antis and Puppies
May. 15th, 2018 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraRandom thought of the day: could the "antis" pull off some sort of concerted voting campaign against AO3 the way the Puppies did against the Hugos?
I think my answer is no. Blah blah blah: First of all, the OTW Board doesn't all turn over at once, so even if the antis were able to vote in a slate of candidates, as long as it was only three of the seven seats, the other four board members would still hold the majority. It would be a divided and dysfunctional board, but hopefully not a destructive one. (This is assuming the antis could only pull this off once and in the next election the general population would rally, which, it occurs to me, could be complicated by the election rule against "outing" - when this happened to the Hugos, we were allowed to talk about everything we knew about the Puppies, but I guess "quoting objectionable things people have said on Tumblr" is actually an illegal OTW election behavior.)
Secondly, the OTW election timeline is more like the Hugo period between nominations and final voting than the nomination stage where the Puppies were effective - OTW members have a couple of months between candidate declarations and elections to talk about the candidates and convince people who might not have voted to cast ballots. The size of the OTW electorate is roughly comparable with the Hugo population, which is part of what got me thinking about this in the first place (OTW says they had 5376 eligible voters in 2017 who cast 682 ballots). My recollection is that in 2015 the Puppies were able to get about 150 people to join in time to nominate - if the antis got 150 people to join in time to vote, there would still be time to mobilize some of those 4000+ OTW members who otherwise wouldn't bother.
Thirdly I'm not sure there's anyone among the antis who would take on the leadership of coordinating and publicizing a slate. And also I'm not sure they could actually find candidates given that OTW Board candidates have to come from committee staff and I don't get the sense that the antis are particularly out there volunteering let alone serving as staff. (Which, I mean, I'm not either, but I'm also pretty happy with the AO3 status quo.) Which is maybe the biggest sticking point but I wanted to think through what this might look like. I guess it just interests me to consider the parallel at all... unhappy self-righteous minority groups who would like to see a shift in the values of an organization and who feels welcome in it...
For anyone who is wondering what the fuck I am talking about re antis: on Tumblr, there is what looks to me like a growing pro-censorship movement mostly among young people, who would like to see AO3 adopt a major policy change to ban works with underage content. This movement isn't unanimous (I believe some of the people in favor would also like to ban rape/noncon, and some of the people would prefer to see AO3 shut down entirely - here's a sample discussion.) Some people I would like to loosely characterize as "older and infrastructure-minded" have responded with ideas about improving tagging, filtration, and curation, which some antis have responded to by saying that this is missing the point (of suppressing opportunity for people who do want to share those works to do so). I've been really surprised by the scope and seriousness of this cultural shift, like, it's not just trolls, there seem to me to be a lot of younger people in fandom who are genuinely upset by underage and age-gap pairings in a way that I just don't remember seeing ten or twenty years ago. (And a particular emphasis on 18 as the one true magic age irregardless of the local age-of-consent laws for either the writer or the setting of the story.) I don't know what I think is going to happen with this but I feel like *something* is going to happen if this younger generation of fandom holds on to these beliefs as they age - some kind of dramatic culture-clash event the way the Hugos had the Puppy crisis. I guess I hope it's a giant flounce a la the Dragoncon Awards rather than a takeover attempt. :( Anyways, if you want to know more about antis here's some stuff on Fanlore.
I think my answer is no. Blah blah blah: First of all, the OTW Board doesn't all turn over at once, so even if the antis were able to vote in a slate of candidates, as long as it was only three of the seven seats, the other four board members would still hold the majority. It would be a divided and dysfunctional board, but hopefully not a destructive one. (This is assuming the antis could only pull this off once and in the next election the general population would rally, which, it occurs to me, could be complicated by the election rule against "outing" - when this happened to the Hugos, we were allowed to talk about everything we knew about the Puppies, but I guess "quoting objectionable things people have said on Tumblr" is actually an illegal OTW election behavior.)
Secondly, the OTW election timeline is more like the Hugo period between nominations and final voting than the nomination stage where the Puppies were effective - OTW members have a couple of months between candidate declarations and elections to talk about the candidates and convince people who might not have voted to cast ballots. The size of the OTW electorate is roughly comparable with the Hugo population, which is part of what got me thinking about this in the first place (OTW says they had 5376 eligible voters in 2017 who cast 682 ballots). My recollection is that in 2015 the Puppies were able to get about 150 people to join in time to nominate - if the antis got 150 people to join in time to vote, there would still be time to mobilize some of those 4000+ OTW members who otherwise wouldn't bother.
Thirdly I'm not sure there's anyone among the antis who would take on the leadership of coordinating and publicizing a slate. And also I'm not sure they could actually find candidates given that OTW Board candidates have to come from committee staff and I don't get the sense that the antis are particularly out there volunteering let alone serving as staff. (Which, I mean, I'm not either, but I'm also pretty happy with the AO3 status quo.) Which is maybe the biggest sticking point but I wanted to think through what this might look like. I guess it just interests me to consider the parallel at all... unhappy self-righteous minority groups who would like to see a shift in the values of an organization and who feels welcome in it...
For anyone who is wondering what the fuck I am talking about re antis: on Tumblr, there is what looks to me like a growing pro-censorship movement mostly among young people, who would like to see AO3 adopt a major policy change to ban works with underage content. This movement isn't unanimous (I believe some of the people in favor would also like to ban rape/noncon, and some of the people would prefer to see AO3 shut down entirely - here's a sample discussion.) Some people I would like to loosely characterize as "older and infrastructure-minded" have responded with ideas about improving tagging, filtration, and curation, which some antis have responded to by saying that this is missing the point (of suppressing opportunity for people who do want to share those works to do so). I've been really surprised by the scope and seriousness of this cultural shift, like, it's not just trolls, there seem to me to be a lot of younger people in fandom who are genuinely upset by underage and age-gap pairings in a way that I just don't remember seeing ten or twenty years ago. (And a particular emphasis on 18 as the one true magic age irregardless of the local age-of-consent laws for either the writer or the setting of the story.) I don't know what I think is going to happen with this but I feel like *something* is going to happen if this younger generation of fandom holds on to these beliefs as they age - some kind of dramatic culture-clash event the way the Hugos had the Puppy crisis. I guess I hope it's a giant flounce a la the Dragoncon Awards rather than a takeover attempt. :( Anyways, if you want to know more about antis here's some stuff on Fanlore.
