Now I just want @nostalgebraist-autoresponder to get in a fight with ChatGPT to see what kinds of brand new discourse she can invent.
I pronouns you not guilty
Now I just want @nostalgebraist-autoresponder to get in a fight with ChatGPT to see what kinds of brand new discourse she can invent.
*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 we liked.
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.
They ask for all of that money for two reasons, one being larger than the other.
1. Employee expenses. Someone has to renew the page license, update firewalls, improve the webpage, and add beneficial features that the users are explicitly asking for. They also keep good copyright lawyers on retainer, who stay up-to-date on potential law suits and draw up legal responses to those Cease and Desist letter. That is not a nothing-expense. People deserve to be properly compensated for their labor.
2. This is the big one: Servers. I don’t know if y’all know this, but internet web pages do not have endless and infinite storage capacity. Since AO3 is ad free, it needs to come up with the money to buy and maintain servers from elsewhere, aka DONATIONS, which are willingly given.
It’s not a subscription service. Authors don’t have to pay to submit stories. There’s nothing predatory about it. If you don’t want to give, don’t give. But also don’t try and smear their name when you don’t understand a single thing about what they do for fandom and fanworks.
People do deserve to be properly compensated, but that’s not how AO3 runs. Almost all of the labor is donated, including those expensive tech skills and legal skills.
My biggest beef with the “I deserve a $5 coffee for my fic” thing is that the vital work of making the site exist at all is largely uncompensated. A given fic writer wouldn’t just be monetizing their own labor but that of a lot of other people who did not consent.
Yeah, I don’t think people realize–or can comprehend (!!)–that nobody gets paid–it’s all volunteer from the board on down, and even the lawyers work pro-bono. Server costs, machines, hosting for webpages for related activities, communications software, those things cost money, but the OTW is an all-volunteer nonprofit corporation. We did (I believe) once or twice hired limited-term contractors to help wit specific technical debt stuff (things about gems and stuff underlying the software, updating Rails), but the thing is mostly a giant labor of love. Because it turns out that not everyone creates awesome things for money. As you might think an entire archive of awesome, custom-written fanfiction might prove. :D Or to put it another way–the whole of OTW and AO3 is A FANWORK, YOU GUYS.
there’s lots of great info here but i just want to add, for anyone who missed it or isn’t thinking about it, that it’s incredible that ao3 doesn’t have ads.
they aren’t even requiring that anyone pay to use the site. it’s optional. you don’t want to donate, don’t donate, it’s fine. you’re probably capable of ignoring the donation request banner on other sites (wiki??) just fine.
it’s true that running and maintaining servers and also holding a fund for legal expenses costs actual money– you can request their actual budget and expenses explanation iirc but i’m not going to leave tumblr mobile to hunt for it.
but also? do you realize how incredible no ads is? like, really? almost every single other non-commercial website (and even some of those now) depend on ads to survive. that means they’re selling your data to pitch their target demographics and traffic to advertisers. so not only is ao3 letting you read fic without annoying banner ads, but they aren’t selling your info to justify the advertising expense to potential advertisers/investors. imagine how horribly THAT info could be used if it was being sold or leaked as a commodity.
like bruh i’m sorry if it sucks that you think you should get to make money off someone else’s IP– depending on the IP in question you might be entirely justified in wanting to! but you’re welcome to go use patreon or ko-fi. you could take commissions somewhere. i could go off and write original fiction. yeah, it’s unfair that fanart is a loophole left alone more than writing, or that people feel like they shouldn’t have to pay as much for words. that all sucks. and none of that is ao3’s problem or a problem ao3 was created (by us, by fandom) to solve.
not only have we watched FFN go down the advertising and yielding to legal pressure drain, but if you’ve always had ao3, you don’t know what it was like to have fanworks hosted on little private hubs or groups on sites not entirely intended for it. one of my fandoms was a privately managed server and when the host moved on, they waited a few years, and then stopped paying to maintain it. it’s all just gone– any work i didn’t back up from when i was a teen, any stories i didn’t think to save for when i wanted to revisit them two decades later. i posted my first ao3 story seven years ago and even THAT is a wild amount of time to still be like “oh yeah i’m not at all worried about the site vanishing” to me.
they aren’t making money off us, nobody is vacationing on ao3 donations, but even if someone was for a site that doesn’t sell my data to advertisers, doesn’t require a fee to use, and lets me register pretty much anonymously, i would probably think an optional occasional donation was worth it. maybe i’d have criticisms but that’s still a whole fucking lot that thousands of fandoms are being offered for FREE.
and if it still really bothers you, then instead of complaining about your conspiracy theories every donation season, maybe just go donate to your local rescue or food pantry and do some good with the money you weren’t going to give anyway, instead of trying to trash a site’s reputation based on misunderstandings and rumors. some of us are really grateful for ao3 and don’t want it ruined.
