Hello! We are researchers at the University of Washington Human Centered Data Science Lab, where we study fandom and fanfiction communities in order to better understand how people interact and engage with others in online environments. We’ve built a survey, and we’d love you all to participate!
All parts of this survey were approved by the University of Washington Human Subjects Division Institutional Review Board (IRB) to ensure the protection of your rights and welfare as you take this survey.
Anyone 13 years old or above can participate. You may stop participating in the survey at any time. Your responses will be kept confidential, although we will publish aggregated results. Also, we’ll ask if you are interested in a follow-up interview.
This survey will ask you about your participation in fanfiction communities. You will also be asked some basic demographic questions at the end of the survey. The survey contains 11 to 13 questions in total depending on your answers. You are not required to answer every question.
For questions about our research, send us an ask or contact Ruby Davis at [email protected].
Person 1: What is the thing we can’t live without?
Person 2: -_- oxygen!
Me: (raising my hand trying to reach the ceiling in excitement) oh may I? I know I know.. Fan-fictions, fan-fictions (looking at those morons with expressionless faces and idiots living on oxygen) F A N…- F I C T I O N S!! ( ͜。 ͡ʖ ͜。)
archiveofourown.org (also known as ao3) is a nonprofit archive of fanfic made by and for fans, run in such a way that you can feel safe your stuff won’t be taken down for Ye Olde Female Presenting Nipples™ like it can on Tumblr
it’s got plenty of Peaky writers on it, including but not limited to @whentommymetalfie,@twistedrunes,@blinder-secrets, @alfiesolcmons, @toyhto,@vamillepudding, and I’m sure I’m missing like at least a hundred other people but I’m too sleep deprived atm to list em all. Anyways there are literally over 800 Peaky Blinders fanfics on there. You can use your account not only to publish stuff but also to comment, bookmark, and mark to read later. It’s great
it’s also the site I’m using to run the Peaky Blinders Fic Exchange. usually you have to wait in a queue for like three days before you get your confirmation email, but because I’m running this fic exchange I’ve got 8 invitations so email me at [email protected] or talk to me on discord #ashling7490 or talk to me on tumblr.
tl;dr: I have 8 ao3 invites and I can get you an account rly fast. so if you wanna join this fic exchange but you’ve never dealt with ao3 before and don’t have an account, hmu (edit: as of 10/12/19 I only have 3 invitations left)
I see you’ve built an app that scrapes AO3 and dubs itself an “archive” of fanfiction, the biggest in the world. The fanfiction you’re publishing is fanfiction that we wrote, that we chose to put on AO3 because we feel good about the OTW’s motives, methods, tools, beliefs, and origins. Many of us refuse to put our work on platforms that collect ad revenue or censor fanworks (like ff.net). While our works are available for free on AO3, we retain the ability to control what happens with it, and we can edit, remove, or restrict any fic we’ve posted at any time. AO3 also acts as a platform through which we interact with readers, and AO3 provides information about our readership through statistics that help us understand the impact of our work.
The app you’ve built runs counter to all of that. You are taking our work and redistributing it without our permission, and you are soliciting “tips” from readers and ad revenue from advertisers. You are literally selling an archive of fanwork without any fan permission.
Fanwork is based on remixing, borrowing, and reconceptualizing media and work owned by others. In principle, taking our work and making something new out of it isn’t inherently bad or counter to our values. But that’s not what you’re doing. You’re taking work uploaded to one trusted platform and republishing it on another, selling it as a “huge fanfic collection to read”. You’re selling our work, not yours.
The kicker, for me, is that AO3 has explicitly asked you not to do this. They do not offer a feed so that app developers can do what you’re doing, and you are in no way authorized to use their code and their work in this way. You are scraping AO3 directly against their clearly articulated wishes. To do so, you are using the bandwidth the rest of us donate to make available. We don’t donate to AO3 so that you can profit off of it: we donate so that readers can access our work for free, and so that we can store and share our work in a place that aligns with our morals, ethics, and values.
