“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??
DAMN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THOSE BOOKS ARE PUSSYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOOK AT THOSE BOOKS BEING PUSSY;S!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NOW THATS WHAT I CALL “INTELLECTUALLY STIMULATING”…!!!!!!!!!!!!! THIS WILL… REALLY MAKE YOU THINK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
if this post gets deleted on the 17th I’m going with it
i dont know but it kinda always feels like ppl want their wlw ships to be devoid of passion. like i dnt think we need girls to like beat the shit out of each other like its naruto and sasuke going at it for the hokage position in a fight to the death but also. uhh. sometimes i want my wlw relationships to have that level of devotion and it doesnt have to come out in physical violence ofc or in extremely unhealthy power dynamics but im always shocked by how much ppl want to see all wlw relationships in media declawed. like i want passion and i want betrayal and i want devotion and i want furious blinding love that consumes and consumes and consumes. and! i like cute ships with v little conflict too, but idk! diversity in relationships is good. i wish that we could have more strong relationships with challenges and flaws that aren’t automatically written off as inherently abusive or disgusting bc they got in a fist fight in a world with fucking super powers. sorry that not all of us are boring i guess!!!!
I really want a movie where there’s this Dark Brooding Male Hero who’s like, a total badass, and during all the fight scenes he keeps getting flashbacks to happy images of his wife, and like his whole narrative is framed around his wife, and all the other heroes on his team know that he’s got this passion and vengeance and think it all has to do with his dead wife… but then near the end of the movie his wife shows up and he’s like “hey babe” they’re all shocked and they’re like, “Wait I thought all your power and passion came from avenging your dead wife?” and he’s like “no bro, I just really love my wife, she’s really cool, she’s what keeps me going” like… a reverse fridge
Unfridge your wives 2017
Unfridge your wives 2018
“This whole saving the world thing has kept me from seeing my wife for like, three days and I was really starting to miss her!”
It turns out he’s normally a ray of sunshine and is only Dark Brooding Male Hero mode when he misses her.
I always knew AfterEllen.com was cryptoTERF trash but looks like they’re really showing where they stand now.
I don’t know how long this has been in the works but the last week of their Twitter profile is enough:
As well as supporting meghan murphy they are really pushing the idea of trans women as male predators. Miranda Yardley is an English trans woman who repeats TERF talking points for them and was very well received for opposing updating the Gender Recognition Act in the UK. The reference to Stonewall UK also suggests that the new staff are completely in bed with English TERFs, who have links to US Evangelical funding.
Stop supporting After Ellen, the name has essentially been bought out to promote a fascist agenda which wants to remove all trans people from existence and then work on doing the same to the rest of the LGBT community (whether individual contributors admit it or not).
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