Autor: inhumansandwiches

fangasmagorical:

blooming-wilting:

gladnis:

hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity

You know it legally is a charity, right?

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. 

It needs what it gets to function and improve. 

kiena-tesedale replied to this post

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.

It’s
absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW
defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that
actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and
the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we
love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.

calystarose:

nonbinaryjasontodd:

taika: here’s this neat symbolism of thor being sent down the same path of his father, shown by losing his eye and having the eyepatch, but instead he chose to be a better man than his father was. also his hammer gets destroyed because he never really needed it, it was just a channel for his powers, and he’s far more powerful without it.

russo brothers: ……………………………….. okay heres a robot eye and an axe

Reblogging for @iunia-kallistrate excellent tag commentary: 

#the russo brothers are having the joss whedon problem#joss’ shit was innovative when he started#(performative) feminism 101 on TV in Sci-fi then#was huge#but now we’re all in (actual) feminism 405 and that 101 stuff is tired#the Russo brother’s were kings of the superhero scene when the only bar they had to surpass was Whedon’s#and so they went and did social and moral conflicts 101 stories featuring white men and their sidekicks#but then we got Tiaka and Ryan Coogler#who write social and moral conflict on the graduate level and not the undergrad freshman intro level#and both of them surpassing Whedon’s so called feminism to boot#not that its hard#but you’ve got Tiaka over her writing a female character who can go toe to toe with the boys w/o it being about how sexy she is#Valkyrie is on fire but its not about them#Even the Grandmaster’s little crush is meant to show us how badass she is and not how hot she is#Then you get Ryan Coogler out her writing a fucking dissertation on intersectional feminism and the patriarchy of the diaspora#How are we supposed to go back to the Russo brothers after that#When they refuse to accept that the game has changed and try to break what was built to fit their tired concepts#the same Whedon ignored their character building in Ultron#like kids who brake their own toys because they don’t want their siblings to play