#ao3 discourse
So, there is a postcirculating and harping on the don’t donate to Ao3 again. I thought about replying to it directly, but I really didn’t want to give it more attention. While they have done some research into past 990 forms, they are being very irate about a figure of about 13,000 for Management & Administrative because the Non-Profit staff doesn’t get paid and fear-mongering that the higher ups are embezzling the money instead of putting it to good use.
Now, I cannot speak to server costs and the massive scalability increase needed for the newer requirements especially in these Covid-era years. Although, I know as a writer and reader on Ao3 myself, I know that Ao3 has made lots of improvements since this time.
However, the linked post OP seems to fundamentally miss something very important, something which I assume most people in the general public do not even need to know exists. That 13,000 cost and category looks like it could absolutely be a Non-Profit accountant, which is a very specialized niche of accountant who knows the tax code relevant to Non-Profits and who make sure all of the accounts meet the legal requirements and the organization wouldn’t lose that hard won Non-Profit status.
Now, I myself would be very in the dark were it not for the fact that I personally was a treasurer for a much smaller non-profit for about 3-4 years nearly a decade ago. That means I didn’t get paid for the hundreds of hours of my timing tracking all of the financials for my group. However, you better believe even a small organization like ours shelled out about $7,000 (during my tenure) to have that accountant with the right expertise vet all my work and handle all coordination between the federal and state tax authorities, even though we were also a group that never broke past about $200,000 revenue/income mark at the time. (My memory on what the exact thresholds were or are now is fuzzy at best.) Since Ao3 is seeing numbers in the millions, that larger dollar figure raised explicitly requires more time (and cost) intensive level of scrutiny by the accountant to ensure auditing compliance of all records submitted to the tax authorities.
The one complaint review cited on Guidestar (of a past BoD member in 2014) talks about the functional sunshine requirements and visibility. This likely expense 100% speaks to make sure they are doing everything right and above board.
Now, obviously I cannot confirm that Ao3 doesn’t have some tax accountant volunteer who is out there somewhere doing this work pro-bono (as nearly all the all-volunteer staff clearly does.) However, it is just one very expensive line item that comes to mind off hand that most people are not aware is not just required, but is essential to ensuring the organization continues to serve its users as intended.
The 990 form will never be that detailed, as they are intended to provide a big picture view to the public (and the authorities, of course). However, that detail is there behind the scenes and is going to be vetted in incredible depth to ensure the organization is properly serving the public.
i think an important thing to remember in the ao3 discourse TM is that ao3 was nevermeant to be The Fandom Archive, it was meant to be afandom archive where you could be sure your fics wouldn’t be removed. it’s become a discourse point because it was so good that people all decided to go use it, but its existence isn’t necessarily making a point about the Best way to run a fandom or an archive, it’s a site created with a mission statement for a specific purposeasone specific archive that it’s optional to use!
things have changed a lot since then, and it dominates fandom now, but remember that what youwant from an archive and what yourpriorities are may be different, that ao3 has made a specific choice. if your criticism of it is a criticism of its mission statement you can and should find somewhere else to post.
*cackling*
If OTW weren’t around, this wouldn’t be “scaremongering”: It would be the inescapable status quo.
The people who believe this crap are the anti-vaxxers of fandom.
Oh god. They kind of are, aren’t they?
I’d go bigger and just say that they’re the conservatives/reactionaries of fandom–or, to frame it differently, this is how conservative and authoritarian ideologies express themselves in the context of Fandom.
my opinion on AO3 is that it’s an important asset but i still find it scummy that they’ll ask for money but when their users try to ask for money they slam them with their non-monetization rules.
Like Anne Rice is dead and this isn’t the 90s anymore, people are making money from fandom please catch up with the times.I think you’ve misunderstood:
AO3 was built by a bunch of us with our free donated labor for the purpose of being a space free from commercial spam.
It’s not a public service. It was built by us to house the type of fandom culture weliked.
People who want to do fandom differently, including making money, are welcome to go build their own site with their own money or their own donated labor.
AO3 does not forbid commercial links because they think fans making money from fanworks is immoral but them making money (to run the damn site) is fine.
AO3 forbids commercial links because they are making a very specific claim about the legality of fanworks, and that claim is about noncommercial fanworks.
They’re not saying that commercialized fanworks are against the law. They’re just not prepared to host them–nor defend them in court.
In case people missed it: The OTW will not honor DMCA takedown orders that are basically, “I own X work and that’s a fanfic of it, and that’s copyright infringement so make it go away.”
The OTW says, lolnope, we don’t think that’s copyright infringement. If you disagree, sue us.
