As far as I could tell (I do have a well-curated dash), the discussion was roughly 1% sincere antis, 4% wankers, and 95% people talking at length about why the antis were wrong or liking those responses. The posts boosted the drive if anything (and made me personally verklempt to read all the lovely posts talking about how much the AO3 has made people happy. :’)
Anyway, the board, the volunteers, and the members & donors of the OTW are the ones who actually keep the AO3 up, and they are all choosing to give their time and money to support the mission of the org. Antis can’t stop them doing that no matter how loud they yell.
Even if the AO3 stopped being popular, that wouldn’t make it go away. The OTW is not trying to make a big score going public or have a super flashy site. We never wanted to build the one and only archive for fanfic. For-profit companies want monopolies to have the power to squeeze customers. We have no such incentive. We’re eager to have as much fic as possible on the AO3, because that lets us do whatever we can to preserve it, but we don’t want it to be the only place where fic exists. That would make the AO3 a single point of failure for fandom. And a wonderful part of fandom has always been its decentralized nature.
The AO3 isn’t perfect, either in absolute terms or for every user, and never will be. There’s lots that could be improved (and many awesome people actively working on improving it – I highly encourage anyone who can to please make the effort to volunteer).
But what does make the AO3 special is that it cares a lot about fannish history and its preservation and preserving your access to it, and not at all about generating hits or profits or harvesting your personal data, and central to that is maximal inclusiveness of content. It is fundamental to the entire project. It’s literally the first line in the Terms of Service that you agree to when you get your account.
If someone sincerely cannot accept that policy, then they shouldn’t agree to the TOS (which on the AO3 unlike most sites is human-readable), and they shouldn’t use the AO3.
For everyone else, even if you don’t like using the AO3 for your everyday reading for whatever reason, do consider cross-posting your stories there. Because if nothing else, it means that when the site you do like goes away, or becomes inhospitable, you’ll have a backup site with all your stories on it where you can download copies easily to be imported.
I got an email from a guy who said that he was really depressed and was about to hurt himself when a friend called and asked him to go dancing. He said no, he didn’t want to go out. And then after he hung up the phone, he remembered that line: “Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy.” So he called the friend back, went dancing, had a great time, decided not to kill himself and wrote me a letter saying, “That line saved my life.” I was weeping [reading that]. What an offhand line to end up being so meaningful to someone. That blew my mind. (x)
So, I realized that I never uploaded the complete cover of the fanbook
that I made in collaboration with a lot of awesome artists.
It was a really nice experience to organize a beautiful
project for a fandom that I love so much. You can get a copy in my
store: http://gyrhs.storenvy.com/
If God never existed, then whose heavenly staircase did I march up, whose heavenly host did I best in battle, and whose severed head do I keep stowed in my basement?
jinlinli 