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.I am honestly reaching levels of “take the toys away from the children” irritation. I mean, obviously that would never happen, nor would I advocate for it, but jesus fucking christ on a rowboat.
Fandom in 1998, when I got started: Hey, the preview for this show I just saw sounds interesting. It’s already in its second season. I’ll see what information the internet (which has been available to me for about four years) has about this show. (I will later get copies of the show by paying for someone to send me VHS copies of the aired episodes.)
Oh, this site is interesting. I can read episode summaries for the episodes I’ve missed. Huh, there’s a webring thing at the bottom. I will click on some of these other links.
Oh, right, fanfiction. I’ve sort of seen that around. It gets posted on this message board, which wasn’t designed for fiction posting, so people who post here have developed a system for what they put in the subject line of a post, which is usually just a title, and maybe a rating. Meaning the kind of rating the U.S. movie system uses, which may or may not mean anything to non-U.S. posters.
Shit, I just read a romance story with the show’s big pairing, and at the end the hero DIES TRAGICALLY. I wasn’t prepared for this! Oh, man, an author I really like posted a story where two men have sex, but this fandom doesn’t even know what slash is and some homophobic posters are really upset that they “had” to read it, and now it’s a giant kerfuffle.
Oh, now the message board provider is putting ads on everything. Now they’re shutting down because the ads don’t make enough money. Some people didn’t save copies of things they wrote. But it’s okay, because one single fan has put in the work and the money to archive everything that was posted to an archive she set up. Including all 239 shitty stories by an author I hate, but who has tons of fans. And luckily, she didn’t refuse to archive deathfic or slash or torture or rape or anything else that might have bothered her.
Except, whoops, now she’s out of touch. The website stays running for a while, but eventually the hosting expires and the domain registration expires, and now links to that site take you to whoever is now squatting there.
So those roughly 2500 stories are gone. Poof. The only reason anything got saved is because I dug up a tool that would crawl the Wayback Machine and downloaded what was available. It’s most of everything. What’s missing? Hell if I know. And I can’t even get it into AO3 through Open Doors, because the original archivist is MIA.
Purity wank is one thing. One stupid thing, but still. But bitching about financials for a 501c3 with a budget and an annual report and federal reporting requirements? A site with over, what, four MILLION stories, ad-free, with the search and download features it’s got? Run by volunteers? And you’re bitching about $38k, which I’m pretty sure that AO3 didn’t compel anyone to donate? That extra twenty percent is going to help keep the fucking lights on.
(Of course this isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference, because we live in a world where facts don’t matter anymore, so thank fucking god I can download fic from AO3 to put on my Kindle and avoid engaging with reality.)
And lest the young folk think the bad old days are past, I used to post my Anita Blake fic to a site called Pomme de Sang for years starting in 2005. Then a couple years ago the entire site vanished. There was no warning and nobody I’ve spoken with knows what happened to it. One day it was just gone, and so was every single piece of fic published there, which was easily numbering in the thousands.
I was lucky; I had saved everything I posted on that site
(only because I have a paranoid streak tbh), including one fic that had over 80 chapters. But I’ll bet many of the other writers who posted their fic only or mainly on that site weren’t soparanoidlucky and lost some or all of what they had posted there, because after the site being online for well over a decade nobody expected it to just vanish. Until it did.Guess where I’m now republishing all my old fic, where I can be confident it won’t vanish again like PdS did only a scant few years ago?
Nobody should be complaining about AO3. It’s a godsend to fandom.
Wow. I haven’t been in that fandom since obsidian butterfly. I had no idea there had been such a catastrophic archive closure. How awful.
One of the biggest Sailor Moon fic archives in the early aughts was A Sailor Moon Romance. Had a forum and automatic posting and a very basic search function. It was taken down by the people who ran it in the late aughts and I was never 100% sure why. Someone started a project to restore the old archives based on site backups done by paranoid fans who didn’t technically have access to the code but who made tools to do that. It didn’t save everything. and the restoration stalled out maybe a quarter of the way through.
While I cross-posted some of my work to ff.net, most of my sailor moon fic from my first days in fandom was lost when ASMR went down.
AO3 is amazing and an invaluable resource for fandom and anyone who says otherwise is either misled, lying, or a fucking idiot.
let’s be real, we all know who’s threatened by women and minorities having their own artistic spaces.
Published
just moving along like everyone else 