The OTW says: Disney - we will not remove explicit Mandalorian fanfic. Rowling, Warner Bros - we will not remove trans Harry Potter fanfic. Gabaldon - we are not removing Outlander fanfic no matter how much you think it’s illegal or a personal violation. Yarbro, if someone puts “The Adventure of the Gentleman in Black” on AO3, you will need to actually take it to trial to (try to) get it removed; none of this C&D order followed by fans caving because they can’t afford a lawyer.
…So far, nobody has sued them. (This is, in my mind, the strongest proof we have that fanfic is not copyright infringement. In 13 years, not a single person or company has scrounged up a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against AO3/the OTW for hosting fanworks.)
But they’re not willing to put themselves on the line for commercial works. Those get considered differently in copyright law. They’re not always infringing - there’s a whole history of parody books & songs to prove that - but the OTW is not dealing with them.
The OTW does not care if fans are making money. The OTW cares if fans making money interfere with its legal defense of its archive.
If you are not a copyright lawyer, your opinion about the situation is not going to be considered.
Also, it wasn’t just Anne Rice coming after fandom in the 90s as though this is some relic holdover terror from ancient history.
Events like Strikethrough and Boldthrough happened in the early to mid-2000s. It felt like you’d wake up every day in 2007 and find another fandom group on LJ gone. (And not just fandom groups either, important community groups for education and trauma survival were also wiped out in those purges as well.)
And while not exactly the same, Yahoo Groups–and yes Yahoo Groups was a major online fandom hub at one point–were deleted as late as 2019 with very little warning, leaving a lot of older fandom groups scrambling to back up decades worth of content.
I might be projecting, but Fanfic.net seems to be wobbling too. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out they go under in the next few years despite performing similar purges of adult content in 2012 and allowing for obnoxious ads, which made the site unusable on mobile unless you wanted to see an ad what felt like every couple of paragraphs. (It might be better now, I haven’t checked in a while.)
It has only been in very recent memory that fandom has gained any sort of foothold that isn’t poised directly over a precarious faultline that could at any moment open up and swallow entire communities whole, and a huge part of that is the volunteers at Ao3 who decided to play chicken with the likes of Anne Rice and won.
Ao3 at its core was and is built by fandom. Some people don’t like it and that’s fine, but to even suggest that the volunteers are lounging around eating peeled grapes and lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills making bank through fraud while fanfic authors are left out in the cold is beyond the scope of laughable.
ASIDE from the legal protection and the fact that OTW makes its financial reports available, the internet is also…not free? I have only a very shaky layman’s understanding of most of this in its current form, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on the technicalities, but servers cost money to run. Servers are physical objects that require housing, controlled temps, electricity, maintenance, and network connection. All of those things cost money.
When I was younger in fandom, some fandoms had a fan or two with the cash and space to host a server, but you were dependent on them continuing to afford it and being invested enough in the fandom to not ditch the group. Some of them maintained servers long after community dissolved as an archive, but usually servers (or rented space on host webservices) went down at some point. Some of my oldest stories are only available in scraps through the wayback machine, and that’s true for other stories I loved. That was true when those stories were six or seven years old– my six year old stories on AO3 are probably not going anywhere. Because people donate. To help maintain servers. That we all use. Together. Without ads.
Ads can cover some of the cost of maintaining servers, but then you have ads– and as a user AND as an organization, you’re dependent on who wants to advertise through you and who sees it as a significant investment. And then you have to have staff to manage ad accounts and try to get new ones and also user tracking so you can show advertisers your foot traffic and present demographics and that you’re a worthy investment. And then if most people ignore the ads and the ads don’t get click thru, because people are busy reading a 200k fic, then it’s not a worthwhile use of a company’s ad funds and they won’t renew an account.
I feel like I’ve turned into a cynical old grandmother for a moment, but things cost money to run and maintain even in a non- or not-for-profit organization.
Post link
Since May 3rd, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) — the nonprofit behind AO3, Fanlore, and other projects — has been dealing with malicious attacks aimed at the organization and its volunteers. We wanted to share with you some of what’s been happening, as well as what we’re doing to contain it, and how it may affect our response times to your inquiries and our workload in general. Above all, we need to ask for your patience, because these are complicated times for all of us at the OTW.
An unknown attacker has been sending our volunteers threatening emails with illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM), which has been reported to several law enforcement authorities.
Source: https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/22557
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My personal thoughts, very briefly: I’m not going to name names, but is it really a huge mystery which kind of people might be behind this? I think not.
There is more conversation talking about this on Twitter, including suggestions around security matters for OTW/AO3 volunteers. But this needs to be discussed on Tumblr as well.
Antis: This fic is disgusting. I hope you kill yourself. I’m reporting this.
Ao3: We’re punishing you because harassment and threats are against our TOS. This properly tagged fic wasn’t breaking the tos, which you agreed to when you signed up for this site.
Antis: Oh my god. This proves ao3 CAN punish their users, they just choose not to!!!
