i'm too old for this.

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.

Have you ever learned, like, a SINGLE THING about the legality of fanfiction?

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?

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.

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.

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.