gg-selvish-deactivated20250602:
the worst thing that could possibly happen to ao3 is it being put on the app store so please stop asking for it because you don’t understand what would happen if that went through. ao3’s whole deal is it archives EVERYTHING, while the apple app store’s whole deal is keeping everything clean and safe. so if ao3 were to have an app all of the ‘bad’ stuff, including nsfw in general, would have to be censored at best or would be purged at worse. the google play store is more lax but who fucking knows what GOOGLE would police if they got their hands on the archive. do not ask for an app. do not use third party apps. it’s on mobile browser functioning perfectly, just fucking use that before you ruin everything for everyone please.
Stop demanding that your entire fucking online experience exist through apps. Buckle down and figure out how to use your internet browser goddammit!!!
Your dependency on apps is exactly *why* the app store and google play have the power over social media that they do. The less people rely on them, the less platforms will have to focus on becoming sanitized in anticipation for some obligatory app release.
You remember this is why Tumblr stopped allowing nsfw? Because of the app store taking it down?
I mean– there was more to it than that, but ALL of it is connected to the reason why sites everywhere are getting more and more sanitized.
i.e.
the app store (if I recall correctly) removed the tumblr app because of concerns about underage nudes on the site. Tumblr already did not allow sexual photos of underage kids, of course, but its enforcement of that rule had not caught everything. And this was unacceptable from the app store’s viewpoint.
But then they faced the question of… how do we bring the enforcement any closer to perfect?
Allowing porn used to be a really good thing for a new medium. It’s how VHS and Blu-Ray succeeded where Betamax and HD-DVD failed. But that was then.
It’s harder now (when nearly everyone of any age has access to internet-connected camera phones) than it was before (when you took pictures with a film camera, and got them developed at a public shop, and could usually only distribute them to others by making physical prints and mailing them out).
Makes it really easy to break rules.
As long as your terms of service say “go nuts, show nuts,” there will probably be some people showing nuts that belong to someone too young, or otherwise not properly consenting. You’d have to have someone looking at every picture of nuts and trying to detect any sign that these were perhaps not the nuts of a willing adult.
And in many cases this cannot be proven without demanding identification! This is why there was that whole attempt to pass a law requiring all sites with sexual content to make every member submit proof of age and signed forms of consent for everyone appearing in any image posted. This was why OnlyFans seriously considered going no-porn.
I’m not saying that it’s easy to enforce a no-porn rule either. I’m not saying it’s easy or even possible to write a perfect, always-valid definition of “sexual content.”
But to have a moderator look at something and decide “that’s sexual” is much easier than to have a moderator look at something and decide (with confidence they can stake the company’s legal future on) that the people in the image are definitely of legal age and gave enthusiastic consent to be there.
I don’t know what a solution would be. This is a problem everywhere on the internet, a systemic problem bigger than anyone’s individual actions, and there might not BE any really good options.
AO3 still allows smut, and has few enough rules that moderation is somewhat manageable. But I’m pretty sure AO3 only avoids this legal issue by not actually hosting any images, just text and links to images hosted elsewhere.
It’s harder for anyone to argue that someone was hurt or exploited by imageless text.
But not impossible.
And you can bet that if AO3 was trying to qualify for the App Store, they’d be getting those accusations a LOT.