renasanse:

ifishouldvanish:

ifishouldvanish:

“why are pillowfort/ao3 asking for money?? Tumblr and LJ are free!!!”

y’all really don’t get how this works, huh?

Look y’all. Bottom line is large websites/web apps are fucking expensive

It’s not like a personal or small business site where you pay $25/mo for a shared hosting package and knock yourself out

You need multiple, dedicated, high-performance servers to handle a service like Tumblr or AO3, or Facebook, or what have you, to keep up with the insane amount of bandwidth and unfathomable amount of data.

Shit cost thousands of dollars a month. And those costs only go up the more users you have. Into the tens of thousands of dollars a month. Someone has to foot the bill for it. And that doesn’t include the salaries of the developers who pour hours of their time into making things function the way they need to.

“but Tumblr used to not have ads!!” you say! “They just got greedy!”

No, they didn’t “just get greedy”. This is how free services work. They aren’t magically able to sustain themselves. At any point. Ever.

Investors see proof of concept during the infancy of a project, and they pour their money– hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars– to 1) help fund the project into maturity. (Maturity = stable performance and a large, growing userbase) and 2) have a seat at the table when big decisions are made

Until that point, you won’t see ads, or be nagged to donate, or forced to pay a fee to access your content. That’s no accident.

Investors eat the cost of running and developing the service, because they know that once that userbase has been established, they can– you guessed it– SELL YOUR DATA TO ADVERTISERS.

They can’t do that until after they have users for advertisers to sell their shit to!

That’s how the investors make their money back, that’s how the service becomes profitable instead of being a giant cash pit.

So for the love of God, can we PLEASE stop slandering sites like AO3, Wikipedia, and now Pillowfort for having the audacity to ask for donations, or for having tiered/paid membership options for additional, non-essential features??

THIS. 

Seriously, in the wake of all this bullshit, younger fandom users desperately need to learn how to support their own we communities. If we don’t do this, all of the new platforms cropping up that promise to “not sell out”, like Pillowfort once it becomes stable, will inevitably be FORCED to sell to a larger corporation, that will not care about its users beyond their monetization value, or shut down. That’s how it works. 

If we want noncommercial, minimal-advertising websites with competent staff that care about the opinions of their userbase, we need to fund them ourselves. If you like a platform, fund it. Throw a couple dollars their way when you have a couple dollars to spare, and spread the word when you don’t. Buy the stupid little ad-ons or cheap subscription service if your budget allows for it. If you don’t do those things, be prepared to lose whatever community you’ve built there, because sooner or later the site will be running at a deficit each month and the investors will get pissy, and they’re going to have “ideas”, and those ideas are going to be heavily divorced from what the userbase wants because to them, you’re nothing but ad revenue. Sad truth of business. 

Don’t like it? Work to change it. Put your money where your mouth is.