AO3 was created deliberately as the place for taboo fanfiction that no one else wanted to host.
It was created in significant part in response to the spontaneous deletion of adult and queer content fanfic on other archives; specifically fanfiction.net and livejoural.com.
I cannot stress this enough. Fanfiction.net and livejoural.com straight up deleted users adult and queer content without warning, backup or recourse.
AO3 was created so that authors could host queer fic, porn, and transgressive adult material without the threat of deletion.
AO3 was created as the place for shipcest and underage fic.
If you want a clean archive with no taboo material, those archives exist. AO3 was created to be their alternative.
This is also true, but a major catalyst was that men in fic writing spaces were mad about fic written by women. We were being squeezed out of writing spaces because our content was not taken as seriously.
I was there during the purge on LJ (though I wasn’t a fic reader at the time) and it was brutal. The he effects of it certainly rippled through the entire blogging world. (which, to be clear was much much different than the current one.) Suddenly your own personal blog posts felt at risk even if they didn’t have “bad” content. But especially if they did, even in non fanfic contexts. Censorship impacts content beyond the thing being censored.
What fandoms was this men thing a problem for you?
As I recall and as is recorded, the major catalyst was companies screwing over fans; both by trying to create corporate Archie’s, and by purging queer and sexual content.