If you were partnering with AO3 to develop an app that would provide fans with a tool to store, comment on, interact with, bookmark, rec, or transform fanwork posted on AO3, I would be your #1 supporter. Building tools for the fannish community that builds on and transforms the fannish experience is an amazing act of fanwork in itself, and tools built with an eye towards how fans interact with each other are amazing. But that’s objectively not what you’re doing.
Just because content is freely available on the internet doesn’t mean its creators don’t still have rights. Freely available doesn’t mean you own it. We are all about transforming works into something new, but re-publishing someone else’s work without permission is not transforming anything. It’s just profiteering.
As a copyright owner, you do not have my permission re-distribute and re-publish my work via your “Fanfic Pocket Archive Library” app . You do not have my permission to profit via tips or ad revenue based on offering people an archive my work. You are currently publishing all of my available works on. AO3: please remove all of it immediately.
Sincerely,
Ivy Blossom
Thanks to Kizzia for bringing this app to my attention. <3
Video description: a tiktok video discussing AO3’s new comment blocking feature.
The video begins by showing a tweet from the Ao3_status twitter account. The tweet reads, “Comment blocking is now live! ” and is responding to the tweet linking the AO3 News post announcing that comment blocking is coming.
The narrator then goes to the comments section on one of her works and points out that there is a new button available. On comments from other users, you can now see a button labelled “Block.”
She taps on the Block button and it takes her to a confirmation page. The confirmation page outlines what blocking will do: stop a user from commenting on your works and stop a user from replying to your comments elsewhere on AO3. It also outlines what blocking will not do: hide that user’s works or bookmarks from you, delete or hide their existing comments on your works, hide their comments elsewhere on the site.
She confirms that she wants to block the user and then returns to her comments section. The button that formerly said “Block” now says “Unblock.” She says you can remove the block on a user by pressing that button again or by tapping on your username at the top of the page and selecting My Preferences from the dropdown menu that appears.
On the My Preferences page, there is now a button labelled “Block users.” After tapping that button, she goes to a new page. On that new page, you can see the user she just blocked and a button next to their username that says “Unblock.”
She taps that button and it takes her to a confirmation page which outlines what will happen if she agrees. Unblocking a user will allow them to comment on your work or to reply to your comments elsewhere on the site. She confirms.
The screen goes back to the Blocked Users page found in My Preferences, and the narrator explains that you don’t need to find a comment from another user in order to block them. If you’d like, you can type their name into the text box provided and block them directly from that page.
Not shown: you can also block a user from that user’s profile page.
If you’d like to know more about more blocking and muting features that are planned, read the News post linked above.
FYI to all it looks like this to the people you have blocked:
[image description: screenshot of the buttons and kudos left at the bottom of an AO3 work. Where the comment box would usually be, there is a blue infobox that reads, “Sorry, you have been blocked by one or more of this work’s creators.”]
thank you so much for checking this out and sharing with us!
(I can also make a series for more mainstream stuff if people would be interested in that, though it’s a bit more ambiguous what to put there. I could also do one for cartoons/animated stuff, and/or one for webcomics but they’d be pretty sparse currently).
For the most part I find that most people follow me for one of those fandoms, but generally not all three. Or else they like my anime/manga fics but don’t really follow me for much else. So if you want to subscribe to me on Ao3, but only want to get notifications for one of those fandoms/genres please bookmark the one you’re interested in!!!
Also, if there’s any other groups you want me to make series of please let me know!!
Also don’t forget I actually have blogs for those three fandoms for you to get specific content/fics for them over here:
Hello! I’m opening commissions for AO3 page dividers! No more boring straight lines - spruce up your fanfic with a little doodle in between your scenes!
If you have any questions, or would like to commission me, email me at [email protected] and we can get you hooked up with some sweet razzle-dazzle for your fic!
I was today years old when I learned that when you type “otp: true” in AO3 search results it filters out fics with additional ships, leaving only the fics where your otp is the main ship
Yknow what while I’m here I know we as a website agreed to oppress the business majors but all the bullshit that comes around every April over ao3’s business practices makes me think we should’ve kept at least one to explain to people how nonprofits, despite their name, still need money to function and do not in fact run on rainbows and dreams alone
Woo! It’s a good thing y’all didnt oppress accounting majors because we understand this stuff better than business majors. (We were around before capitalism and we’re already set up for after capitalism.)
