Absolutely amazing how AO3 is a part of the internet that doesn’t sneak in any ads and doesn’t have an algorithm and doesn’t watch you or record how much time you spend looking at each fic or whatever. It’s just right there to use for free. Legend
The internet was like this. This was the normal.
this is because it’s a non-profit! Remember this next time you bitch about ao3 asking for donations.
Re: littlecofiegirl’s comment — actually, the internet was never like this.
“YouTube used to be free.” Youtube used to be funded by venture capitalists. It operated at a loss for many years, until it grew a dedicated enough customer base to start stage 2 of the enshittification process.
It’s the same business model as Amazon or Uber. Venture capitalists pour money into a business, allowing it to operate at a loss and undersell its competition until all the competition dies out and it becomes a monopoly. Once that happens, the business can hike up prices as high as it wants, secure in the knowledge that customers have nowhere else to go.
These websites were never free. They were always accruing debt, with the intention of eventually coercing the public into paying off that debt a hundredfold.
AO3 is not a relic of the old internet. It is a new kind of website created specifically in reaction to the enshittification of the corporate internet, by a community of people who believed that creative works deserved to flourish on the internet, on a platform that was not subject to the whims of corporate oversight, so much so that they were willing to donate money and labor to create such a platform.
If you want to compare AO3 to something, compare it to a website like Bluesky, which was created in reaction to the enshittification of Twitter X.
Do not glorify “the good old days” that never existed. You don’t make the internet or the world better by going back to the way things were. You do it by building something new.
The internet existed before YouTube.
There used to be a lot of websites that were paid for by the individual people who made them. (I had one, back in the day. Cost me $10 a month in hosting, plus the domain registration. Rolled the HTML myself.) There were no algorithms; there were webrings. There were more universities online than there were companies.
AO3 is absolutely a relic of the old internet, which was a muchsmaller place than it is today.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t focus on building new things as a way to move forward, but historical revisionism doesn’t help our current situation either.
Archive of Our Own was created in 2008.
Back then, if you weren’t alive to experience it, YouTube looked like this:
ALT
AO3 was created as a reaction to fan fiction websites deciding to ban content on account of its obscenity*, content that was previously allowed. It was supposed to be a website immune to this kind of free speech backsliding.
*including or mentioning NSFW scenarios, scenes, or concepts, or certain specific concepts such as certain kinks, being smut, etc.
It could be argued that this was an early form of enshittification as it is likely these websites were doing this to please advertisers and payment processors.
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