i think what bothers me the most about the little shits who hate AO3’s donation drives and assume that OTW is pocketing the money is that these little shits are taking the site for granted. for some of these kids, they’ve never had a real fandom experience without an ad-free site that cracks down hard on harassment and allows literally any kind of fanwork under the sun regardless of fandom, content, or rating.
because they have a legal team composed of people who believe fanworks are covered under fair use and aren’t copyright infringement, they can defend our right to create fanworks in the first place.
because the creators lived through purge after purge, with fanworks being removed by the purity police or personal archive sites shutting down, they wanted a place where all fanworks could be safe from slash-and-burn tactics that frequently end up targeting queer stories and authors first and hardest, and wouldn’t be subject to a single person no longer being able to pay to keep a domain or server space for their favorite fics.
I remember the days of ff.net’s refusal to allow NC-17 works, which you could safely ignore if you were writing a straight pairing, but as a slash author? i was terrified of having my work permanently removed and all my hard work to get reviews undone. I remember when they banned songfics, and the author of one story i followed that had written completely original lyrics to an instrumental song had to take that section out of his fic for fear the whole 100k+ fic was taken down
with AO3, people no longer have that fear. sure, they could use ad revenue to fund the server costs, but then they’d either have to rely on ad networks that use tracking data and intrusive ads or else hand-select ads that are safe for everyone’s computers and phones. and THEN they’d have to hope that enough people didn’t use ad blockers on their site to actually pay the server costs
if OTW and the AO3 go down, kiss all that shit you kids in fandom take for granted goodbye. cease and desist letters from Disney (who owns Marvel) because you’re writing a popular Steve/Tony MCU fanfic and posting it to your personal blog, and that kind of thing “makes the company look bad” and could somehow be stumbled on by someone who doesn’t know what fanfiction is and thinks it’s an official Disney/Marvel-owned story
think that’s bullshit? it happened to an owner of a Batman erotica fansite before ff.net existed. WB sent her a cease and desist letter with that exact same reasoning. they probably sent out hundreds of those, but what can an individual do to stop a major corporation from taking down their personal fanfic site? but if you have a company running that archive, with a legal team that will fight back against those takedown notices because fanworks can, do, and always should fall under the label of “fair use” then people can continue to make their fandom a safe place… for fandom creators. take away the safety for creators to produce their content, whatever content that might be, and you’re on the way to losing fandom.