can i be real? i think ao3 should die for doing a donation pool for themselves with everything going on
and let me say this if it isn't obvious. if youre donating, i think youre a bad person
#i was literally thinking about this today#they have a MASSIVE amount of users and... they decide they need donations. ignore the palestine thing happening theyre more important#apparently#reblog
I understand that you're 22 and corporate internet is all you've ever known, but you need to know that users COST sites money.
The sole case when users do not cost sites money is when 1) users are constantly shown ads, 2) users' private data is being harvested and sold to advertisers.
AO3 does not do either of those things. It was its mission upon being founded to not do either of those things. And thus, we have twice-yearly donation drives. Every year. Yes, every year. Even that year. Even the April and October of the pandemic, even the Aprils and the Octobers of mass BLM movements, even the April after Ukraine was invaded, and yes, even this October. It's not "failing to read the room". It's called maintenance costs and being an ad-free NGO that doesn't monetise its users.
I genuinely hops this helps.
I need young people to realize that when you say "AO3 should just make money like social media sites do rather than running donation drives" what you are actually suggesting is "AO3 should sell detailed and privacy-violating data on the porn consumption habits of its users to ad companies in order to make a quick and easy buck." That's what you're suggesting when you push for that.
This is like if you looked at Wikipedia and said "Why are they asking for donations? They could just charge people and companies money to be able to rewrite their Wikipedia pages to say whatever they want about their brands!"
I mean, yeah? They could sell out their fundamental mission and all of their core userbase in order to squeeze some money out of advertising and general enshittification. They could do that. Do you really want them to? Really? Is the little donation banner (which I assume you never bother to click on anyway) really so annoying to you that you'd rather the site just sucks forever (but without needing donations, I guess)? Call me out of touch, but somehow I doubt that any of you advocating for that sort of thing would actually want the inevitable results.
A lot of people donβt necessarily realize that things cost money
AO3βs servers cost money. Wikipediaβs servers cost money. A homeless shelter costs money for rent and to keep the lights on. A park costs money for upkeep. Roads cost money to be repaved
Just because somethingβs on the internet doesnβt mean itβs free. You, as a consumer, have to spend money to buy and maintain a computer. You have to pay for Wi-Fi to load any pages and for electricity to recharge your batteries. They have the same costs, but amplified by every single user that comes to their site. Thatβs additional data that needs to be supported and maintained for every user and every post and every comment
