A History of Fandom Purges

tsuki-chibi:

whitmerule:

liz-squids:

pearlmaser:

elfwreck:

olderthannetfic:

unclutterme:

olderthannetfic:

I’m curious how many related deletions we can come up with.

• 2002 – FFN bans porn
• 2002 – FFN bans RPF
• 2004 – FFN bans script format
• 2005 – FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic
• 2007 – Strikethrough, Boldthrough
• 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.