It's past time to cut through this fucking buillshit.

[tzikeh]

I have stayed out of the OTW insanity since it began. I didn't even know how to begin to talk about it, and I didn't want to wade in while things were shaking out, and I didn't want to read things that were going to make me angry, because I knew it would just cause me impotent rage, since there was nothing I would be able to do.



I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH PEOPLE WHO DON'T LIKE/DON'T WANT TO PARTICIPATE IN THE OTW IF THEIR PHILOSOPHIES ARE IN DIRECT CONFLICT (bolded now for those who fail at reading comprehension and think I'm defending OTW, instead of what I'm actually doing, which is bitching about people who hide their identities so that they can say nasty things about OTW), but I am so done with people who are against the OTW with absolutely no facts to back up their opposition. They are the Teabagging Party when it comes to OTW: frothing at the mouth with blind hatred, but they have absolutely no fucking facts and they just believe whatever their mental, seething leaders say without bothering with critical thought, or fact-finding of their own.

In case anyone reading this thinks that I'm somehow part of the OTW "machine," let me be crystal clear. I have no part in OTW. I'm not on the board, I'm not a beta-tester, I'm not a coder, I'm not part of the PR department, I'm not anything at all when it comes to the project. But I am DONE with this fucking insane bullshit Teabagger-mentality ignorance that has spread through some sections of fandom that are just spoiling for a fight with the OTW, because they've heard from someone who knows someone who said something they didn't like.

I have fucking HAD IT.

Whiny, shitty fucks who bitch about the OTW, but create sock-puppet accounts to do it so no one who knows them will know it was *them*, can shove it up their own asses. Cowards. Bullies. Those of you who have a beef with the OTW and have created sock-puppet accounts just to write about it? Show your faces, you craven pieces of shit. How dare you hide so that nobody who knows you finds out what you think. Afraid of conflict with people you know? Coward. You want to dish it out while not having to own it. Put up or shut up.

Comments

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

Here's some suggestions *I've* come up with, just off the top of my head, that I haven't seen anyone else suggest.

1) Cap participation.

Cut Yuletide back to a manageable amount of participants, say 1000 people. To be fair, select those people randomly from the group of people who actually signed up, and then tell everyone "try again next year." Of course this brings up its own logistical problems-- do you allow this year's participants to put their names in the hat again *next* year, or do you have them sit out one year so that a larger group of people can actually participate? How do you deal with accusations that the choices aren't random? Etc.

2) Randomly assign official uploading times to each participant, staggered over the last two weeks of the challenge.

These can go out with the assignments. "Here's your recipient, and your official uploading timeslot is from 5am-7am Eastern Standard Time on December the 20th." Of course, this means that some people will have less time to write than other people, but that's the only way I can see to keep the old upload form from breaking, so that's the way it has to be. Allow no exceptions for school, work, family commitments, time zones, etc-- if a participant's assigned upload time is in the middle of the night or the middle of her workday, she'll have to arrange a proxy. Failing to upload during your official upload timeslot will count as a default, and participants may be banned from future Yuletides at the mods' discretion.

3) Password-protect the archive on an invite code system.

Of course not permanently, but at least lock it down for a couple of days/weeks after stories go live-- enough time to cover the anon period, definitely, but maybe also for a few days after that. Assign each participant (and pinch-hitter) a unique invite code/password so that they can read their stories without running into archive crashes or slowdowns. Everybody else can just wait in a queue while the mods distribute invite codes/passwords slowly, over the next couple of days, as the strain on the archive's bandwidth allows. Sharing your code with someone else would of course be a Yuletide-bannable offense.

See? That's the kind of *practical* suggestion I don't see anyone offering. You know why? Because all those options SUCK. These are terrible ideas. But they're the only things that I can think of (and you would probably have to implement all three together, not just one, so call it a three-point plan) that would enable Yuletide to go forward without moving to the AO3.

Yeah, a tiny handful of people are complaining about the move to AO3. What do you think the reaction would be like if something like my three-point plan went into effect, because the mods decided *not* to move to AO3? I think the mods did what they had to do to keep Yuletide running in *as similar* a manner to past years as they possibly could, and I'm glad they did.

[slashpine.livejournal.com]

heh, yes, growth has its inevitable downside.

W/r/t #1: Oh snap!

[anatsuno.livejournal.com]

And even if these options didn't suck, the thing is, there is nothing evil in the fact that the mods of a large fest/challenge have power over that fest and are changing some things. If they'd gafiated and stopped paying the old archive and all the stories had been lost, it would have been a tragedy, but no one would have born them the same shrill ill-will than we're seeing with this - a move which btw ensures the exact opposite, haha. They could have said 'no Yuletide anymore, we're stopping this' and though the wailing would have been heard on the moon, the /wanking/ would have been a lot smaller, I bet.

