by fans, for fans. This was the birth of the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit organization dedicated to provide access to fanworks, and to protect and defend fanworks from commercial exploitation and legal challenge. Strikethrough and Boldthrough definitely pushed the project along. OTW opened DreamWidth in beta mode in April 2009, and began open beta testing of Archive of Our Own in November 2009.

In mid-January 2010, DreamWidth came under pressure by an undisclosed group who tried to convince DW’s server and PayPal, among others, that DW was a platform for child pornography. DW refused to give in to the harassment and intimidation, and promptly notifed users about the situation. The only consequence of the group’s pressure was that new requests for paid services were temporarily put on hold until DW was able to find a new payment processor service. DW remained true to its Guiding Principles by keeping users informed throughout this incident, and respecting freedom of expression by refusing to delete any posts or blogs to satisfy the demands of the group of trolls.

Which brings us to Tumblr.

Tumblr was launched in 2007. While not all fans have embraced it, citing reasons like character restrictions in replies and asks and the difficulty of finding others who share one’s fandom, it’s certain that the majority of fandoms are well-represented.

However, in July 2013, fans once again expressed outrage when Tumblr – without warning – removed without warning accounts flagged as “NSFW” or “Adult” from public searches, made those blogs inaccessible to Tumblr users not already following them, and deleted a number of tags from its mobile app, including #gay, #lesbian and #bisexual. In a manner unsettlingly reminiscent of Strikethrough and Boldthrough, Tumblr did not immediately respond, and the response posted 24 hours later was widely regarded as a non-apology apology. Tumblr claimed it had been trying to get rid of commercial porn blogss, and eventually asserted that all the removed accounts had been reinstated.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, it’s that of George Santayana: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Most blogging and social networking sites are in business to make a profit, and fandoms make them uncomfortable. They inevitably take steps to control the content being posted, to keep outside groups or their new owners happy, disrupting fandoms and deleting material that fans had considered to be safely stored.

The only solution I can see is for fans to copy and back up the things that are important. Maintain active accounts at several sites. Keep a list of your friends’ pseudonyms and emails.

Because the only thing that’s certain is that it’s going to happen again.

I highly recommed A brief history of fandom, for the teenagers on here who somehow think tumblr invented fandom: by ofhouseadama.

I intend to make proper footnotes at some point, but until then, here’s a list of sources used in writing this article:

http://astolat.livejournal.com/150556.html

http://astridv.livejournal.com/84769.html

http://boingboing.net/2007/05/31/lj-purge-drama-who-a.html

http://www.dailydot.com/culture/livejournal-decline-timeline/

http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/tumblr-nsfw-content-tags-search/

http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/tumblr-statement-banned-hashtags/

http://www.dailydot.com/society/pros-cons-tumblr-livejournal-fandom/

http://www.dailydot.com/society/tracking-livejournal-fandom-diaspora-infographic/

http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/16590.html?view=top-only#comments

http://elke-tanzer.dreamwidth.org/951013.html

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Archive_Of_Our_Own

http://fandom-flies.livejournal.com/profile

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Boldthrough

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Dreamwidth

http://fanlore.org/wiki/LiveJournal

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Tumblr

http://fanthropology.livejournal.com/374988.html

http://hatteress.tumblr.com/post/55834911159/tumblrs-new-nsfw-restrictions-and-why-turning-off-safe

http://innocence-jihad.livejournal.com/159327.html

http://innocence-jihad.livejournal.com/31786.html

http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/283323.html

http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/283781.html

http://metafandom.livejournal.com/114942.html

http://www.metafilter.com/61636/livejournal-suspends-hundreds-of-accounts#1712054

http://missmediajunkie.blogspot.com/2013/05/why-i-dont-use-tumblr.html

http://news.cnet.com/Mass-deletion-sparks-LiveJournal-revolt/2100-1025_3-6187619.html

http://staff.tumblr.com/post/55906556378/all-weve-heard-from-a-bunch-of-you-who-are

http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=LJ_Strikethrough_2007#After_the_Strikethrough_-_On_to_Boldthrough

http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/the-death-of-the-blog-and-the-rise-of-tumblr-210071.html

http://transformativeworks.org/sites/default/files/OTW_Annual_Report_2007.pdf

http://www.dailydot.com/business/yahoo-tumblr-fandom-lessons/

https://zine.openrightsgroup.org/features/2012/fandom:-open-culture-vs.-closed-platforms

http://www.zdnet.com/after-backlash-yahoos-tumblr-quietly-restores-adult-nsfw-blogs-7000018342/

Thoughtful summary and great collection of links.

