hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity
You know it legally is a charity, right?
If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code …
The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function.
You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity.
They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a
publicly accessible budget – waaaay more info than most charities, in
fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are
vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much
servers/hosting costs.)
In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy.
I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason
it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text
based rather than video.
AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.
Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.
It sees about 6 million people a day.
About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running
searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per
search. The demands involved are astronomical.
JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.
It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.
But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?
Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.
Care to guess its budget?
Double that of AO3.
AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.
The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.
It’s
absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW
defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that
actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and
the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we
love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.
People keep asking “How can anyone have a problem with AO3 doing fundraising!”
And I’m just like…. Have people not noticed all the virulent anti-AO3 hate on tumblr propagated by the anti shipping community? Antis have a problem with AO3 raising money because they hate the fact that AO3 won’t allow them to censor content they don’t like and doesn’t tolerate bullying. That’s who is putting out these posts like, “how can this nasty site raise so much money?” Read between the lines.
And for all the people who are just like, “If they don’t want AO3 to to raise money why don’t they just not donate?”
Because antis are incapable of saying “this isn’t for me so I won’t support it but I don’t care if other people support it. They have to actively discourage other people from supporting the thing. At the same time, they also won’t stop using AO3 because 1) they’re a bunch of fucking hypocrites who want readership and that’s where the readers are and 2) they’re too lazy to put together their own archive using AO3′s open source code because that would require doing coding and buying servers and doing all the moderating they want, which is hard, and they just want to engage in empty virtue signalling, which is easy
Anyway, my point is, people need to be aware that these people are out there and they hate AO3 and they want it to go away even though they’re actively using the platform. They’ve even said they want AO3 to fail so something “better” (re, something they control) can take its place. Some of them are blatant about it, calling AO3 a cesspit of pedophilia, and some of them are subtle about it, saying more innocuous things like ‘Does AO3 really need 130K a year?” “Shouldn’t you give your money to individual needy people doing gofundmes for stuff that’s more more important?”
But all of these people have the same end goal, which is the destruction of the archive, and the way they’re going about it right now is to try to discourage people from donating.
So instead of asking, “Why do people object to AO3 raising money?” start telling people “Hey there are people out there who hate AO3 and want to destroy it and we have to protect the archive from them.” And donate, if you can, and signal boost, if you can’t.
Every year, multiple times a year, they convince ppl to fork out thousands of dollars and….literally nothing changes. There’s no doubt in my mind they’re pocketing most of this money lol
Yep
They just emailed me about this today and I’m ???? Where is the 100k+ going every time they do this? There’s been one major update that fanfiction has had for at least five years and they don’t demand money like that
You people realize that, like, server space and shit costs money, right? You realize that they need money to pay graphic designers and coders and such BEFORE you get to see those updates on the website, right? You realize that ffnet runs ads on their site and that’s how they’re earning revenue while AO3 is completely ad-free, right? Lord help me I know very little about finances or how to run a website but Wikipedia does the exact same thing but they have a far more massive user base to pull from. Do you like AO3? Would you rather go back to only having ffnet? No? Then maybe don’t baselessly accuse them of scamming people. You don’t have to donate to them if you don’t want to, they’re not holding your account hostage if you don’t.
Want to know how to search for multichapter fics? Or works without any relationship tags? How about only bookmarks that have tags added by the bookmarker? You’re in luck! You can find all this and more in our list of hidden search operators and neat tricks. o/
AO3 updated their filters and I’m so shook???
I love this so fucking much, you have no idea. Thank you, AO3. This made my day way better, and my life so much easier.
Yeah, and ff.n used to SPECIFICALLY encourage criticism in the review box before you start typing. I forget the exact language, but it was something like, “As well as telling the author how much you enjoyed their work, you could also give some advice on how to improve their writing.” I’m sure they were trying to build a sense of community and discussion amongst writers and readers, but what it ended up being was a lot of entitled children telling the writers on the site what they wanted to see and how to do it. It definitely contributed to the culture on the site back about ten years ago when ff.n was huge, where a lot of writers would ask for input and specifically follow it, kinda like Homestuck before it became Homestuck.
I’m glad they changed it. Now it just says “Type your review in this box.”
In my experience this is also partially indicative of a culture change in fandom too? I feel like people are a lot more accepting these days of “fic for fic’s sake” and there’s been an evolution in fandom culture where criticism is only given if specifically requested, because it’s understoodthat many writers are just writing for fun and not out of a desire to improve or expand on writing skills. The default these days seems to be “say something nice or say nothing at all,” and sometimes it even dips into “giving unasked for criticism is downright rude.” You even see this these days for little things: plenty of friend-writers of mine have gotten asks recently that are specifically checking if it’s okay to even point out things like a typo or a spelling error that got missed.