It just drives me bonkers. I get that people have a stake in Yuletide, and are entitled to feeling upset by the move if they disagree for whichever reasons I don't even want to belittle - the fact remains, though, that if they have pretended in the past to be blind to the fact that the mods have modly power, it's their own wilfull blindness they need to question, not the whole 'mods have power' thing. mods always have power, in every fest known to fandom. It's a structural thing.

[shayheyred.livejournal.com]

I don't hate your #1 suggestion at all...it's harsh, but perhaps it would be for the best. Maybe the first 1000 to sign up, or the first 350 on any of three days...with no signing up another person. I dunno.

With all the yuletide madness fics, the whole process is ginormous. I applaud the mads for even taking on such a project, and have no quibble with whatever decisions they make. It's a shame there's such an anti-OTW culture of lies and misinformation out there.

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

Maybe the first 1000 to sign up, or the first 350 on any of three days...with no signing up another person. I dunno.

Yeah, but if you were really going to do this, you'd want to *not* set it up so that tons of people are all trying to sign up at one time. I think the only way to do it would be to spread it out, and then pick randomly afterwards-- then people have no incentive to slam the form all at once.

Really, the problem with the suggestions that I gave is that maybe they would allow Yuletide to run similarly in years past for the *participants*-- at least, the lucky 1000 who actually get in-- but each one also creates *ridiculously huge* additional amounts of work for the mods, to the point where it would hardly even be worth it on *their* part to do any of this stuff-- they'd have to hand-check 2500 sign-ups for sock-puppets, watch upload with an eagle eye to make sure everyone hits their upload timeslot, and then somehow build a password-protected archive that blocks people from direct-linking to stories, etc. There's just *so* many issues in each of those "fixes."

So they'd be cutting down Yuletide by half, which means at least 1000 people spending the entire Yuletide season being disappointed and envious and disgruntled and annoyed every time someone on their flist is like "OMG YULESQUEE", and also making things inconvenient for the participants, especially the people whose upload timeslot is really early in the process, who are not going to be happy that they have less time to write. And then, finally, locking everyone except those lucky 1000 people out of the archive for a week and taunting everyone else with stories they can't read, which is totally going to hit fandom's "omg clique" buttons. All that extra work for a half as big Yuletide... what would be the point?

Maybe eventually the mods will have to cap participation. I don't think it can just keep growing by hundreds of people every year forever. But with the move to AO3 it's more likely to be capped at, say, 5000 rather than cut back to 1000. And given that the move *also* makes it a lot easier on the mods to admin/run things, and that it provides a *permanent* home for the archive that won't go away if someone gafiates or can't pay the bills, it just seems like the obvious better choice.

But like I said, my point wasn't really "they COULD have done this and it might have worked," but that I literally have not seen *any other* suggestions from anyone as to how the mods could have made it work without moving. Zero, zip, nada. I mean, here's another suggestion that I just thought of: Maybe the mods should have canceled Yuletide for this year and next year. By December 2011 the AO3 open source archive software would be ready for exporting and use, and then the mods could install it at yuletidetreasure.org, and to pay for webspace and bandwidth they could put a big donation button on the front page and a big bold-font banner at the top of every story page, like on Wikipedia, saying GIVE YULETIDE MONEY, DONATE NOW. Etc.

See, those are concrete suggestions. They're crappy suggestions-- but at least they're options, and I haven't seen anyone else coming up with *any* options. (Unless they are like "the mods are lying and they could have stayed right there and done everything the same," but anyone who is actually paying attention knows that is an idiotic suggestion.) Basically, my point is, I don't get the backseat driving when you don't have any suggestions to give as to how to actually make things work.

[franzeska]

I did see one person making a suggestion of this type. She was annoyed at the slowness of the archive, so she suggested that yuletide should have been delayed by a couple of weeks this year (though still hosted on AO3) to allow more time for bugs to be worked out. I didn't find performance nearly as bad as she did, and I don't think delaying for two weeks would actually have helped, but this was a sensible, concrete suggestion.

I've seen a lot of people commenting that you shouldn't be required to have a solution in order to offer critique. This is a great point when the situation actually is a critic being met with: "Come back when you've written a bestseller/famous fic/blah blah prizewinning work of literary fiction!"