First things first - I dont regularly use or donate to AO3 but I have made an account to see what the fuss was about. Fanfiction just isnt my thing but I see why people like it.
That being said, AO3 has no employees. All work is volunteer based. ABSOLUTELY ZERO people are making money from this site. (Outside of contractors and professionals who are vendors and not affiliated with AO3.)
I’m going to break down the 2019 Audited Financials because that’s the most recent. And compare them to the budget and notes:
The auditor’s opinion is “unmodified.” That means these are as accurate as they get.
Their assets: $1.3M in cash. $197k in the value of the servers. (That’s the price they bought the servers minus depreciation. Depreciation is a tool we use to slowly devalue fixed assets over time. Without it, companies would recognize huge losses at year end when they sell old assets. That’s not reliable information when you’re trying to analyze the financials.) Why would a non-profit need a million dollars in cash? Partly to fund the next year’s work - it looks like they’re trying to bring on new servers which can cost upwards of $400k each time. They also have a history of protecting fans from people like Anne Rice who wants to sue them into debt and oblivion. We’ll talk about the legal stuff later. But in the case they would lose an expensive case, they need funds on hand to pay that out.
Revenues - this is the money in. They received $733k in donations and the like. Their expenses are about 37% of these. Which tells me, they are focused on managing their cash balance, and doing well. Again. No organization would survive if they had no cash at year end.
You might see the “In-Kind Revenue” and not know what that means. $190k is a big amount. But if you look at their expense statement on page (4) you’ll see “In-Kind Expenses” for the same $190k. In-kind means services in kind of cash. Or services instead of cash. So they had $190k of pro-bono (donated) legal work in 2019. They mention it in the budget and later in the audit footnotes. There are other “professional fees” for about $28k. That’s also legal/audit work but they had to pay cash for. It wasn’t donated.
Cash expenses:
Server fees = $79k (these are higher than 2018 because they installed a new server.)
Transaction fees = $27k (these are charges from your banks/credit cards/paypal to process donations. They are roughly 3% of donations which is about correct.)
Contractor fees = $15k (the budget noted they paid for a security test - this is actually a pretty low cost for something like this.)
Supplies = $14k (I couldn’t find notes on this but it’s similar to 2018, so it’s probably just normal business things.)
Postage = $12k (This is high compared to 2018, but I hazard a guess it’s related to sending out promotional items for donations.)
Advertising = $10k (looks like a new cost this year, but is related to fundraising efforts. And might be related to those promo items.)
Other non-cash expenses:
In-kind = $190k (those donated lawyer fees we talked about earlier.)
Depreciation = $74k (again this is an accounting process that every company with fixed assets does.)
The cash flows statement just confirms which expenses were and weren’t cash. And it shows us that they have $1.3M available for the next year. Glancing at the 2020 budget they planned on spending a third of that to upgrade servers. And they have another $400k budgeted for 2021. Honestly to me, the cash looks low considering some years (2018 in particular,) their legal work was valued at half a million. There is a risk that they would have to pay that amount out of pocket the same year they plan to bring on a new server upgrade.
So all in all, if you want to donate to AO3, this looks like a reliable organization to donate to. There is no evidence in the financials that they don’t deserve the donations. (And if you do donate, remember it is a tax credit!) I also don’t see any verifiable reasons not to donate. If you have other places you would rather place your donation, that’s fine! Do that! But there doesn’t seem to be a reason to campaign against their fundraising efforts.
This is a really neat breakdown! And it’s explained so that idiots like me who don’t know how stuff works can understand!
I’m kinda new on this scene…really great explainer here, but I really hope this isn’t a debate I’m gonna have see every time ao3 collects money
Hate to break it to you, but that is exactly what’s going to happen.
I’ve already seen all of the usual suspects from 2018 and 2019 and, like this post, 2020, pass by during this April 2021 drive. I’m sure we’ll see them all again in October too. (Thanks, tumblr, for your horrible lack of timestamps unless one turns that shit on with xkit.) No doubt there are classic drive wank posts from 2017 and before and I just haven’t noticed because literally every six months, all the posts look the same.
