2009 – GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 – FFN forums deleted
2011 – Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 – major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 – Quizilla shuts down
2015 – Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
… they deleted Fandom Wank???
Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.
2007 – Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
2009 – Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
2012 – Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost
I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.
I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.
Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.
Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down.
Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.
Yahoo owns Tumblr.
1356: 50% of monks.
People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.
AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.
2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost
Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005
Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.
A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.
^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.
these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view
FF.net banning porn isn’t a “fandom purge” though, just a porn purge. Fandom isn’t just porn.
Yahoo/other sites being incompetent/dying isn’t a “fandom purge”, it’s just bad business.
Youtube using content ID so you can no longer use stolen music is a GOOD thing, because YOU DON’T HAVE LEGAL RIGHTS TO THAT MUSIC!!!!!
Megaupload was MEGA FUCKING ILLGAL
God
It’s like none of you know… law.
No, fandom isn’t just porn, but when “porn” gets targeted, it’s always the m/m stuff that gets attacked first, followed by other queer stuff and anything made for women’s taste. To me, that’s a problem.
Queer content tends to be rated higher than straight content, even voluntarily and by the content creators, so deletions based on metadata will hit it disproportionately and include content that isn’t actually explicit. Queer content also attracts more harrassing grudge reports. AO3′s site rules and site culture discourage all of this, but it’s the reality for most internet spaces and was certainly the reality back when many of these FFN deletions happened.
There’s no specific definition of a “fandom purge”. The events people are mentioning here had a major negative effect on fandom and/or destroyed many fanworks. In many cases, they were caused by incompetence or by the host having other priorities, not by some specific targeted attack.
That doesn’t lessen their impact on us.
Megaupload going down and Youtube adding content ID were intended to stop straight up piracy. They also had a side effect of destroying lots of perfectly legal fanwork, specifically vids, which have historically been lost at an even greater rate than fic and collected and archived only rarely.
The way that music is used in vids will generally fall under fair use, though it’s not a defense that often gets tested. Vids have their own sort of vocabulary where the song and the images come together to create a meaning that is more than the sum of its parts. You can’t simply replace the song and have the same work with the same meaning. Vids aren’t piracy, and it is only the creeping, grasping erosion of fair use understanding by corporate propaganda that makes anyone think so.
It’s simply not accurate to call that kind of remix use categorically “illegal” in the US.
Even youtube has reinstated plenty of fanvids after a fair use-based challenge. I’ve done this myself. Many of the challenges about music on there are completely spurious. (There are scam artists who claim rights they don’t actually own.) The ones that do come from the real rights holder are not taking fair use into account.
The actual law is far more permissive than the de facto situation where we’re dependent on hosts that care about advertisers.
The original post was not intended to pass moral judgment on yahoo or ffn or anywhere else, just to suggest that the current tumblr shenanigans are part of a long history. My conclusions are:
1. Fans who got in via tumblr should take heart: fandom won’t be over even when we inevitably leave tumblr at some point (which won’t be just yet anyway).
2. We got tired of all of the deletions and built AO3 to protect fic. It’s time we started doing the same for art and vids and blogging because all of those are still vulnerable.
3. Websites have every right to not care about us… But we have every right to leave them and make our own spaces that value us.
“Insulin products costs very little to manufacturer, but prices have skyrocketed in recent years. A vial of insulin that once cost around $25 now goes for about $400 to $500. The activists are demanding that Sanofi immediately lower the price of its insulin products by 90 percent.
…"Dr. Vikas Saini, co-director of the Right Care Alliance and an organizer of the protest, pointed to recent researchshowing that the cost of manufacturing insulin is so low that companies like Sanofi could drastically reduce their prices and still enjoy a 500 percent retail markup. Saini said insulin has been around for a century and costs about $5 to manufacture, so nobody should die from lack of access.
…"Under a for-profit health system, even people who have health coverage can find medicine unaffordable.
…"The three major insulin manufacturers have come under increasing pressure to lower prices as this crisis continues to make headlines.
…"A class-action lawsuit filed in a federal court in New Jersey accuses Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi of acting like an insulin “cartel” and raising prices “in lockstep,” and the court recently granted the Type 1 Diabetes Defense Foundation permission pursue a parallel lawsuit against insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers for their role in the affordability crisis, along with manufacturers.”
I'm Still Kicking 