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.
OP, running a website is expensive. Especially when that site gets as much traffic as AO3 does during "normal" periods. Since the Covid lockdowns around the world, the site has seen such a surge in traffic that the staff have been working to the bone to try and modify the site so that it doesn't collapse under the weight of all the hours users are spending on it.
(And that's not even MENTIONING the legality of it all; idk how old you are, so you may not have been around for this, but fanfic writers used to be at genuine risk of getting sued. As in, a big name author could have sued me -- at the time a broke 16 year old -- because I was writing fics about their work. That's not a threat that fanfic authors have to live with any more, and it's because of AO3 and their legal team.)
The donations from the drives go, 100%, to keeping the site running.
Now I am all for standing up and telling big companies to fuck off, but AO3 doesn't pocket a single cent in profit. Every shred of money they get goes straight back into the site.
If you still have a problem with the fact that they run a (voluntary!!) donation drive a couple times a year, well, there's plenty of other sites you can read fics on instead that DON'T run donation drives.
The other sites, of course, all have ads, or require the user to pay an access fee, or they're just a shitty design.
If you're gonna keep reading fics on AO3, then you need to reassess your attitude to the funding drives. You can't read fics on a site that has no ads, protects it's users from legal battles, never collapses under the weight of its users and/or data, and has the best web design in its field (a design that's constantly being updated and improved upon, no less), and does all of that thanks to a dedicated team of unpaid volunteers, and then turn around and bitch about them running a donation drive, the funds from which are all spent on covering the site's run costs.
Just go read elsewhere, if that's your attitude.
I can’t believe we still have to explain this to people...
*doubletakes at the tags* I'm sorry, @inthebathory , can you expand on this downloadable pdfs and ebook reader thing?! 👀👀👀
Works on AO3 all have a ‘download’ option with formats:
- AZW3
- EPUB
- MOBI
- HTML
I post a lot of vids, and alas, they don’t work well for anything like that, but for longer fic, it’s amazing. You can use various browser addons to do that for Livejournal or Fanfiction.net or whatever, and some people have done their won ebooks with better formatting... But to just have the option of pretty good and consistently-formatted ebooks for everything? Oh my god!
The first person who should actually getting paid is the sysadmin, not the writers, but that’s not where OTW’s money actually goes, as OP knows perfectly well and has been told plenty of times.
My father and my elder brother are the entire IT department for a five-office company of about 100 people. They just got slapped with ransomware so badly that they've paid probably about 500,000$ just to get the company operating again. They work on a budget of about 260,000$ a year - approximately what AO3's current drive is at, last I checked - and they're both chronically underpaid. My dad makes about 80k a year, my brother about 40k a year. They /should/ be making 120k and 80k respectively, for all they do. AO3 is running a downright insanely tiny budget, and it is one of my big dreams to volunteer for them properly, when I'm a big tidy IT guy with certifications and a degree to back me up. AO3 is what every single IT company should have as their hero, because what they do is insane, amazing, and I for one love them immensely. And so should you. Now do yourselves a favour and back up everything you don't want to lose, because the ransomware folks are making the rounds and you do NOT want to pay 2500$ USD a machine to get your stuff decrypted.