But we're not talking about people critiquing how the new archive actually works or the actual policy changes (e.g. AO3 isn't just 18+ even if yuletide remains so), and we're not even talking about people discussing their hurt feelings without making any comment on who should have done what. We're talking about people suggesting, often in so many words, that yuletide should have stayed at the old site and that the move shows some kind of ulterior motives on the part of the mods or AO3/OTW/whoever.

This is not critique of the kind where your complaints are valid whether or not you offer a workable alternative. This is just a lot of conspiracy theories and suggestions that have already been dismissed because they will not work.

That's what really gets me about that whole part of the wankstorm/discussion: the reframing of useless suggestions and paranoia as either "critique" or people "just expressing their feelings". (No, you're not. Not when your "feelings" consist of being in denial about matters of fact. The being angry part is your feelings. The thinking the mods are lying part isn't.) Argh.

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

I didn't find performance nearly as bad as she did, and I don't think delaying for two weeks would actually have helped, but this was a sensible, concrete suggestion.

Yeah, it seemed like a few people had a really hard time getting in for a *much* longer time than others-- I don't know if that has to do with specific types of internet connections, or what. Maybe it would have made sense to delay Yuletide a bit, but I got the impression that most of the "fixes" the mods & coders deployed were things that got worked out on the fly, seeing what worked & what didn't under battlefield conditions, and not things that they already had in mind and just didn't have time to fully implement pre-Yuletide. I could be wrong about that, but since Yuletide wasn't even 100% inaccessible for a full 24 hours, it doesn't seem like delaying for even three days would've been a good trade-off, let alone two weeks.

I've seen a lot of people commenting that you shouldn't be required to have a solution in order to offer critique. This is a great point when the situation actually is a critic being met with: "Come back when you've written a bestseller/famous fic/blah blah prizewinning work of literary fiction!"

Yeah, I said this over on executrix's post: if the criticism is, "In your story you say London is the capital of France. You should change that to Paris," then it's not reasonable to respond, "Oh yeah!? Well, you can't criticize me because you're not an author!" The criticism is correct and most importantly, the suggestion is constructive.

But if the criticism is "Your story is Andy/Tina and it should be Andy/Carlos because I hate Andy/Tina and I really want to read Andy/Carlos!!!" then it is actually quite reasonable to respond, "Um, nothing's stopping *you* from writing Andy/Carlos if you want it so much. So maybe if you want that you SHOULD do it yourself."

So, seriously, yeah. There are times when "Put up or shut up" is a fair response. If your argument is "The archive should not have moved, because now I can't participate any more, and that's not fair, because I love Yuletide so much," then I want to hear a another suggestion, some other realistic option besides moving. Otherwise just face up to facts: if you are never going to participate in Yuletide on the AO3, then you never would have participated in Yuletide again *anyway*, because it wouldn't have happened, the end.

(Even people who can't participate now because the archive as a whole isn't 18+ -- well, that does suck, but at least they'll be able to read the stories in future years, which wouldn't otherwise have existed.)

That's what really gets me about that whole part of the wankstorm/discussion: the reframing of useless suggestions and paranoia as either "critique" or people "just expressing their feelings". (No, you're not. Not when your "feelings" consist of being in denial about matters of fact. The being angry part is your feelings. The thinking the mods are lying part isn't.) Argh.

Yeah, there's a really strong implication in a lot of posts that loving something a lot gives you some kind of ownership stake in it, or at least entitles you to *keep* having it given to you on a silver platter. (A lot of these people talk about Yuletide in the passive voice-- "Yuletide *is* the biggest challenge evar, Yuletide *is* an important fannish community event," you know, like nobody actually *worked* to make Yuletide happen, like nobody actually put time/effort/money into it-- no, Yuletide just kind of *happens* naturally.)

Anyway, it surprises me, because no one would take this "but I love it, so you have to keep doing it for me" argument seriously for a second if it was directed at an individual fan, demanding that they continue to update an abandoned WiP, or that they shouldn't leave this fandom and go to that other fandom, or that they should stop writing RPS, or whatever. It all comes down to the same thing: no, you're not entitled to make other people do stuff for you, no matter how much you like their work and no matter how much free stuff they've given you in the past.

[franzeska]

Yuletide just kind of *happens* naturally.

That really bothers me as well, and I think it's at the heart of a lot of the complaints. It has gotten big enough that a lot of people seem to classify it with Livejournal or city street sweeping or something. If people see the OTW like that, that makes sense. But yuletide isn't even one of those things that has changed hands a bunch or had modly fallings out or had billions of mods with different visions. Then again, some of the people I've seen with that type of view have done it for enough years that they must have been around when it was small. (And that attitude, which is mystifying now, is utterly absurd if you look at the first couple of years of yuletide.)