I feel like people in the notes have lost the plot a bit.
The key point here should be that volunteers did not spend countless hours building a free ad platform for obnoxious grind culture influencers who think every hobby is a moneymaking opportunity. If you want ad space, PAY FOR IT, on a platform that allows you to do that, just like every other entrepreneur.
There's nothing wrong with setting up your book kiosk and selling books at a flea market. AO3 is NOT a flea market. It's a non-profit public library.
I see people in the notes saying fanfic should never be monetized ever on principle because it's morally wrong to do so. That's a bit ridiculous and out of touch.
Our entire media landscape at the moment is made up of monetized fanfic. That Odyssey adaptation starring Matt Damon is a bad greek mythology fanfic that's been monetized. That lovely Frankenstein adaptation Guillermo Del Toro released is also fanfic. That new spiderman movie was written by a guy who is not the original creator of spiderman. That's another fanfic that's been monetized. These are all stories people have reimagined based on characters that already existed, that they were already fans of.
Now obviously you're going to run into legal issues if the property you're writing fanfic for is still under copyright, and the owners of that copyright are particularly litigious, but that's not the reason you shouldn't be trying to monetize fanfic on AO3 specifically.
A handful of shitty little pissants trying to exploit our beautiful archive for personal gain isn't going to get AO3 shut down, so the issue here isn't that these people pose a real danger to AO3, either.
They'll be caught, eventually, and banned.
If anything's a real danger to AO3 it's all the laws people are currently trying to enact in the USA that increasingly encroach on people's online privacy rights.
This is about community values.
We, as a community built AO3, with free labor, out of a particular anti-commercial, anti-monetization ethos. We wanted a space where our stories were free from corporate oversight. We wanted a space to escape having ads shoved into our eyeballs constantly. We built that space.
And you have the FUCKING AUDACITY to come into the ad-free oasis we built and try to shove ads for your shitty patreon in our faces?
Get the fuck out of our non-profit public library and take your shitty little book kiosk with you.
prguitarman
theartofmadeline
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izzy806
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