minim-calibre:

fangasmagorical:

blooming-wilting:

gladnis:

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. 

It needs what it gets to function and improve. 

kiena-tesedale replied to this post

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.

The number of people on this blue hellsite who apparently do not understand how nonprofits work is mind-boggling (pro tip: by definition, THEY DON’T MAKE A PROFIT), as is the number of people with no idea about the cost of running something that gets that much traffic.

Their mommies and daddies are still buying their underwear for them. Give it time.

jcanderson33:

stileslovesderek:

Fanfiction: A strange phenomenon in which obsessive readers quit caring about physical books only to become even more obsessive readers.

I feel personally victimized by this statement of fact.

freedom-of-fanfic:

wrangletangle:

I volunteer for the OTW, the parent nonprofit organization that runs AO3. So do, as of the last monthly newsletter, 678 other people. The OTW has no paid employees; everyone there is a volunteer.

The average weekly work expectations for OTW volunteers run around 5 hours per week for most committees. Of course, in reality, people are all over the place. Some do 1-2 hours a week, some 30 or 40 or even more – a full work week without pay.

Let’s say that, hypothetically, a volunteer works only 1-2 hours per week, and their work is only worth $10 per hour. (It’s probably worth more – the opportunity costs of most skilled labor is worth more than that – but let’s low-ball it.) That means that every single week, that volunteer is donating $10-20 dollars of their time to the OTW. Some people are donating hundreds of dollars of their time each week, for months or years on end to help keep all its projects running.

Because of course there are multiple projects. There’s TWC, the freely available, peer-reviewed academic journal that just celebrated its 10th anniversary. There’s Fanlore, our fannish history wiki that has over 46,000 articles. There’s Open Doors, which rescues at-risk archives from disappearing. There’s Legal Advocacy, which donates legal expertise to help fans address copyright and other issues. And then there’s the AO3, which is currently listed as the 264th most popular website in the world (#98 in the US). Any one of those projects could easily encompass an entire nonprofit organization by itself. None of them has even a single paid employee. No OTW website shows any ads.

The real secret to the OTW’s success is not that it pulls in just enough money every year to cover its server expenses and overhead – though it does that, and every volunteer is grateful to our donors for keeping the lights on. It’s that the OTW somehow runs entirely on volunteer power. There’s no way we could pay for all the expertise and effort we receive. Other nonprofit websites like the Wayback Machine and Wikipedia pull in millions in funding every year to cover relatively small staffs. We survive without having to write grants or beg wealthy donors because of our volunteers’ unseen donations of their time, expertise, and effort.

Maybe this year you don’t have any money. Or maybe you do, but you’re saving for a rainy day, or you gave it somewhere else. No worries. People volunteer because we want you to enjoy this labor of love. We want you here, building the OTW with us by using our projects. If you did donate, much love to you. Your generosity is deeply appreciated, and we’ll continue being the penny-pinching, wait-is-there-a-free-option, do-they-give-a-nonprofit-discount volunteers we’ve always been, to stretch your donation as far as it can go.

If you want to give something that isn’t money, consider this: How often is a volunteer thanked by someone who isn’t a fellow volunteer? People volunteer because they want to know they’re making a difference. They want to build up the world. Think of how a kudos or a comment makes you feel, then consider how rarely volunteers get one.

You can read about all our committees here, and you can send one of them a quick thank you via the contact form, if you like. Or you can leave a comment with thanks on a Drive post on AO3. Maybe tell Finance how much you love the budget being available, or thank Development & Membership for all their hard work organizing the donation drive to keep the servers running, or show some love to our Communications Committee that’s keeping all these posts updated, or to the Translation Committee that translated them. Maybe you noticed that AO3 Documentation just put out a Tag Set FAQ in time for the exchange season. Maybe you’re wondering who keeps 679 people organized – that would be our Volunteers & Recruiting Committee. Maybe you want to thank the Systems Committee for getting out of bed way too early in the morning to fix the mailer (or whatever else decides to mysteriously break this week). However the spirit moves you, feel free to show some love. It goes a long way.

Thanks for being part of the journey.

i’m going to take this post as an opportunity to publicly say thank you to all the AO3 tag wranglers – not least of which is @wrangletangle, who has graciously explained so many aspects of how the tag system on AO3 works & been so patient with inquiries. Thank you: we’re so very grateful for your work to make the archive navigable!

I also want to second the suggestion to send a little ‘thank you’ message to the Transformative Works committee of your choice, if you’re so inclined. I’m gonna go do that right after posting this.