Back in the day, the comment format of “point out something good, and something that could be fixed” was a lot more commonplace. Or the ‘critique sandwich’ — something well handled, something to work on, finish with something well handled. Feedback was an expectation, and the opposite actually occurred: not wanting critiques or suggestions for how to do better was considered lazy, or only wanting good comments was considered attention seeking or ego-stoking. Sometimes people took it too far with their criticisms, but just as often they didn’t. I know I sure got some upsetting reviews back in the day, but I also got a lot of people pointing out little bits and pieces that I could fix and improve on. Even if I didn’t agree, it still made me think about why I made some of the writing choices that I did.
It’s a fascinating bit of cultural evolution and culture clash, actually. One of those things where language and communication evolved somewhere along the way and caught us off guard. Because I actually do see some older people in fandoms expressing shock when even a (well meant, not mean, or well written) critique is taken poorly by a writer or an artist. For example, I had a friend recently who offered some (legitimate) constructive criticism to an artist and was shocked when the artist was furious and offended with that. And on the flip-side, I know I’m always baffled when readers (hesitantly, shyly) point out a typo or a mixed up word that I missed in my editing, like it’s some great breach of etiquette and highly offensive to me to point out that I made a mistake. (It’s not, for the record).
And I feel like AO3 happened to roll along at the time that shift happened, but I don’t think it’s solely responsible. In fact, my guess is that it’s the opposite, and the culture change strongly influenced AO3.
Of course, sometimes people use “criticism” to be an asshole. And those guys should just knock it right off already.
This reflects on what I’ve experienced, and I know that really works out for a lot of people who write fic. Personally it kinda bums me out, because I like hearing about reasonable critiques (and typos, fuck knows I make a ton of those).
I would actually suggest that AO3s timing wasn’t coincidental. The ‘have a deep discussion about the fic and discussing the craft’ was a huge part of Livejournal culture. That was back in the days when you could scroll past a fic and find a mount of large comments discussing particular elements or characterizations between readers and the authors.
Then Strikethrough happened and AO3 followed after, but the culture of LJ fandom has died out. Tumblr is indicative of that cultural change, I think – you wouldn’t get the popularity on LJ that you can get on Tumblr, or at least not as much as quickly. Back in the day, having a friends list of 100 or so people was a huge deal, and bonefide BNF status.
Nowadays, we’re much less isolated and much less centralized, which also makes fanworks much more public. It opens you up to a lot more undue criticism and vitriol for the same works, and makes it so it’s harder to narrow what you consume, even if accidentally. (IE you have to follow very specific curated tumblrs to completely avoid content you don’t care about, and even then it’s iffy).
Combined with how much more populous and mainstream (ish) fandom/fanfic has become, it’s not a surprise the culture has changed. Not only have we lost LJ’s culture and community/discussion designed formatting, but you can’t be sure the people seeing your writing are people who have chosen to/enjoy that specific content, so you don’t know the mentality they’re coming from. That’s also FF.net’s problem, since it was so huge and so centralized. History repeats itself.
Petition to start calling Tumblr the Pit of Voles 2.0
Excellent thoughts, both of you, and completely accurate. The problem with ff.n culture was that it was far too focused on the consumer. The writers couldn’t respond to reviews individually, but had to make long, rambling author’s notes. (Sometimes entire chapters were author’s notes, gah I hated that.) It wasn’t a conversation on the story itself. Though there was give and take, it was very much about keeping your readers happy so you would keep getting those sweet, sweet reviews.
Of all the fandom cultures I’ve experienced, LJ was by far my favorite. The nesting comments meant that you COULD have conversations on fics, and you did. Lots of people did! It was an amazing way to form relationships and have discussions. And the nested comments were on every post, not just fics like in AO3, so you could write an episode reaction or a meta, then discuss it in the comments with your friends. AO3 tried to bring that over by making the comment system similar to LJ, and I have had AWESOME conversations in the comments on fics (it’s how I got to write for the Dream, Seam ‘verse), but by and large it didn’t quite translate.
If I could put it in a nutshell, I would say ff.n culture was about serving the readers, AO3 culture is about protecting the writers, and LJ culture was about having discussions about everything and anything with everyone you came in contact with. Heck, LJ had huge anon communities where you could go anonymous and just bitch about the fandom and things without revealing who you were. It was like anon hate on tumblr, except not sent directly to your inbox, so you could avoid it if you wanted.
