Like people still haven’t explained why it is that ao3 is still in ‘beta mode’ after like 10 years, why they need so much money in donations each year and why sites like ff.net or LiveJournal never required that. Like yes ff.net doesn’t have as elegant a layout as ao3 but it was still perfectly functional and was a lot of people’s mainstay for sharing and consuming fic. Like I know ad revenue is part of how they make their money to host servers and shit. And then lj has always had the free option and paid/premium member option, and they’ve made good money off that shit over the past 2 decades but they never made it like “oh free version is so rudimentary” and tried to force your hand to buy the premium membership. Lj was free and very fun to use and if not for that Russia bs I would prob still be using it today.
Ao3 has a nice layout and some features (like decorating series, “inspired by” works, etc) that I hadn’t seen on other sites and that’s why a lot of us migrated over there. But all this money being funneled into it legit doesn’t make sense to me because all these other sites don’t make the users pay for server fees…and it can’t cost that much just to have the pretty layout.
I think we need to stop putting ao3 on such a pedestal that we can’t ever have critical conversations about it without someone being reactionary and going “WELL MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN SITE THEN”
Also the fact that ao3 stans keep hiding in the replies on Erikas post says it all cuz they can’t even be bothered to reblog directly from me or other folks to make their rebuttal
Because they don’t accept advertising revenue and they don’t sell user data to advertisers. Sites like fanfiction.net are “free” because they derive profit off their users. This profit comes from people who think they can use this user data in a useful way, and will pay money for it. This can be especially dangerous with sites featuring LGBT content; sometimes people literally will say, “I will give you a shitload of money if you give me all the information you have about anyone reading porn featuring consenting gay adults while living in a theocratic dictatorship where being gay is illegal.” And who wants to know? Well, right now we don’t know. It could be an aid group, a religious group, the theocratic dictatorship’s police force. It’s very easy to obscure who’s paying for what data.
To keep that revenue stream, sites like FF.N have to keep their advertisers happy. Fandom has often been targeted by religious zealots who approach advertisers on sites we use, like Livejournal and FF.N, and say, “Your ads are being displayed on the same page as GAY PEOPLE KISSING! This is disgusting!” And when advertisers threaten to pull their business, LJ and FF.N have traditionally gone, “No, don’t leave, we’ll delete the stuff you don’t like off the site.” That’s why FF.N doesn’t officially allow explicit fic on the site, and will delete it if advertisers ever get upset about it in the future.
But the AO3 has said, “We are never going to accept advertising and we will never sell user data, because we want to be able to decide entirely on our own what content we will host,” so they run entirely on donations and investment revenue.
It’s possible that an anti archive that agreed to delete anything objectionable off the site would be able to run ads and therefore operate much more cheaply. Though even then it should still be run by people keeping a sharp eye on what data they are giving away, so they don’t, for example, give Saudi Arabian authorities the street addresses of LGBT users there so they can be arrested.
Also, people haven’t explained? This has been explained over and over again, because every time AO3 has a donation drive there’s some bright spark who doesn’t understand how social media revenue streams work or that servers cost money and goes off on a rant about it instead of spending .3 seconds googling the topic.
This has been explained REPEATEDLY. If op is too lazy to look up those explanations (and they aren’t hard to find), then that’s on them.
If @synclaires is going to accuse Ao3 of “fishy” financials it would be nice if they’d provide some sort of proof or explanation besides “I personally don’t like how they manage their leftover funds”
Ao3 is pretty transparent, they provide a service free of charge, if you want to accuse them of fraud or something, then make your case. But vague “they ask for more money than I think they deserve” posts are just shit-stirring.
I wonder if the Russian troll farms take secondary target work outside purely political targets. Because LJ is a main competitor to Ao3 and all, and they are owned by Russians… And this kind of agita does kind of read a bit like the pre 2016 election trolling from where I’m sitting.
M’ jus sayin…
*DING DING DING* WE HAVE A WINNER.
I guess @synclaires is perfectly happy having her data mined by the Russians – you know, the people who fucked with the American election to install their puppet in office – but I am sure as hell am not. Ao3 is a non-profit, which means that – just like another really valuable entity, the American Civil Liberties Union, the people who literally have been spending millions suing Trump and his minions to prevent him from going full-blown fascist – they depend on donations.
Now, if @synclaires is so damn sure “Ao3 stans” are wasting donations on riotous living, she’s perfectly free to believe that. She’s also perfectly free to believe that Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor, or that QAnon is something other than a 4chan joke on stupid conservatives. But if she doesn’t want to look like an idiot, she really needs more than just WHINE MOAN BITCH BITCH THEY WANT MY MOOOOOONEEEEEEYYYYY THEY ARE MEAN AND GREEDY AND WHINE WHINE WHINE to back it up.
Or, y’know, she can just not give them anything.
Her choice.
If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
LJ suspended a huge number of user accounts, many paid, because of content they deemed objectionable.
Fanfiction.net purged almost all of its adult content.
AO3 was born as a reaction to events like these, to protect fans from censorship, from their user information being sold, from their stories being deleted.
Without going into a bunch of history you can easily look up, AO3 was founded by fans, for fans. The reason it costs so much money to run: it does not sell any ad space (so it has no ad revenue), and server space and bandwidth are extremely expensive. You can do a little research and see how much it might cost to run a site the size and scale of AO3.
You may not know that a database of user information is considered a hugely valuable commodity. That information can be mined and sold to advertisers. LJ and ff.net are not nonprofit sites. They can, and do, sell their user information. AO3′s user database will never be used for that purpose.
All of the above rebuttals and also…
“all these other sites don’t make the users pay for server fees…“
AO3 doesn’t either. Donating is completely optional, and you can even click the little x on the banner to make it go away.
It’s really unobtrusive as fundraisers go, for that matter. Only one email and an easily removable banner. No pop-ups. No paywall click-throughs.
Nobody is “making” anyone donate, ffs. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. If you can’t afford to, don’t feel bad. You can still keep using it regardless, and there isn’t even a tiered system that makes your unpaid use inferior to that of paid users (like LJ and DW have).
And you STILL don’t have to look at ads (or “sponsored” content, which is fucking ads) even if you don’t.
That’s a pretty sweet deal.
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