anyone notice a new trend of really entitled people joining fandom?

I feel like jerks have existed since the beginning of time, but it feels worse lately.

So far this year, I've witnessed:

And now, in the span of two days:

I'm trying to be a positive person in the communities I'm in, but GOD I am so tired. Every day I fight a battle deciding if I should just be a worse person, everyone's doing whatever the hell they want anyway.

*THIS WAS SENT TO A FRIEND. NOT ME*

the friend who received this is too nice to say something about it but i have reached a point now where i have seen them receive so many messages like this that i just can't keep my mouth shut anymore

this is straight up evil behaviour. whatever lighthearted tone this anon thought they were sending this with, i don't care. it's gross in every sense.

i'm speaking directly to whoever sent this now and frankly, if you follow me, non, unfollow me right fucking now because i don't want this energy anywhere near my blog. it hurts enough that you've targeted my friends with it.

listen up because apparently it bears repeating for the millionth fucking time -

FANFICTION AUTHORS ARE HUMAN BEINGS. they have lives and jobs and school and things they struggle with. maybe they've even spoken publicly about their struggles in the hopes their readers would understand them a bit better because at the end of the day this is a community and they have every right to use this space however they fucking want to.

"don't start a fic you can't finish" - literally shut up. shut up! we are not paid to do this, i will start and not finish whatever the fuck i want.

and holy shit, anon. as if this message wasn't disgusting enough, please let me state plainly something you "desperately" need to hear: no robot can give you what a human writer can. and the fact that you even threatened to just go to AI at this point shows how little you care about storytellers and all they provide for you.

again, i don't care if every word of this message was sent in jest or meant to be read playfully. it's not fucking cute. this shit hurts writers and ya'll need to realize that.

if you take time out of your life to send messages like this, you're a bad person. period. this is not how fanfic works, it's not how the world works. if you can wait two-three years for a movie or a new season of your favourite tv show, you can wait a few months for a fanfic to update. or you can wait forever. we literally owe you nothing.

i'm done sugarcoating it, ya'll. disrespectfully, grow up. grow up! enough is enough.

anyway

Hey anon if you've got that big a bug up your ass about works taking too long to get finished here's a handy goddamn tool for you:

You're welcome you ungrateful fuck.

Part of fanfiction is going on the JOURNEY with the author. And yeah, sometimes that means ending up in a dead end. But the journey was still FUN, wasn't it?

I really do NOT get people who bitch and moan about unfinished works.

Out of curiosity, I followed the link. It was way, way funnier than I could've predicted. I was expecting some sort of right wing conspiracy nut job, but this is way better.

Whatever they posted, it's bad enough that the host server forced a take down. 🤣

Or they're just lying. Heh.

Did anyone watch this nonsense go down in realtime?

earliest Wayback copy of that URL is not early enough to have anything that might have been there before the post quoted above

BREAKING NEWS

They are, of course, on Reddit.

I really, really have to go run errands, but the rest of you rubberneckers, feel free to go look at their sad, sad experience with being "censored" even there.

Man... is it 2002 again? I haven't seen one of these in the wild in a long, long time.

It’s a Brokeback Mountain troll fic, the summary has been doing the rounds on Tumblr. Behold:

And the A/N is all “ao3 is full of people ignoring all the beautiful precious canon pairings to write nonsensical m/m dirty porn!1! BECAUSE THEY’RE HETEROPHOBES!”

Oh, but they have so many more greatest hits than this, apparently. This drama from early December was also them. The plagiarized fic is now gone and isn't waybacked, but google's cache shows it.

Oh that's... something else.

Dude is really, really upset that fictional dudes are getting more action than he is.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but as a creator -

I am fine with "the audience" -

I am not fine with "the audience"

Save the fandom things. Preserve the fandom things. Respect the fandom things.

Enjoy the fandom things.

You also can't sell a print version of any of my fics. If you decide to print and bound my fics to add to your personal collection, or as a gift to your friend - that's fine. You cannot charge for it, and I don't approve of you selling my FREELY AVAILABLE WORK in any shape or form.

Also this is not true. You do in fact have the copyright to the specific writing you did in a fic, because that's not how copyright law works. Like this is not a grey area.

