The Platformization of Fandom and its Discontents: Understanding Platform Harms Through the Archive of Our Own

Abstract

While platformization is often discussed in relation to commercial platforms and the impact of the profit motive on their design and governance, many of its common problems also plague the design and governance of noncommercial platforms like the fan fiction archive, the Archive of Our Own (AO3). Taking as its departure the 2023 End OTW Racism campaign, which urged the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) to address fandom racism, this article argues that AO3 demonstrates fundamental platform problems unrelated to commerciality. The End OTW Racism campaign arose in response to the long history of ignoring racism in Anglophone media fandom. However, it also demonstrated fundamental issues related to platforms, such as the dangers of the fiction of neutrality; the problem of scale; hostility and harassment; and the ways platforms become infrastructural.