prismatic-bell:olderthannetfic:urlocalkookware:madlori:signoraviolettavalery:sussexlavender:roach-wo
prismatic-bell:olderthannetfic:urlocalkookware:madlori:signoraviolettavalery:sussexlavender:roach-works:azcrowleyfell:olderthannetfic: justanoffalygirl:olderthannetfic: Every year… Every damn year… Tags like this are the reason I tend to donate extra to AO3 when I can afford to. Honestly, I don’t even care if people I know donate. AO3 is designed so that a few generous patrons can make a nice thing exist for everyone… But holy shit do I wish tumblr would learn how websites and companies work because it is important to know what motivates them.On AO3, MORE TRAFFIC IS NOT BETTER HOLYFUCK. That’s only true when traffic = more ad revenue or a better pitch to venture capitalists or something. Ao3 is literally a nonprofit, kids. to clarify, rather than scold: The Archive Of Our Own is a nonprofit organization that runs an archive of fanfiction, specifically for the purposes of recording and maintaining all fanfics uploaded to it. it was founded after livejournal and fanfiction.net repeatedly deleted queer and ‘problematic’ fanfics in order to please advertisers and keep getting ad revenue. for decades, fandom was at the mercy of corporations who repeatedly deleted–with little warning and no mercy–whatever platforms were used to host fanfiction, especially dark, queer, kinky, and immoral fanfiction that would annoy corporate interests or scare off investors or offend advertisers. AO3 is specifically relies on donations, rather than ad revenue, because it is the Archive Of Our Own, and is not answerable to any political agenda other than protecting and maintaining, again, all the fanfiction uploaded to it. there are checks and balances, and there’s a governing board, and they’re all dead serious about making sure that the archive endures any attempts by outside parties to censor or remove its content, no matter how abhorrent that content is. the archive is an archive, not a social network or a platform. it hosts content and it serves that content to users in an efficient way–hence the phenomenal tag system–but it is meant to safeguard writers and their writing, not to profit from its users. it literally can’t profit off of its users or monetize their interactions in any way, just by virtue of its own structure: all money given to a nonprofit goes towards furthering that organization’s mission. see, when a company or corporation makes money, it pays for labor and upkeep and then the guys that own the company keep the rest of the money, and that’s profit. when a nonprofit makes money, it pays for labor and upkeep and then if it has extra, it reinvests in various ways, like building new things or improving old things, or it saves the money for future labor and upkeep it might need. the archive cares that users are able to control their own experiences of it, and filter out the stuff they don’t want to see. they care that users are protected from harassment. but they don’t profit from users’ engagement with the site, so they don’t do anything to encourage traffic the way a for-profit site that’s monetized engagement has. hopefully this explanation helps someone. tl;dr, a non-profit archive can’t profit from traffic the way for-profit social networks do, so it doesn’t care about you in a completely different way. tl;dr, a non-profit archive can’t profit from traffic the way for-profit social networks doRepeat for emphasis. I feel like the problem is that kids these days (yeah, yeah) have grown up in a world where everything is monetized, to the point where they can’t imagine an entire archive, that exists, for free, on the internet, with no nefarious purpose, without the intent of makin money. It’s not for profit. There’s no strings attached. Nobody’s profiting behind the scenes somewhere. People just can’t CONCEIVE of it. The site is so well designed and looks so professional that the Youths see it, assume it is a Corporate Entity, and therefore must be reflexively Battled Against as The Enemy.Without noticing that there are…no ads on the site.*sigh* No, because AO3 is genuinely such a good place to find fanfic. Wattpad has become a hellscape of ads after you read a part. If you want to skip to a different chapter or part of the story? Ad. You get an ad. Unless you get premium. Or if you pay for no ads.I’ve been on Wattpad since 2016. I saw fanfic on there, read for a while, and genuinely preferred it over other sites. The shit writing was a joke to me, and yes cringe stuff was there, but my favorite author was there and their writing was fantastic.But then in 2018 or some time ads started getting added more often to the chapters. You used to have ads between the parts of stories on mobile, but you could scroll past them easily. But now It could be like, 6-9 chapters spaced out, but an ad would show up that you couldn’t scroll past. They’d be easily skippable, so I just skipped them and went on my way.Then they added them more frequently. They offered their premium version or whatever and as more people bought it to get rid of the annoying adds, they gave those who didn’t buy premium more ads. Wattpad is still usable, but it’s not worth the ads. I still have Wattpad on my phone, but I haven’t read a full fic on there in ages. Too many ads.AO3 is an incredible place to read from. There will never be ads on AO3 because it’s a non profit. They can’t make money from my time reading.Not only that, they let fanfiction be something writers can make. When I started reading in 2016, I would find fics with warnings, disclaimers, all that I didn’t understand at the time. “These are not my characters. They belong to [people who made them] from [fandom they’re from]” or something similar to that effect.I never saw a fic get taken down, but I know it happened. Companies and authors would go after fanfic writers for creating fiction with their characters. They would take these authors to court, and win because authors didn’t have the resources to fight them.Ao3 gives and acts like an author’s resources. It has a team that defends writers, fights companies, and keeps fanfic legal. The only request for doing such a thing?They ask you not to promote or link any sort of commission or Kofi page on their site. And ask for donations occasionally. Keeping commission links off their site help keep their arguments in court valid, and donations help keep the site running. Tldr; AO3 will never have ads that make the site unusable, keeps fanfic a legal activity, and hosts donation drives to keep their massive archive accessible to anyone who wants it. Don’t hate on AO3 if you like reading fanfiction. If you enjoy a fandom culture, support AO3. They support fandom right to exist. Reblogging for the little snapshot of what Wattpad is/was like. You know what’s happening on Tumblr right now with the Apple censorship debacle?That’s literally what used to happen on sites like fanfiction.net and LiveJournal. In fact that exact thing happening on LJ is what STARTED THE AO3. There had been ideas bandied about in the past, but Strikethrough and Boldthrough—which you can, conveniently, look up on the Fanlore project run by the OTW (or just ask here on the tumbles, plenty of us were there for it)—took those ideas and went “until you do this, you will NEVER be safe, and it will ALWAYS be the queer and disabled people who suffer.” AO3 IS LITERALLY A DIRECT ATTACK AGAINST CENSORSHIP AND CORPORATISM. THAT IS THE REASON IT EXISTS. THAT IS WHY IT IS A NONPROFIT AND NOT A COMPANY. ITS WHOLE PURPOSE IS TO NOT BE A COMPANY, BECAUSE COMPANIES FUCK FANDOM OVER. -- source link