During this weeks round of ‘So is Ao3 ever going to get its shit together re:fandoms racism problem’ someone suggested ‘well if they’re going to keep claiming they’re an archive why not make it more like an actual archive and get rid of all the social aspects’ (specifically kudus, comments, & hitcounts, though the pro’s & cons of also ditching bookmarks were discussed)

@Satsuma bookmarks and collections are very important features; they should expand and improve upon bookmarks and collections and get rid of the other stuff

@Lady the issue is you can add your own notes / tags on bookmarks & people have used this as an avenue for harassment in the past. So if harassment is one of the issues you’re trying to solve they do need to be discussed

@Satsuma i think the advantages to enabling folk organization and categorization of fannish content FAR outweigh the negatives

the kind of actual harassment which could be performed via bookmarks or collections (beyond just like, “Joe’s Archive of Boring Fics, which is not harassment, just uninspired criticism, and can be safely ignored by fic authors [who aren’t even notified about bookmarks anyway]) is sufficiently difficult enough to pull off to be rare and falls easily under “abusing the service for things the service is not meant for”. there is still a need for moderation there, but no differently than someone just putting that same content in a fic and publishing it?

@Lady yeah which is basically my main concern with this proposed solution — it doesn’t actually successfully eliminate the need for moderation bc any site with user generated content inherently requires moderation. And the primarily issue at stake is that Ao3 has consistently failed to moderate its userbase