People who write IP content for corporations give up their copyright on a contractual basis--the company wants writing they can sell about characters/settings they own without getting entangled in royalty obligations etc, so they hire people. Who sign contracts saying they don't own what they write as part of that job.

That's why you don't own Star Wars stuff you wrote for Disney; you specifically agreed not to own it.

Writing for IP you don't own leaves you in a position where you can't legally monetize it (without taking out the Owned parts ad rebranding), but it absolutely does not automatically cede or void copyright. That is super not a thing.

SUPER not a thing, I cannot say this enough.

I can't sell my Batman fic, but neither can DC Comics without my duly authorized consent. Because they own Batman, but not the prose I composed about him.

Do not perform that kind of massive corporate overreach for them. Holy shit. Do they not own enough.

It’s fascinating that this misconception of copyright still exists. Haven’t we all seen the posts on here where authors beg fans to please not send them fanfic of their works? They’re not doing that because they feel like it, they do that because fans legally own their words and ideas, and an author who takes them even unintentionally can in fact end up in real legal trouble for taking something that’s not theirs. It doesn’t matter whether they own the canon.

This.

Copyright is the most basic of protections for all writers. If there’s anything professional/career writers want spread around, it’s the knowledge that all writers have the same protections that copyright confers on us.

Astonishing indeed that anon would attempt to upbraid somebody on copyright issues when, themselves, they understand them so poorly.

The idea that because you don’t own Batman, your Batman fanfic is public domain is one the DC-Warner Bros’ lawyers would take exception to as well. They know they don’t own the fanfic, but they own the hell out of Batman. Public domain? Not hardly!

PSA- this is going on right now. I wouldn't care if the stories linked to my AO3 or ffn account, but no, it's fully copied and pasted to this site. Three of mine were there. Make sure you check for yours, and write them an email to take it down!!

@jessicanjpa @edwardskhakipants @palmofafreezinghand @gisellelx @acewardcullen @therealvinelle share far and wide!!!!

@annevalkyriafiction @happyghostfanfiction @panlight @thecarnivorousmuffinmeta @olderthannetfic

Another day, another content scraping idiot!

Since there are a lot of new people on tumblr these days, I'm going to start this whole thing off by saying that this is my personal blog and while this blog does have AO3 in the name, this is in no way official or affiliated with whatever OTW might have to say on this subject.

Yes, I've seen the reddit post  about the GPT-3 bot scraping AO3. Yes, I'm aware that Sudowrite.com are using the data from that bot to generate text.

A few things I've learned as I've looked into this:

1. Bot scraping is legal. If a website is publicly available on the web (does not require a user to login in order to see its contents), then they don't have grounds to try to stop a bot from doing what anyone can do. Here's an article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation about why this is the case  and also why it could be considered (on balance) a good thing . For example, scraping websites helps academics and journalists do their work.

2. Elon Musk doesn't own GPT-3. He's listed as one of the founders of OpenAI, the group who created GPT-3, but he resigned in 2018. He could still be a donor, but he has no official capacity in the organization.

3. Sudowrites is a tool that generates text, but it is a writing assistant not an AI author. It can not structure a story and develop a plot independently. It can not do research. It is meant to assist a human author by giving them prompts or ideas, helping them find a word or a phrase. But anything created solely by the bot would be at least somewhat incoherent and also in danger of committing plagiarism. For more information, I recommend this article.

What does this all mean? First of all, just because it's legal doesn't mean you have to like it. I'm not a fan of it, myself. but I also know that Google scrapes AO3 in order to provide search results for fans trying to find fic so I've kind of resigned myself to it.

Second of all, there's nothing AO3 or the OTW can do about it, really. There's a technical fix they can implement to prevent scraping by one particular bot (the one mentioned in the reddit article), but that's about it.

You, as an author on AO3, could lock your works to the Archive (restrict access to only logged in users). This might or might not protect your works from scraping. I don't know enough about these bots to give you an answer one way or the other. This feels gross. I understand that. I feel it too. Do what you need to do to feel better.

The original reddit post author states that they contacted the OTW Board, so there's no need for you to write in to AO3 Support. They're already aware of the situation.