Please, please report people who put their ko-fi or Patreon on their AO3 without mercy. Just click the link at the bottom of the page that says Policy Questions and Abuse Reports and say the user is engaging in monetisation. Say where you saw their ko-fi link or mention (author’s note, whatever) and copy the info on their user profile, too, in order to make it easier for the volunteers.
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REPORT THEM ALL
If you’re concerned, there’s nothing punitive about this, it’s just enforcement of the TOS they agreed to when they signed up. And there’s no real risk of the fic being removed, either. AO3 will contact the author and nicely ask them to remove the link, and that’s it.
Yeah, that too.
Literally the only downside is making too much work for the Abuse team. (Cry me a river, guys. In my day, we had like 2 active people, and even at the much smaller size, that was a problem.)
If you want, you can let authors know it’s not allowed and then report their asses if they’re rude about it. Or you can just report them in the first place.
But this bullshit should be stamped out.
Wait can someone explain what I’m missing here because it sounds like a bunch of whiny babies being upset that people are monetizing their own work. I get its a site policy but 1. Why are you being a cop you losers and 2. Who cares? Why is it a rule?
If I’m missing something here I’m genuinely curious. Who is it hurting to drop a ko-fi on your page? Or do y'all just love being cops?
I did not donate seven years of free labor to build AO3 so that some other dipshit could monetize my work.
And yes, it is monetizing AO3 itself because the whole reason people want to put kofi links there is that it’s easy to find fics on AO3. AO3 also lacks constant competition from other ads.
AO3 is as awesome as it is because we built it to not be monetized.
People who don’t get that are shitting on the people who made and still make AO3 possible with their work and their donations.
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Go post your kofi links on a corporate site like tumblr/twitter/etc., not one built by your fellow fans. Disobeying the AO3 rules is just rude.
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Look, when you do whatever on a big social media site, you’re fucking with corporate overlords.
When you’re doing stupid shit on AO3, you’re coming to a dinner party I planned and hosted and then pissing into the flower arrangement in the middle of the table.
The only whiny babies here are the ones demanding other fans provide them with a storefront for free.
You don’t sell your vegetables at a charitable food bank. You rent a booth at the farmer’s market.
You don’t set up your book kiosk in the lobby of a public library. You go to a flea market, or somewhere else that allows you to set up a book kiosk.
AO3 is fandom’s food bank. It is fandom’s public library. It is not your storefront. If you want to sell your work, don’t do it on a nonprofit website volunteers built for the *explicit* purpose of creating an anti-capitalist fandom oasis.There’s also the VERY REAL problem that the main defense of transformative work – aka fanfiction – to keep us from getting our asses sued into the stratosphere by Disney, Marvel, etc. is that we don’t profit from it. If you are writing someone else’s IP for money without their permission, they CAN sue you, and if it’s somebody as big as Fox, Disney, etc., they WILL sue you. The main way I can tell fandom has done a good job of making safe spaces for ourselves is that these young’uns coming up don’t remember getting Cease & Desist letters from very scary lawyers.
So that’s why you report people putting kofi links on AO3 - because by doing so, they’re painting a giant fucking target on fandom’s back.
I have a hard time believing that anyone who knows what AO3 is doesn’t already know all this and isn’t questioning it in bad faith, burgeoned by the facts that the questioner had a keysmash URL and has since deactivated
out of curiousity does this apply to people who put original fiction up
It’s in the TOS. It applies to everything posted.
That stinks. Wonder if they weren’t planning to host original works when that was decided
Uh… dude…
No, it doesn’t “stink”. It’s a primary cultural value of the people who built the site.
I had a really hard time convincing anyone to even allow non-commercial original work as was normal on a lot of older fic archives because they were so afraid that original=monetized and that people would start disobeying the rules. Little did we know that a decade later people would be breaking the rules over fic all the time.
Original works on AO3 are just fine if they are fannish in some way and noncommercial.
Fanworks of public domain canons also have to be noncommercial on AO3, though you can legally sell them elsewhere.
Being noncommercial was the whole fucking point.