the O·T·W’s response to “End O·T·W Racism” fucking sucks

[hojarasca]

Ignoring for a moment that the post completely fails to acknowledgebarely acknowledges (it does say an easily‐missable « In May, fans organized a campaign against racism in the OTW » but it fails to name it or link to it in any meaningful way)¹ the recent action despite obviously being in response to it…

Since the posting of our original plan in 2020, we have completed or made significant progress on a series of goals to help protect our users and volunteers against harassment:

• We implemented the ability to freeze comment threads and turn off comments on your works entirely, giving you more control to moderate interactions on your AO3 fanworks.
• User muting was introduced to help you avoid encountering works, bookmarks, or comments from specific users when browsing the Archive.
• We have implemented comment blocking to prevent specific logged-in users from commenting on your works entirely.
• You can now opt out of receiving gifts on AO3, as well as opt out of allowing your works to be invited to collections.
• We have improved admin tools to facilitate investigations by our Policy & Abuse team.
• Internally, we have updated our Code of Conduct to make it explicit that discrimination based on caste is not tolerated in the OTW.
• We also implemented methods for volunteers to contact and submit feedback to the Board anonymously by introducing a separate feedback form.

We are still committed to working towards giving you more control over how you experience the Archive going forward. To that end, we will be expanding blocking features to cover more user interactions, and further limiting how guest users can interact with you on the Archive.

…I just want to highlight, again, how ⓐ almost all of these changes are technological in nature, and ⓑ none of these changes are actually specific to combatting racism. I am not complaining about the O·T·W implementing much‐needed technological features, but hiding behind technological features when people have been asking for systemic organizational change is a wilful sidetracking of what people are actually asking for. We do not want « more control over how you experience the Archive going forward », we want the O·T·W to stop being racist. Not a single one of these changes does anything to make the O·T·W, as an organization, less racist. (Although being less caste·ist is appreciated).

And look, I am making this post as a software developer. I would personally be appalled if somebody pointed to me doing my job and implementing features as evidence that they were somehow making progress on important issues that they, organizationally, need to fix. What the fuck is Legal doing? What is going on with the situation re: Policy & Abuse? No amount of new feature work will absolve them of these sins. It’s not an excuse and it’s not a fix.

Software devs working for the O·T·W: Stop letting them take credit for your accomplishments. (They won’t.) All the other volunteers: Stop thinking that the accomplishments of the dev team mean you don’t have work to do yourself. (They won’t.) Readers: Do not consider this an acceptable response.

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¹ Actually this bothers me so fucking much. How dare you “respond” to a campaign while completely failing to link back to any of that campaign’s actual demands. Like, did you even read them. This is a wilfully malicious attempt to reframe the conversation and will actively provide ammunition for racist fans to continue to mischaracterize ongoing antiracist work. Fuck all of that. I liked it better when I thought they didn’t mention it at all.