One addition/correction: Dreamwidth is not an OTW project, though both OTW and Dreamwidth were developed by fans partly because of frustrations with LiveJournal, including but not limited to Strikethrough.

A brief history of fandom, for the teenagers on here who somehow think tumblr invented fandom: by ofhouseadama.

Why this is important (READ IT ALL).

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nwcostumer:

wrangletangle:

beatrice-otter:

tomato-greens:

joestrummin:

i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes

it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!

although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there – of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.

you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.

this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.

but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.

eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.

THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.

AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space – often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.

LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.

IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just – it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.

I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics.  They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross.  But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!”  Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it.  So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that?  No.

In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.

Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality.  And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.

Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?

1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse.  It was not meant to titillate or arouse.  It was meant to horrify.  It was seldom explicit.

2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.

3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half.  When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia.  Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex.  And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.

Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we?  I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too.  But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:

1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.

2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.

3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).

Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like.  And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them.  No, this was step one on a moral crusade.  If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands.  This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted.  It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit.  But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality.  Then anything with teen sexuality.  Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con.  Then whatever is next on their list.  It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.

Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service.  You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call).  You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising.  And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids.  Other than that?  It’s fair game.  You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge.  There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.

We’ve been down that road.  It doesn’t lead anywhere good.

Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.

During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.

If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.

reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.

AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.

This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paedophilia”. 

Damn I remember the LJ Strikethrough. It was sort of the beginning of the end for that whole website really, so I suspect it was ultimately not a good business decision.

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skalja
replied to your post “When
I was 15-17 and hanging out on LiveJournal (the primary social…”

I don’t think I ever saw the Katrina thing (?!!!!!) but I remember the childfree rhetoric. Normalized to an extent that’s just horrifying in retrospect – I knew it was awful then but it seemed more everyday awful, you know?

It was like…background radiation or something, wasn’t it? Especially since if you questioned it you were usually hit with “WHY DO YOU HATE FREEDOM OF SPEECH? WHY ARE YOU TAKING AWAY MY FREEDOM?” and no-one wanted to take away anyone’s freedoms, not then, not when the various governments across the world seemed to be doing a pretty good job of it themselves.
Of course, this was before I knew what freedom of speech actually meant…

It was so awful and messy. The reaction to Katrina was even worse, though. “These people had so much, and they lost a little of it” I remember someone saying sanctimoniously at the long-gone probably-unmourned-for fandom_wank blog as the death toll rose.

shit i remember from my 2007 – 2013 fanfiction.net experiences (before i finally jumped ship for ao3 like everyone else)

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susiephone:

  • “don’t like don’t read”
  • uses of the terms “lemon” and “lime” (apparently there was a difference. lemons were porn but i’m STILL not sure what a lime is. i also have NO idea how “lemon” came to mean “porn”. not sure i want to, tbh.)
  • soooo many “i do not own please don’t sue me” disclaimers
  • fics where the whole premise that the whole cast was trapped someplace together and the reviewers would leave questions in their comments and then the characters would answer them in-story. like “ask that guy with the glasses” except shitty and usually self-indulgent towards the author’s preferred ships. (i may have written one of these when i was 12.)
  • authors who legit updated on a schedule (and stuck to it). some every fucking day. (you still see this on ao3, but not NEARLY as much.)
  • fanfic authors who basically had a following and fandom of their own. (again, this still happens, but not as much. not sure if that’s a good thing or not.) not bad considering most of them were 13.
  • “yaoi!!! that means boy kisses!!! don’t like don’t read!!!”
  • putting “————-” or “xxxxxxx” bc ff.net wouldn’t let you insert a horizontal line to show the end of a section
  • very long, very rambley author’s notes
  • some of which had the authors interacting with/talking to the characters in the fic.
  • fics that weren’t so much stories as they were a chapter-by-chapter detailing of all the cliche plots and tropes used in that fandom’s shitty fanfics. (i actually sorta miss these, tbh)
  • songfics. no, not fics inspired by songs. fics where the lyrics were put in between every paragraph, with some lyrics altered to fit the characters. it was horrific.
  • fics that were up-front about the oc being a stand-in for the reader so they can read about themselves getting with their fave character. as in, it was written in second person and the summary outright said the pov character was meant to be the reader.
  • the forums being used for roleplay before tumblr rp was a “thing”
  • long, LONG author profiles, filled with things like “copy/paste if you’re a [whatever] shipper!” or obviously fake sickly sweet anecdotes (think chain email levels of bad), or worst of all (in my opinion), a pro-life anti-abortion story from the point of view of a fetus. it was as bad as it sounds, if not worse.
  • listing all your ships on your author profile page
  • seeing a title that was all lowercase letters and thinking “lazy” rather than “aesthetic”
  • “101 one ways to annoy [insert character here]” (voldemort was popular for these things)
  • it being fucking impossible to find f/f fic that wasn’t porn
  • writing ships as “characterxcharacter” instead of “character/character”
  • author’s notes in the middle of the story. literally you would be reading a fanfic and all of a sudden, in between paragraphs… “A/N: awwww isn’t it cute how they’re thinking the same thing!!! XD”
  • for that matter, author’s notes using the XD emoticon
  • people FLIPPING THEIR SHIT whenever their fave author (or just a well-established author in the fandom) changed their username. ESPECIALLY if they changed it from something fandom-specific to something more neutral.
  • “character x/character y. NO CHARACTER X/CHARACTER Z.” bc apparently you think i’d think your fic clearly marked character x/character y would be nothing but character x and character z making out.
  • trollfics trying to capitalize on my immortal’s infamy. there are still trollfics, of course, but they tend to be more subtle. 
  • for that matter, trying to pass a trollfic off as a legitimate fic rather than just admitting it’s a parody
  • specifically reading fics for your notp just to bash it in the reviews
  • people putting replies to reviews for the previous chapter in the author’s notes (this died down a LITTLE once ff.net finally added a reply function, but not much)
  • the great fanfiction.net purge (ahh yes. history lesson time. basically, back in the olden days of fanfiction, when everyone actually used ff.net, one fateful day, back in biblical times – 2011 – ff.net decided to make MA rated stuff – basically porn – not be allowed on the site anymore. ofc people kept posting it anyway, but then ff.net started deleting stories from the website with no notice to the authors. just poof! gone. the aftermath was HORRIFIC. people were FURIOUS, as a lot of people had no backup and just lost their stories. so ff.net stopped enforcing the rule, but the damage was done. this was when people began to officially leave for ao3, i think.)
  • lots of harry potter fanfics about the my immortal versions of the characters interacting with the canon characters. some of these were actually quite funny – i think they’re still around, but i don’t see them as much. (i actually wrote one of these stories. it is still, to this day, the most popular story i ever wrote.)
  • drabbles that were ACTUALLY 100 words long.
  • fictionpress (a sister site for original fiction. it was like wattpad before wattpad was wattpad. it never really took off. come to think of it, i may still have some stuff on there from when i was 12 i need to take down)
  • “crackfics” that consisted mainly of “lulz iM SO RanDOm!!!111!!!!!oneone XD cheeeeeeeese!!!!!!” humor
  • “i suck at summaries”
  • “this is my first story so please be nice”
  • “i’ll only update if i get 10 good reviews”
  • AUs before “AU” was a really widely used term, so the author’s note would have a length explanation for why they had to change things for the story and apologizing over and over instead of just noting the AU in the summary
  • AUs out of laziness rather than for creative/plot reasons (ie, “luna’s a gryffindor in this fic because i couldn’t find another reason for her to be here”)
  • authors notes apologizing for late updates
  • being genuinely shocked when you found a GOOD fanfic

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thetransintransgenic:

crowmeme:

the best and saddest thing on the internet to me is dead and defunct content – the still-standing electronic remains of people who are no longer here or no longer the same people who created them, all the links long defunct and the purpose long gone

your geocities pages, your forum threads, your facebook posts, may outlive you. everything you make may one day be an electronic ghost town, just glimpses of what was once an evolving part of someone’s life. look on the internet, ye mighty, and despair.