And tumblr culture is about gaining as many followers as possible and trying to keep your fandom “pure.” Very fame and morality driven.
I wish that ao3 had an option to filter warnings (and tbh certain authors) out like I will never ever want to read it and just seeing it puts me off so much that often I end up closing my browser because that content upsets me so much lmao
There is a way to do this but I can’t recall how to do it. it’s something you type into the box for “other filters” or something, I don’t remember. who knows??
It’s not a great option, and I don’t know if you can sort out authors that way, but it’s better than nothing if someone can reblog this with how to do it!
Alrighty friends! It takes some specificity, but you can do this. Let me show you how!
So I started with going to the Sherlock (TV) section of Ao3. On the right we find this lovely section! ((I know I’m going over things you already probably know, but I figure this post may go to new Ao3 users, so bear with me.))
Underneath this, I chose sort by Kudos, because that’s a quick way to find most popular fics, for the sake of this demonstration.
With those filters on, we end up with this being our first two results:
As you can see, we have Nature and Nurture by earlgreytea68, and The Internet Is Not Just For Porn by cyerus. So what if I am utterly sick of seeing earlgreytea68 on my list? Let’s pretend I’ve read all their fics, or that I just don’t like her, or whatever. I want this author out. I go to this section on the right:
In “Search within results” I type earlgreytea68 into the bar, with a minus sign in front. This gives me the following page, upon hitting the sort and filter button:
There goes earlgreytea68! But now I’ve decided that Crack is just not my thing, I’m sick of that, too, for heaven’s sake, I want something reasonable in my gay slash fanfiction about detectives that solve crimes about glowing dogs and irish megalomaniacs. Heaven forbid this get ridiculous.
Well, then I add this to my search:
Which gets rid of everything with that tag. My results are now:
Performance in a Leading Role is now my first result!
You can do this as many times as you want; the biggest problem I have is trying to filter out multi-worded tags. For example, “Secret Relationship” is hard to filter. Better to go with authors you dislike or with words like “DubCon”.
I hope this helps! Also remember that googling site:archiveofourown.org and then adding search terms will mean google searches Ao3 for you, and sometimes that works far better.
Good luck!
An excellent in-depth guide! Thank you!!
omg changed my whole ao3 rarepair game
An excellent guide to filtering on AO3!
You can filter out phrases by enclosing them in quotes. For example, if ABO and Hydra Trash Party are not your things, try:
-“alpha/beta/omega dynamics” -”hydra trash party”
I have more advice!
Say, you’re in your random fandom- I went with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, since I’ve been reading Iron Man stuff recently. Tony Stark is awesome.
But anyway, you’re on the page, and you see that there are 174,774 works! That is way too many for a casual afternoon’s browsing.
And you see that the first one is Peter Parker/Tony Stark and that is not your jam. It doesn’t work for you, or it squicks you, whatever. Wouldn’t life be easier if you could browse without seeing that pairing (or whatever pairing you don’t like)? You can!
First, click on that pairing tag(You may want to open this in another tab, actually.):
and it’ll take you to the page for that pairing tag. Click this button:
and then look at the address bar! The actual page is unimportant. Copy the numbers located here:
and go back to the original search page! Down on the side, in the same place you can get rid of other tags, type -relationship_ids:”the number you just copied”
Then hit ‘sort and filter’ annnd… magic!
The fics with that pairing are gone! You can also do multiple pairings, get rid of any tags you don’t like, and sort it by date or length or kudos, or whatever.
Enjoy.
I’d just like to add that these sorts of search modifiers ALSO WORK IN GOOGLE AND MOST RESEARCH DATABASES.
The problem doesn’t lie in differentiating the obvious extremes: the problem is in moderating everything that falls between them; in determining which kind of sexual fantasies are “allowed,” and under what conditions, and how to make those judgements consistently.
Here’s the thing: when we conjure up a sexual fantasy for masturbatory purposes, it’s designed to pop like a soap bubble once we come. The very act of fantasising about anything means putting a barrier between the realities of the situation and the reasons we enjoy it in the moment, and that’s especially true of sex. What we want in fantasies, what we enjoy in fantasies, very seldom maps perfectly to what we want in real life, which is why it’s so very dangerous to start judging people’s real morality on the basis of what they wank to. That’s not to say there’s no correlation between morality and what gets people off – there are plenty of racist fetishes, for instance – or that we shouldn’t interrogate our preferences. What I’m saying is that there isn’t a clear binary of Good and Bad in the majority of cases, and acting like there is will get you in trouble.
