Why AO3 is a censorship-filled cesspool that isn't worth engaging with

I got tired of even my anonymous comments on AO3 being deleted in as little as 30 minutes (if I could even get them through the aggressive spam filter in the first place) that I'm just going to post this here instead of trying to get it onto AO3 anymore. I also want to point out that the default option when posting to AO3 is to only allow registered users to comment on the fic/fanwork which is clearly because they don't want banned users to be able to post anything negative about AO3 or other users. It's not because of trying to keep out spam posts, either, because they already have a very strong filter that prevents anything it detects as spam from even being posted.

“Non-fictional comments” is one of many of the AO3 mods' ridiculous attempted justifications for deleting fics. If this standard were applied to all the posts on AO3, it would necessitate the deletion of almost all the posts on this site since they will use this BS excuse even if the “nonfictional comments” are only within the fic itself and not an author note/summary.

“Not a fanwork” is another of the many nonsensical reasons they'll delete an entire post even though this site hosts thousands of original works and there are even two heavily-used tags for these types of fics (“original work” and “no fandom”).

AO3 even sneaked in a provision of their TOS which lets them “justify” deleting any post for any reason: “Anything we determine is spam will be removed immediately. Users may be permanently suspended for spam the first time they post spam content.” This is a pretty harsh penalty when you consider how they're just making up their own definition of spam since they consider even “repeated identical or nearly identical posts in multiple places” to be spam when the actual definition is “irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the internet to a large number of recipients.”

They'll also label entire posts as “spam” simply because the author listed the same noncommercial(!) website in two different fics (yes, just two mentions is all it takes to qualify as spam on here!). So all of you who routinely mention tumblr or whatever in your posts, beware of AO3's tyrannical mods. Since there's no PM/DM function on AO3, their spam policy makes it pretty clear that they don't want people making any fellow fanfic-loving friends. They even wrote in their TOS that they alone decide what qualifies as spam and threaten to ban a user (not just an account) for even one violation of this ridiculous policy. All social media sites are commercial, BTW, which AO3's TOS explicitly forbids from being “promoted” (you're considered to promote it merely by mentioning the site even if you do so within the text of the fic itself). I saw two fics by the same author get deleted within just days after they were posted and no one even reported the fics either—the mods were simply waiting for this author who the mods didn't like to post something else so they could find some BS reason to delete them and then ban the author.

Mods seem to find almost nothing offensive unless it personally offends them which will result in them swiftly deleting the entire post even if the “offensive” comment was only one sentence out of 1000. They automatically find certain types of subject matter to be offensive even if done for humor/satirical purposes. I've seen a fic get deleted by the mods in two hours by an author that previously had another work deleted by the mods even though none of that writer's works violated the TOS yet the mods waited nearly two months to do anything about someone failing to use the Underage warning (which is expressly forbidden by the TOS). Because...priorities?

I always had a bad feeling about this site which was why I didn't post anything on it for a long time despite knowing of AO3's existence for years. AO3 is clearly a site for yaoi fans first and foremost and it seems other people simply moved to it once it became arguably the biggest fanfic site based on the number of posted works, although when you consider that the site's TOS doesn't prohibit low-effort posts such as one-sentence fics (yes, this is seriously a thing allowed on AO3—there's even a tag for it) or simply replacing character names in generic fics (many AUs and PWPs are this level of generic) and then posting them to multiple fandoms (unlike other fanfic-hosting sites which prohibit these practices), this feat of being #1 in volume isn't nearly as impressive, not to mention that this site allows fanart, Youtube embeds, etc which makes it more like a watered-down social media site than a fanfic site.

It alarms me that so many people have flocked to this site and largely abandoned the previously #1 fanfic site, fanfiction.net (which I've posted to many times over the last decade without any issues). At least fanfiction.net is transparent about what they don't allow and I've never seen or heard about any fics getting deleted that weren't explicitly disallowed by their TOS (and even then, only rarely, as it seems they only do a purge every decade or so).

If you don't believe me about this, go post something that criticizes AO3 in the “Organization for Transformative Works RPF” in the “Celebrities & Real People” section of this site (that's the name of the group behind AO3), even if just a comment. Just by browsing this section, you'll see that the only fics still there are ones that offer unending praise for AO3 and its mods because, of course, they've already deleted the ones that didn't.

I have zero desire to post any serious fics on a site that engages as hard in censorship as AO3 does and will only spend my time and effort getting the word out about this until they inevitably shut me down. Wattpad and blog/social media sites like Tumblr are the last sites I would recommend moving to since some of them require signing up for an account to browse and Wattpad doesn't really let you browse at all, making it a disorganized mess. I'd search Google for fanfics sooner than Wattpad, personally.

AO3 has changed their TOS since I wrote this but I'm not going to waste my time reading through it again to see what they've changed since they don't bother to adhere to their own guidelines anyway. They hide most of the fine print in their FAQ, anyway.

Also, hi to anyone finding this from a social media post! I'm aware that screenshotting of "sensational" posts like this is popular (this ain't my first rodeo on that front) so that they can be mocked on social media accounts controlled by the very people I'm mocking (*koff*Reddit*koff) but would like to point out that this is a form of plagiarism (gasp!). I know just how dearly AO3 cares about their crusade against plagiarism of fanworks no one was making money off of anyway and I'm sure that NO ONE who would waste their time defending the AO3 censors would EVER do such a thing as knowingly plagiarize something! Ironically, by screenshotting/copying this fic, it can be preserved past the few minutes that it takes AO3 mods to delete it into oblivion. So I thank you in advance for taking the time to preserve it as I am hereby granting you a lifetime license to copy this fic to whatever place your heart desires and, unlike AO3's mods, I won't try to change the definition of the word "license" so that it no longer means what anyone on Earth thinks it does ;-)