Of course, the other perspective on this is the exact reverse.

Around the colossal wreck, we are told, nothing beside remains – of this once-great kingdom, we must assume, of this king powerful enough to leave the tiniest fingerprint for us to see.

A ghost town is sad because of what might have been. The conversations that might have been had, the toys which might have been given to children and the young lesbians who might have ducked behind the store. The flecks of paint and the trails in the dust and the fingerprints.

But as for us – glimpses? Your Facebook page might outlive your grandchildren. All my friends I have on here – just on here – I have made through this one blog. How often have you scrolled through someone blog and thought “I would love to be friends with this person”? Why should 100 years make a difference? Glimpses? These are portraits and movies and snapshots and selfies and journals more deep and more raw than anything we have seen in history.

Look upon my very existent work – the fanfics written and the jokes shared, the stories we’ve woven together and the battles lost and the best of times we’ve had – frozen in amber, perfect as that day they were shared. Look upon my work and share it with me, laugh at my flaws and chide my innocence, listen to my rants and learn from my mistakes.

Folk’s not dead while their name’s remembers, we say as we read a book again and again and again, letting that one character live a desperate, vibrant life again and again and again… and us? HOW MANY NAMES WE HAVE.

We are not doomed to be Ozymandias – we will be the traveller, from our very own antique land, wandering endlessly and greeting every diver into the archives as yet another chance to live again.

LOOK UPON THE INTERNET, ye mighty – and live.

everyone say the most Web 1.0 thing they ever did i’ll start

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eclecticmuses:

dwarfvania:

charredasperity:

oddbagel:

x-cetra:

esteefee:

itswalky:

aijoskobi:

molly23:

jadegordon:

dovsherman:

prokopetz:

bogleech:

dragondicks:

flygex-eatin-on-softies:

ryanhatesthis:

laughterkey:

kayinnasaki:

darkbeastcaarl:

queenlyflesh:

lolman9000:

literal-ghost:

adriofthedead:

hamigakimomo:

numboars:

usbdongle:

one time i downloaded a MIDI of the Friends theme song off of someone’s Angelfire page

I tried to illegally download an MP3 of Simple and Clean but my mom picked up the phone and disconnected our internet.

I made an anime fansite on one of my pet’s pages on neopets.com and every single asset and art on it was direct linked/stolen from other websites because i didnt know how to upload images to the internet myself

I owned and used a .zip drive

I made an anime fan page on Angelfire that just had a bunch of gifs I found for things I liked INCLUDING those ancient ass gifs of a) Pikachu running, b) Pikachu balancing on a Pokeball, c) odd dancing Raichu, and a bunch of Rurouni Kenshin screenshots.

The background was set to black, but had that falling cherry blossoms gif over it.

The font was gold colored and it was COMIC SANS.

i made a fanfiction shrine that was up for two days before getting taken over by middle eastern hackers

the first time i ever used internet explorer i used it to go to the nintendo power website in order to get the toll free number to call nintendo and ask them how to get the raiden magicite in ff3. (otherwise known as ff6)

I downloaded MP3s from AOL chatroom mp3 bots. Also cgshrines was my original danbooru. (IT’S STILL AROUND, AMAZINGLY)

I used to watch a music video of one of my fave low-key boy bands (No Authority, what up?) on their interactive CD in the Mac Lab after school.

I once made a Kingdom Hearts AMV set to Good Charlotte’s “Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous” on Windows Movie Maker and uploaded it to Kazaa.

I had a Gorillaz fanpage that had a built in chat feature that I used to talk to my friends while in computer class because other messaging clients were disabled.  I was found out pretty quickly.

I actually printed out the neopets permission form for my parents to sign and then physically mailed it to them bc scanning and emailing it was beyond the realm of my ability

 I’m 99% positive that I was literally the first person ever on the internet to put screenshots of “Invader Zim” on a webpage.

