emmagineif:

bihet-dragonize:

nutheadgee:

synclaires:

witchythirteen:

Looking at this makes me so tired.

Every year, multiple times a year, they convince ppl to fork out thousands of dollars and….literally nothing changes. There’s no doubt in my mind they’re pocketing most of this money lol

Yep

That’s what’s so wild to me. They’ve made exactly 0 changes other than adding the ‘Exclude’ tags and that def doesn’t take 130k.

Actually you can see their budget right here, and, yeah, it cost about 100k. (For reference an entry-level, full time web developer makes about 40k a year, not including benefits). 

Here’s where they talk about all the changes they actually made. 

To understand why any of this matters, here’s what you have to understand: 

In computers, time is expensive. 

“Putting a strain on the Archive’s servers” basically means slowing down the website, which potentially means paying for and maintaining more servers, which is more expensive. 

And that’s just bookmarks. Because everything on ao3 is interconnected, any changes made to the tagging system could completely break the functionality of the entire website. This means if you didn’t notice any changes somebody did their job really well. Somebody tested that code extensively, pushed it to it’s limits, fixed all the problems, and then tested it all over again.

And that’s just the things they’ve actively made changes to; every year there’s more fics added, which means more data they’ve got to store and maintain. They’ve got to back everything up that when they lose data (not if), they’ve got a backup so you don’t lose the 500,000 word fic you spent 2 years working on and isn’t stored anywhere else. 

And that’s just what they’re storing. Every time you load a fic, every time you make a search, you’re communicating with a server, which can only send information out to so many computers at once. More and more people use ao3 each year, meaning they have to buy more servers (which cost money). 

Now, I’m not an expert. And I haven’t thoroughly looked through their budget to see if they actually have spent their money wisely, or if there are cheaper contracting services they could have used, but I’m pretty sure the people working there have a better idea of how much something costs than a random person looking at a number and saying “that looks like a lot.” 

Do you have to donate? No. Obviously not (although it is tax deductible). But I personally don’t consider paying somebody for a service they’ve provided to be them “pocketing my money,” especially when they’re a nonprofit, unlike, say, twitter, facebook, or… TUMBLR. 

Maybe it isn’t worth anything to you to keep ao3 up and running, and that’s fine! But I use their service every single day, and it’s worth something to me.