Well, basically, there are a bunch of problems with AO3 and OTW that OTW has been chronically unable to address in a timely manner for structural and organizational culture reasons, and I think that's bad.
Some of those are problems with the way that AO3 operates as a fanfic archive. For example, the lack of a system for canonizing freeform tags - that's a huge issue for AO3's usability as an archive, it's been a problem for I don't remember exactly how long but I think at least 5 years, and it's taken forever to address it in a meaningful way (and the problem isn't a lack of resources or manpower, because there's a ton of manpower for tag-wrangling). Other things are more organizational - for instance, there's a chronic deficiency in resources, support and outreach for non-English language volunteers and users. And there's a really troubling lack of safeguards and abuse protections for volunteers, and an absence of things like dispute resolution and conflict management resources, or people to basically serve an HR function, and an internal tendency to treat issues that do arise as fandom power struggles. And that's all really bad for volunteers and ultimately for the site and the organization.
So it's things like that, where there are real problems with the way that OTW operates, and the existing organizational structure has been extraordinarily slow and deficient at addressing them. And then people just circle the wagons, regardless of what criticisms people are actually making, and act like that the only people who criticize AO3/OTW are antis who dislike age gap ships, or whatever.
no subject
Some of those are problems with the way that AO3 operates as a fanfic archive. For example, the lack of a system for canonizing freeform tags - that's a huge issue for AO3's usability as an archive, it's been a problem for I don't remember exactly how long but I think at least 5 years, and it's taken forever to address it in a meaningful way (and the problem isn't a lack of resources or manpower, because there's a ton of manpower for tag-wrangling). Other things are more organizational - for instance, there's a chronic deficiency in resources, support and outreach for non-English language volunteers and users. And there's a really troubling lack of safeguards and abuse protections for volunteers, and an absence of things like dispute resolution and conflict management resources, or people to basically serve an HR function, and an internal tendency to treat issues that do arise as fandom power struggles. And that's all really bad for volunteers and ultimately for the site and the organization.
So it's things like that, where there are real problems with the way that OTW operates, and the existing organizational structure has been extraordinarily slow and deficient at addressing them. And then people just circle the wagons, regardless of what criticisms people are actually making, and act like that the only people who criticize AO3/OTW are antis who dislike age gap ships, or whatever.