people will be like “fanfiction writers!!! are everything”
and then turn around and say a website that doesnt pay the writers they make their traction and money off of is a saint that would do no wrong.
im just saying. ao3 gets their money
those writers dont. lmao.
so whyre you making it about the writers when they could post pretty much anywhere huh? 😂 and youre only paying a website.
u ever consider they do it this way on purpose so the only people making money on their poorly designed website are the owners
👀
Have YOU ever considered it’s a volunteer-run website that’s a nonprofit and is incredibly transparent about where its money goes?
Have you ever learned, like, a SINGLE THING about the legality of fanfiction?
Or are you just being an asshole?
“poorly designed”
You mean that ultra-lean, fast-loading site with maybe the world’s best data sorting and tagging that is open source so you can set up your own archive if you wanna try to run something that big without ever asking for money or if you wanna try to make it prettier or something?
That is free to host fiction on as well as free to read fiction on and is a site with an incredible amount of traffic that runs exactly zero ads aside from occasional funding drives?
As a person with a law degree, can I just tell you how vitally fought and precariously won the ability to even HAVE Ao3 is!? And how a lot of that balance rides on it being a non profit that no one makes money off of? And how very much Ao3 does with how little $$$? (To the point where I mentioned the site traffic to a web developer friend and he honestly couldn't see how the site could even exist because in his world to make it would cost so much and require so much work that it blew his mind that Ao3 even existed with the functionality, traffic, and utter lack of budget compared to what he usually worked with!)
Some days you kids today make your dearest rum aunty wanna beat her head against the wall. I swear to dog.
Fanfiction has to be free to survive.
It’s not a matter of “Oh, without that dastardly AO3, fanfic authors would be free to make money off of other people’s intellectual property″ and framing it that way is disingenuous.
The way copyright law and Fair Use work right now - the way legal precedent stands in the US, at this time - the only thing stopping Disney from swooping in and suing someone for writing Steve/Bucky fanfiction is that nobody is making any money off of it.
Is it fair that it works like that? Possibly not, but that’s not actually the argument at hand! That’s the way that copyright law works right now. And before AO3, anyone who wrote or hosted fanfic online was in danger of randomly getting a C&D one day - and most people don’t have the money or resources to fight that.
It happened. A lot.
And it wasn’t just porn! I know the anti-AO3 people like to frame it that way, but it has also happened to stories without any smut at all, just because the person or company holding the IP felt like it.
Nobody is making money on the site. Not the people who founded it, not the people who coded it, not the people who wrangle tags for it. Notice that there's not a SINGLE add on the site. Money isn't being made every time someone loads a page or hits the "next" button, unlike many other sites out there. There's no fee to read, let alone a tiered structure to entice you to hand over a higher amount of money per month. If AO3 wanted to make money... well, then it would be shut down because the only reason it *legally* gets to exist is because nobody is profiting from it on any level. But if that wasn't the case and AO3 really wanted to make money, there's so many better ways they could do so than by a completely-option donation request a couple times a year?
I don't know how you could spend any time at all in fandom and not know these things about AO3. Or miss the fact that they show EXACTLY where every dollar that comes in from their fundraisers goes to.
Like, do you even GO here??
You could run the AO3 frontend off a couple of shitty Thinkcentres networked together for redundancy and haproxy in front of all of it. The site is extraordinarily light and the biggest challenge is load balancing it.
AO3′s backend is...
Listen. I work for a $600 million a year company serving DNS and domain names to literally everyone who isn’t shopping at GoDaddy. I help run the most successful MVNO in the US. I don’t want to say I wouldn’t even know where to start to build AO3, but I know exactly where I would stop. And that’s at the tags. Everything else, sure, I could build in a week. DBs, backups, a fuck ton of caching, monitoring and alerting. Give me another couple of weeks and I’d build some basic self healing so I dont have to get up in the night when something as big as AO3 breaks.
The fucking moment you tell me you want me to index hundreds of millions of tags, I’m fucking out. We do something similar with domain name recommendations and let me tell you that fucking POS system breaks monthly and it is a goddamn nightmare to fix. You would have to pay me, a single person, what AO3 asks for its entire goddamn operation every year. As far as I know their tech people consist of a sysadmin, a DBA and a few front end folk, all of whom are volunteers.
Which means that $130,000 is all being spent on tech. The fact that that number is below seven figures means they are doing it with all open-source software, zero support contracts and probably hardware that fell off the back of a Supermicro van. And no, they’re not in The Cloud because this shit would cost them an arm and a leg there. I checked. Indexing hundred of millions of tag fuckarightouttahere.
AO3 runs on blood, sweat, tears and some kind of Christmas miracle. So yeah, OP, go cry a fucking river. You’ll only fuel them.
NERD ALERT BUT AO3 IS A DAMN TREASURE
