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.
The whole problem started when social media put everyone together in one unmoderated community that isn’t easy to search or filter.
In the case of AO3 specifically, however it was actually created to be thesite for the taboo stuff that no one else would host (ask me about the history of AO3).
So in that specific case the people who don’t want to see incest and underage fic should go build their own site. Lol
I hate to break it to you, anon, but that kinda already exists. If tagging and filtering isn’t enough for you, there are sites like baraag, which is a total clusterfuck (complimentary) of problematic sexual content, ao3 was created specifically for dead dove fic, and there are a few others like that that are just obscure enough that we don’t talk about them much here. In most cases, especially on the internet today, smut is something you have to actively go looking for in order to find, which is how I think it should be.
The thing is, proshippers don’t want this discourse to exist. If antis were just upset about improper tagging or the lack of child-friendly sites, that would be totally fine, in fact I often have those complaints too, but antis are often more interested in shaming and bullying people for fictional content rather than coming up with real solutions to their problems.
Don’t get me wrong though, I absolutely think there should be more websites specifically for sfw content so the two can be a little more separate. Then it makes perfect sense to take something down if it violates community guidelines for that specific site, and that wouldn’t count as censorship. Boy, do I miss a lot of aspects of the old web.
AO3 LITERALLY ENCOUREGES you to make a copy of its code to go make a new site. People just don’t want to do that. They took AO3 because it was popular and then tried to remove the very aspect of it that made it so popular in the first place!
You really want your own site? Do it yourself. Antis certainly won’t.