A very common example: in real life, communicating about sex can be difficult or embarrassing, even though it’s necessary, so people fantasise about perfect sex that happens without communication. Sometimes, this is because both parties are so perfectly in sync that words aren’t necessary, but other times, the fantasy is of one party taking control because they ‘know’ what the other person wants. In real life, that sort of behaviour is generally a red flag – but in fiction, the fantasy is explicitly a what if: in this case, what if they actually did know?
Another example: in real life, people enjoy sexual roleplay, where consenting partners act out non-consensual or dangerous scenarios. In fiction, the ‘consent’ aspect of engaging with those same fantasies is inherent in the act of deciding to read them in the first place; the characters don’t need a safeword, because the only real sexual participant is the reader, who has complete control over their immersion in the story. These are the kinds of stories that tend to make people the most uncomfortable, because it often looks like the narrative is romanticising toxic or abusive dynamics by giving sexy descriptions to terrible things. But this is precisely what tags are for, which is one very strong argument in favour of fanfic being better at consent than many traditionally published stories: the very act of tagging content means that the reader knows that the author knows the thing they’re writing is bad in real life, but that it exists here for the reader to indulge in as a fantasy, whether sexual or otherwise, just as they would with a roleplay. By contrast, when you encounter similar dynamics in a published book, you have no idea whether the writer knows the thing they’re describing is Bad unless they explicitly say so in the narrative, which makes a lot of readers – myself included – uncomfortable about engaging with it.
Overwhelmingly, sex written as pure pornography doesn’t strive for perfect realism, because the whole point is to focus on a specific definition of arousal or pleasure detached from any negative real-world consequences. This is just as true of happy, loving sex depicted between consensual adults, where nobody ever gets a cramp or has an inconvenient period or tears the first time they try anal, as anything darker or more disturbing.
So, yeah – there is absolutely written content on line that I personally find gross and bad and disturbing, but I genuinely don’t believe there’s a safe, reliable mechanism for excluding it that won’t massively fuck over a whole bunch of other stuff in the process. If you want to pay for a website to try and walk that line – and you’d have to pay; there’d be no way to ensure good moderation otherwise – then that’s your call, but I don’t believe you get to decide that for everyone else, no matter how honourable your motives.
I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.
This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.
You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.
“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.
If you’re not prepared to see adult content, created by and for adults, don’t fucking click through this. And if you do, for all that’s holy, don’t blame anyone else for it.
If you don’t like AO3′s core, founding mission–a fan-run archive where you can host your fanwork without having to worry whether it will get yanked when someone decides it’s objectionable–or if you’re upset that they aren’t interested in budging from that mission even when it comes into conflict with values that you, personally, hold dear…
All the code is on Github. You want an archive with all the fandom-tailored bells and whistles that AO3 has, but with a moderation policy for content you find objectionable/offensive/injurious to public morality/in unforgivably poor taste? Nothing’s preventing you from copying the software that runs AO3 and setting up your own archive with it. Well, nothing but the resources and technical skills required to host, deploy, and maintain a complex Rails app. Which isn’t anything to sneeze at, but if having a space free of the shit you’re objecting to is important enough to mobilize like-minded folks for vigilante enforcement via assorted charming forms of social coercion–shaming, harassment, ostracism, smear campaigns, doxxing, suicide-baiting, etc–surely it’s important enough to mobilize like-minded folks to contribute money, volunteer hours, and technical skills towards building the kind of space you actually want to see. The kind of space where you don’t need to resort to the vilest depths of social coercion to enforce a content policy in line with your values, because it can be enforced quietly and civilly by the mods with a few mouse clicks.
And if that’s too high a barrier–if your fandom is awash in stuff you find intolerable and you need a moderated fanwork archive now now now but the technical side might as well be sorcery–five bucks a month and an afternoon of point-and-click setup will get you a WordPress install on shared hosting. WordPress ain’t AO3, but it can be bent into almost any shape you want via plugins, and even a bare-bones default install comes with categories, tags, user accounts, comments, and moderation options. That’s all you need for a basic archive. WordPress.com will even host a small one for you for free. If it fills a need, and people put a fraction of the energy and social capital into promoting it as they currently put into witch-hunting transgressors into submission, it won’t take long for it to hit critical mass within a fandom.