• as linked above: a list of the committees & what they do
• and the contact form, where you can pick the committee to reach from a drop-down menu.

(added b/c I executive dysfunction so badly if I don’t have direct, easy to see links.)

misscontraption:

mitunathehelicaptor:

tagging nsfw is hilarious like it’s just like you’re in a room with a shitload of people and you shout PORN and then some people cover their eyes and others stare at you in anticipation

lordhellebore:

bai-xue:

minecraftmidoriya:

the-real-seebs:

voidsexual:

bottomsona:

donation worthy website: wikipedia

NOT donation worthy website: ao3

what op isn’t saying: a site that gives young writers a platform to make their work more accessible is bad

what op is saying: don’t give your money to a site that actively turns a blind eye to child pornography

This seems like a good time to remind people that AO3 grew directly out of a previous moral panic similar to the one on tumblr, complete with people calling things “child pornography” when they weren’t. AO3 does not, in fact, turn a blind eye to child pornography. AO3 does allow writing which involves uncomfortable themes, including child abuse. That’s not child pornography. But there’s female writers, and queer writers, and queer content, and that makes people uncomfortable, so they go around stretching definitions so they can claim that a non-pornographic textual description of sex is “pornography”, and 18-year-old characters are “children”, and ignore all the other distinctions.

People on the Internet have been using accusations of pedophilia and child pornography to silence things they dislike for decades. It’s not new, and its primary effect is to allow actual abusers to escape detection, because the vocal critics are flooding law enforcement inboxes with spurious reports.

The spurious reports are, invariably, directed at marginalized and vulnerable people. People it’s safe to attack. AO3 exists precisely because that consistent pattern of targeting vulnerable people on trumped-up charges has been causing our communities a great deal of pain for longer than most of the current crop of attackers have been alive. Please continue to support AO3.

If you are deeply concerned for the wellbeing of the people attacking AO3, consider that you may be saving them a lifetime of bitter remorse over what they destroyed, when they grow up enough to realize that trying to wreck the lives and work of vulnerable people so you can feel powerful isn’t actually protecting anyone.

“targeting vulnerable people”

we are vulnerable people. i am lesbian and disabled. many of us are lgbt, disabled, people of color, mentally ill, and survivors ourselves. we don’t want to see other people go through the same cycle of pain that many of us have gone through.

we have seen, or have been the victims of, people using fandom content to groom people. fandom content has been used to perpetrate abuse, has normalized abuse. that’s why we’re fucking pissed.

i’m not fighting this to feel powerful. it’s not some fucking power trip lol. if i want to feel powerful i have plentiful opportunities to exercise that in my offline life. i’m fighting this because i don’t want any more kids fucking hurt and scarred and traumatized by this shit.

and stop with your patronizing bullshit. we’re not all kids lol. and even if some of us are? even if some of us are young? it’s not too young to have beliefs and morals and act on them. stop acting like you’re actually concerned for us because you sure don’t act like you are.

– most of the content creators who get hurt because of your little morality crusade are also queer and disabled

– you didn’t go through a “cycle of pain” because of fiction. Fiction can’t hurt you. Real people hurt you.

– if abusers use fandom to groom victims, that is nobody’s fault but the abuser’s. Stop displacing blame from those who deserve it. Also, abusers will use anything available to groom victims. Anything. That is the nature of abusive people.

– we’re patronizing you because your morality policing is little more than regurgitated Americanist right-wing rhetoric which has formed the basis of all major moral panics of the past century, and you’re too goddamn stupid to realise it.

we have seen, or have been the victims of, people

using fandom content to groom people.

@minecraftmidoriya I’ve bolded the part of the sentence that is relevant and after which there should be a full stop. People who were abused were abused by other people. By nothing else. Abusers use all kinds of things to groom and abuse their victims. It’s easy to focus on the means they used and try to forbid them, because it makes one feel safe. “If this doesn’t exist, it can’t be used to hurt people.” I get that. The problem is: abusers will simply use something else. They always will. Fiction. Sweets. Attention. Affection. Anything you can imagine, they’ll use it. You can never forbid everything an abuser might use. Never. And you shouldn’t either, for one because a) thought policing and censorship are always stepping stones to a more authoritarian society, and b) because that kind of fight takes the focus away from where it belongs: on the perpetrators. 

Forbidding the kind of fiction you’re against won’t make an abuser stop abusing. So the focus shouldn’t be on the fiction. The focus needs to be on the people committing crimes, not the things they misuse in order to be able to abuse others.

OP is an ignorant cunt