I should probably be working

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. 

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.

when scott brings kip onto the ice at the 2017 stanley cup, that is two years after gay marriage is legalized in the US. it’s one year after the Pulse shooting. there were maybe three openly gay professional athletes at the time, none of whom were in the NHL. the NHL actually has never had any openly gay players actively on the roster.

i’m the same age as hudson williams; we were 16 when the scott+kip kiss would have happened. i remember big youtuber coming out videos still being news worthy at 16. if you wanted queer representation back then, your options were Will & Grace, The L Word, and Drag Race. and that’s not nothing! i remember Love, Simon being fucking revolutionary. i also remember knowing people personally who were told not to bring their partners to prom.

it was a completely different era for queer acceptance. we were still having to settle for “hate the sin, love the sinner” tolerance. and you know what? queer people in their 20s and 30s and older were telling us we were LUCKY!!! AND WE WERE!! WE HAD IT BETTER THAN THEM!!! THE BAR WAS IN HELL!!!!