You want a strictly-moderated safe space? The bad news is, AO3 is never going to be that space. You don’t get to demand that the people who sink a bunch of time, skill, and effort into providing it to you (for free–actual free, not “selling your most sensitive data to advertisers” free) throw the entire carefully-considered purpose of their work under the bus whenever that purpose can’t be fully reconciled with the values you think deserve precedence. You want an archive with a different ultimate purpose and a different set of values that override competing considerations, you’ll have to contribute your own time and effort to building it.
But the time and effort required is by no means prohibitive. Fandom has been DIYing shit since forever, and right now the tools are more powerful and accessible than they’ve ever been. So the good news is, if AO3 isn’t doing it for you… it takes less heavy lifting than ever to build an archive of your own.
Censors, fandom police, purity culture diehards… put your money where your mouth is.
But, but … that involves doing actual work besides yelling at people!
In fairness, it would involve a lot of work. I kind of blew it off in the original post as “nothing’s preventing you… well, nothing but the resources and technical skills required to host, deploy, and maintain a complex Rails app.” But from what I understand, the actual infrastructure side of installing and deploying the Archive app doesn’t lend itself to easy replication. There certainly aren’t a bunch of AO3 forks and clones running around out there like there were for LiveJournal.
However! Most of the anti-AO3 grumblers’ use cases don’t require anything near the scale of the Archive. If what you want is an archive for one fandom (or even a handful of related fandoms) where you don’t have to worry about stuff you find objectionable, it is really and truly possible to build that with WordPress on shared hosting for less than $10 a month. Point-and-click, no coding required. Install WordPress, from the WordPress admin panel install Writeshare and a security plugin like Shield, be sure to enable auto-updates, and you’re done.
Hell, let me make an offer: I know I’m a filthy degenerate who’s written and–even worse!–defended all sorts of depraved fic, but I’m also of the opinion that if antis want an archive they can moderate to their standards, they deserve one. Having control over the spaces they frequent instead of having to duke it out over the community standards of a general-purpose, lightly-moderated platform like Tumblr or AO3 might ease some of the pressure driving these conflicts. So. If you want a fic archive for your fandom that’s free of problematic ships, underage, noncon, abuse, etc, I will build and pay for it. I will shell out up to $10/month for shared hosting. I will handle as much of the technical end as you trust me to handle: server, database, domain name, WordPress install and plugins, security. All I ask is that you and/or your friends run the site yourselves and not involve me in any of the moderation decisions (which you wouldn’t want me involved in anyway), and that you crowdfund anything above $10/month if the site gets huge. That’s it. You can even lock me out of the WordPress admin panel if you’re comfortable maintaining and updating WP yourselves.
Fine print: The offer to pay for hosting is only for one site. Anyone after that gets the technical setup offer but not the $10/month. No real-life identity or contact info will be exchanged: I don’t want yours, and I definitely don’t want to share mine. I will do my best to trick out your WordPress install however you like it, but no guarantees that all the features you want will be possible. If either of us wants out after the site is up, I will hand you a full backup of the database/filesystem so that you can install it elsewhere, plus a static HTML archive of the site that you can put up on a free webhost.
Go ahead and reblog this if you want to. I’m curious to see if anyone will bite and be serious enough to get a site up. I know I’m dead serious. I may be a degenerate with terrible opinions, but I’m a professional techie who’s hosted/run/modded a lot of sites in my time and never pulled untrustworthy shit with admin access. I will lock myself out of whatever you want me locked out of. Just let me put my money where your mouth is, because I figure it’s in everyone’s best interests if those who want a safe alternative to AO3 can build one.
FWIW, if you want a safe space following whatever rules you want, you can do that INSIDE the AO3 with zero coding work or hosting cost whatsoever. You don’t even have to convince anyone to cross-post to your site.
1. Recruit people and figure out your moderation standards. (You DO need people who are willing to review stories that might NOT meet those standards to make sure they fit, but you need that no matter where you do it.)
2. Make an AO3 collection and make your recruited people mods (Optionally: make a subcollection for each fandom you have someone to mod.)
3. Each mod looks over whichever new stories you want to review, and then bookmarks the safe ones (Optionally: with whatever tags or description you want), putting the bookmark in the appropriate collection.
4. People who only want to read works that match your moderation standards can just browse that one collection.
This is part of the purpose of bookmarks and why they have tags and notes, so people could follow specific bookmarkers who curate and/or provide the level of information they want to know about stories even if not all authors provide the level of info they want.
i'll apple your turnover 