I screencapped this during the first airing of the first episode and put it on my geocities homepage with a few dozen others before the episode had even ended.

That is its original size.

Streaming video wasn’t really an accessible thing but I was able to do this because I made my parents buy me an expensive device called a “TV card,” which allowed you to screw your cable television cord into your computer to watch live tv on your PC. The sound didn’t work, so I had to turn a real TV on in another room with the volume blaring if I still wanted to watch these television premieres while I ripped my exclusive cutting edge image galleries.

I also had a digimon page and was very proud of some of the moments I managed to screencap. There wasn’t any record feature so you had to be QUICK!

My first website had a different autolooping MIDI file on every page; one of them even used “The Macarena”. I used Internet Explorer’s proprietary <bgsound> tag so that there was no player UI and it couldn’t be turned off.

(In my defence, that was over 20 years ago, and a consensus hadn’t yet emerged that websites with audio were the Devil. It was a different time.)

I built the first website to show preview images of the KiSS dolls I found on an anime FTP site, a website which I later grew into the Big KiSS Page, leading to the popularization of KiSS dolls in western fandom. It led to a brief mention in Wired and my name being temporarily on the Wikipedia entry for KiSS dolls. I also made one of the first animated FKiSS dolls.

I also made the musteline sprites for Furcadia.

Oh, and I maintained one of the most popular and over-built player classes on LambdaMOO (where I was “APHiD”).

And I made some ANSI animations of Ranma ½ by hand.

Oh! And I made the first bendable hair for the original Sims game by building the first tool to give third-party creators access to the Sims character blend data.

When this first came around all the stuff in my head was just how connected anything I did back then had some root with Dove – so long before we even met or knew of each other!

I got my birds & bees talk from a CD-ROM textbook.

It took two hours to download the teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode I.

i put my comic strips up on a geocities page, an iteration of media which would later on be dubbed “webcomics”

Converted my gopher menu to an NCSA Mosaic page. It had an animated title exploiting an html bug.  Also, animated GIFs for icons. Remember those? hahah how quaint. But those went away in favor of Flash animations.  And then I helped work on the very first HTML 2.0 layer animations for Netscape. Oh, how far we’ve come. I hear animated GIFs are quite popular with the kiddos these days.

Yay, Gopher to Mosaic! I had to do that too, for the Perseus Project (it’s still around!) *Hi5s oldies* At first our homepage was just a long list of links snd some ugly gifs, until I consolidated it into an imagemap-based “dashboard” whose design I shamelessly adapted from LCARS.

Web -1.0: Searching college nets with Veronica and Archie. Posting Doctor Who fanfic on a coolege VAX bbs. Reading a roundrobin Doctor Who fanfic called Lime Jello that was passed around by mailing 3.25 floppy discs between writers. Performing an arcane conversion ritual to send email from the Bryn Mawr/Haverford/UPenn regional network across a bridge to someone on the University of Virginia’s regional network. Noticing when our IN% email addresses changed to the format name@such-and-such, which was a sign that our small regional network had hooked up with bitnet. Building a website for the classics department, and building my first personal homepage with someplace.edu/~username in the URL, which was fairly common back then.

We would get AOL installation disks in the mail and I would use the free trial that came with them every time. Eventually, we started getting calls from AOL asking us if we wanted to become actual members. They would always ask for me, but I wasn’t 18 so they couldn’t speak to me. I also looked at porn on Kazaa.

I had to wait up to an hour for my dial up modem to load the page I printed all my Gameshark cheats off of, most of that loading time was to load the “CONGRATULATIONS, YOU WON!” popup.

I briefly had the attention of my entire fandom because I had three entire unused LJ codes and most of the authors in our fandoms still hadn’t been able to get on and start porting their fic from the mailing list archive hells it was in. 

I roleplayed in the Star Wars Cantina on the Webchat Broadcasting System.

Also I’m fairly sure I was one of the first people ever to download and install Napster. When I found it, the website was FrontPage 95-tastic with clip art and bright blue and red Comic Sans text.

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