I do a series on Tiktok/Reels called “Good Trans News” the whole idea was to try and give other trans people a reprieve from the constant barrage of bad news and try to provide hope by showcasing positive news that affects trans people.
I’m not sure why I never posted those videos on tumblr, because I think they could do some good here.
So here’s some good news!
It turns out that most people don’t hate us
Thats not just 83% of americans, thats 83% of Fox News Poll Respondants, which typically is a demographic that leans strongly to the right anyway!
What's the worst pain you've ever experienced in your life?
Getting kicked in the balls really hard
Migraine
Broken bone
Piercing or tattoo
Getting stabbed
Waking up from a surgery
Passing kidney stones
Getting shot
Giving birth
Other (list in tags)
Ok. Real talk time. I'm going to share this story, and if you are someone who has a uterus, please read. I do not want anyone else to go through what happened to me without at least knowing what is happening with their body. The worst pain I ever experienced was a deucidual cast.
Dec 2020, I woke up in horrible pain. I was having the worst cramps I have ever had in my life, and I regularly experience very painful cramping when I'm on my period. Pretty much all I was capable of doing was crawling out of bed and onto the living room floor to try and put pressure on my uterus so it would stop.
Within about an hour, I texted a friend to ask if they could please come help me get to a hospital. About ten minutes after that, I called 911 for an ambulance because I could not wait the 20 minutes for my friend to come pick me up. My primary concern at the time was appendicitis. I had recently read somewhere that it was not uncommon for people to confuse intense period pain with their appendix bursting.
I got to the hospital and told them my symptoms. Incredible pain. Like 15 on a scale from 1 to 10. The ER nurse put me on morphine. IT DID NOTHING. I was in so much pain morphine did not even take the edge off. When the intake admin came in to do my paperwork, I was rolling on the bed in so much pain I could not even speak. The nurse upgraded me to hydromorphine-did not even know that was a thing, but that finally helped to get control over the pain.
They determined it was not appendicitis, and then sent in an ultrasound technician to take a look at my uterus. When I sat up after the exam, what I can only describe as an explosion of blood came gushing out of me. My underwear was soaked and dripping blood. The paper sheet on the bed was drenched. If you are squeamish, warning because it's about to get kinda bad.
I went to the bathroom to take a urine sample, and to try and assess the damage. When I pulled down my pants to sit on the toilet, a piece of flesh the size of a golf ball fell out of my body and onto the floor. To be very clear, there was 0 chance I could be pregnant for a multitude of reasons, so this was not a miscarriage. Stunned, horrified, and now sure I was dying, I scooped it up in the sample cup and took it back to the nurse.
My pain immediately went away after that. After a lot of hemming and hawing, the nurses and doctors decided that I was ok to go home, gave me some heavy duty painkillers, and sent me home. When I had a followup with my regular doctor the next day, she did a lot of thinking and eventually suggested that maybe, since I was using my birth control to skip periods, I had built up an unusually thick uterine lining, and suggested I stop skipping the placebo week, so I did. It was not until 2 years later, on TikTok of all places, that I finally found out what it actually was.
I came across a video of a nurse who described experiencing very similar symptoms to me, including having flesh come out of her. She noted having what felt like contractions, and intense pain for hours. When she went to the doctor's, no one had any idea what was wrong.
In fact, the comments on this video was FILLED with women who'd gone through the same thing, and had responses ranging to 'no idea, go home' to 'you're hysterical.' People described being terrified by the experience, and having to go home with no answers. For me, I went home and stopped skipping periods, the exact reason why I'd gone onto birth control in the first place, and then just lived with my very scary ER visit for a long time.
So finally the woman explained that she reached out to a gynecologist colleague who was able to tell her that she'd had a deucidual cast. The lining of her uterus had come off in one piece, instead of slowly shedding over several days (aka, a period, for those who don't know). A deucidual cast is excruciatingly painful, not that uncommon for anyone who has a period, and most doctors have never heard of it. Unless you are a specialist in a few fields, it doesn't really get taught in medical school.
I know this is a very long and rambling story, but I feel like it's really important to capture the details because it helps others to identify what the symptoms are, and assure others that they are going to be ok if it happens! This was a seriously scary and traumatizing experience, and I had to live with it in the back of my mind for two years. No one deserves that.
The good news is: a deucidual cast is not dangerous. It can be indicative of am ectopic pregnancy, but not always, and if you're not pregnant you don't have to br concerned. If it happens to you: it is going to be ok. You do not need to feel scared about the blood or anything else; it's the uterine lining, just like regular period blood. It is PAINFUL and that suuucks. But you will be ok once it's over.
Idk, I hope this helps someone. Tl,dr, look up a deucidual cast if you have a uterus and can have a period. They are VERY painful but not dangerous, and there's a good chance if have one a doctor will not know what's happening to you.



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