I'm Red (they/he white, 25 y/o) and I'm gay with a lot of opinions. Check the links for more info. If you need something tagged please message me. Or just talk to me about whatever man.
The first time I heard my parents swear, I was about 6 and my dad and I were buidling something out of two-by-fours in the garage and he hit his thumb with a hammer and, naturally, yelled “SHIT!”
I stared at him.
He stared at me, eyes watering.
“Now listen,” he said, forcing himself to remain calm as he held his rapidly-becoming purple thumb. “-That’s a word we say ONLY when we’re Really, Really hurt. Now go get your mother.”
And for an improvised moment of parenting, that was actually brilliant because I was a clumsy, uncoordinated child and was basically constantly falling, running into walls, knocking shit over and generally sounding like I was involved in a fatal accident in the other room, but now my parents knew not to worry unless they heard the reedy voice of a pained elementary schooler shrieking “SHIT!”
My teachers on the other hand, were significantly less appreciative of my father’s genius.
So, I got 5000 kudos in 12 hours, evenly distributed across all my fics, in a small fandom deep in hiatus. Obviously, these are fake, there just aren’t that many readers, and some of these stories are niche oneshots posted a year ago.
I’m sure some of you have noticed or experienced it yourselves, but I haven’t seen any posts about it on here, and this kudos bot has hit our little fandom HARD over the last few days. Every other newer fic is affected, although not all to the degree mine have been, some experience bursts of 40-100 kudos on a single fic. This is just a psa, if this happens to you, or you’re confused with the numbers you see with others. The writers themselves are not doing this, it’s a third party.
I do NOT want these kudos, they’re meaningless and not reflective of real reader interaction, and it feels really shitty to have these forced on you. This is not harmless, certainly not to me, but not on a larger scale either. 1) It makes it impossible for me to gauge my real stats, it’s hit every single one of my fics. 2) it’s demotivating because it’s burying the real guest kudos, I don’t know if any of them were real so I can’t be happy about them. 3) it’s unfairly promoting my fics relative to others, which I feel horrible about. Kudos is the most common metric for readers to sort by, and I don’t want to benefit at the expense of others. 4) It’s undermining the system at large, making kudos a useless metric by which to judge stories. 5) I worry people will suspect me of doing this myself and that I look dishonest, and it’ll be at best a reader-deterrent and at worst get me reported.
Ao3 is not able to do anything at present, was the response I and many others got. I understand it’s run by volunteers and resources are limited, and this post is not meant as a complaint. But I wanted to show the scope of this, because in a small fandom, this is a massive impact, fics don’t GET that many kudos, and it’s already at a point where kudos are meaningless, just a few days into this. And the bot is still at it.
Have other fandoms been hit this hard? Is it just less visible in larger fandoms? I’ve talked about it in discord servers and reddit and not gotten much response from outside the tdp fandom, but enough to know that it’s not EXCLUSIVE to tdp.
The bot hit my fandom too (Mass Effect). I’ve done some research, and it appears to have struck several fandoms over the last month. My fics haven’t been hit (yet), but it’s obvious on new fics because the bot doesn’t leave a proportional number of hits. It seems to have hit all fics posted/updated over the span of 12 hours or so. From Facebook group discussion, it sounds like it’s usually random, so there may be other older fics that also got hit. I’m not sure.
It’s really baffling why anyone would create this bot. Mass Effect is a relatively small fandom, too, though I don’t know how it compares to TDP. Getting 20-60 kudos is impactful on these smaller fandoms. I don’t know if it’s someone trying to be nice, or someone trying to overload AO3’s kudos storage. If it keeps attacking AO3, it’s going to make guest kudos meaningless and maybe even cause the option to be removed.
Thanks for sharing your experiences!
We’ve seen both older fics and newer fics hit. It does seem to disproportionally hit newer fics, even taking into account that the effect is more visible on newer fics. It’s hit stories with 1000+ existing kudos and stories with 3. It’s hit long stories and short. All ratings and tags.
It seems to strike in different ways, so there may be multiple bots running in parallel. Sometimes it hits a single fic, sometimes an author, hitting all their fics at once and usually fairly evenly, as happened to me.
It’s hit me five times total now, twice on all fics, three times on single fics. 7000+ total bot kudos, at this point more than my real kudos count. So kudos are very much a meaningless metric in our fandom at this point, it’s hit at least every other new story, but not evenly, some fics get 50 and some 300, when hit.
I haven’t been following the kudos bot issues very closely, but based on what people are saying, I’m wondering whether this is actually a kudos bot, or perhaps instead a completely unrelated web crawler with an unintended impact.
(For context: Hi! I’m a Computer Science grad student who’s been semi-lurking in the TDP fandom for around a year and a half now! Web crawlers are not specifically my field of study, but I do study computer systems and infrastructure; this means that web and networking infrastructure is something I deal with a lot, so I’m hopefully qualified to comment on this.)
I think many of y’all need to be educated about the concept of lateral aggression because too many of y’all think that being marginalized yourself gives you a free pass to act completely fucked up towards other marginalized people, even ones in your own community that you share marginalization with, because you’re under the false impression that your behavior isn’t harmful on any meaningful level and that’s not true. Not in the slightest.
Too many of y’all wield your marginalized identity like a shield to try to minimize and justify your behavior and that is causing active harm to the rest of us while simultaneously making it easier for our oppressors to continue oppressing us. Knock it off and get over your bully complexes. The world is not your playground and your behavior is causing tangible harm to those you come in contact with.
The weirdest thing ever is to see someone bullying someone else and then have them be like “but I’m gay/trans/POC” like… and??? That doesn’t have any impact on how fucked up your behaviour is???
an incel takes to 4chan tulpamancy in order to get a girlfriend, however, he scorned this new woman from the start, simply because she wasnt real. they go through cycles of once-sided hate and reciprocal love, though the man understands he can never truly find happiness, and his hate for her grows stronger. years pass, unchanging, and though she always smiles and blushes cutely when she sees him, the man worries that she feels the same hatred towards him. one night- whether as proof of the woman having her own real thoughts and feelings, or simply the mans guilt manifesting onto himself- she sneaks up behind his soul, and twists its neck off, killing him and leaving only her in his body. with the woman being a constructed spirit unable to pilot a physical form, the mans body lies catatonic for weeks before eventually starving to death, and she dies alongside it.
There is no shared white history. Europeans all hated each other from the first settlers up until the 1500s. No Italian has even fucking heard the word “Odin” until long after (”white”) christian missionaries nearly eradicated that religion. If you and I are both white than our ancestors probably fucking hated each other. Hell, if you’re a white mutt like me, various roots of your own family tree fucking hated each other and considered each other foreign savage barbarians. The only thing that unifies the white race is skin color and privilege, and neither of those things fill me with any kind of pride.
