#if I can figure that out based on min wage alone without a calculator?

[blindtaleteller]

Not a great surprise they haven't come out of it either though; especially considering the site is on top of all that volunteer run with what equates to a less-than-skeleton crew for a site hosting more content than (using the example above though there are others too) place like wikipedia; never mind having an average user base as huge as AO3's is.

I used to beta test, and I've moderated on text based/forum sites in the past. Even with a decent sized moderation and dev team for the size of that user population who might be paid under that rule, and que programs to help that moderation along: dealing with every report given in a day alone is literally impossible for a user community of that size. And AO3 really does not have that.

$500,000 would not even cover a portion of the required number moderation employees' yearly salary, even if they weren't volunteer, and only hired a slew of them in at minimum wage.

Example math: rounded down 35,000-43,000 (depending on location) per year, per full time employee at minimum wage alone: BEFORE taxes, or any benefits like insurance etc taken out times only 10 employees equals 350,000-430,000: for a site that is yes open 24/7 and would need multiple shifts in several time zones to keep up with it in any other model.

$350,000 to $430,000 for just ten employees.

This does not include the costs of servers and bandwidth so users can continue to visit to read or post, any account for Dev salaries were they paid, any account for legal assistance including court filing and fees, or a user base larger than the optimum 50-100 users per moderator, which AO3 absolutely does have at it's size of more than 6 million+ works -- and 6 million+ comment sections with them, alone.

Beta testers are generally uncompensated even in the gaming communities (since that's brushed here,) but if you want to go through that comparison: alpha testers often are not when it comes to legitimately and morally run companies. (especially as some alphas in gaming in particular have and can render equipment if not operating systems they run completely unusable with one or two really bad bugs: this used to be true of beta testing too, though the severity has decreased since due to quite a few things including improvement of technology and baseline policies since; that would take an entire essay to explain but that's a whole other matter.)

Ultimately .. understand that, the point is on the flip side: that AO3 volunteers ARE opting on missing out on that pay for their time: in part so the money CAN go to portions of the site and community needed to keep it running. Complaining that the free-to-you-site that has no ads other than what bots invade to put in our comment sections, whose under-staffed moderators go unpaid in the total of more than $35,000 a year per moderator alone, asks for the users help to cover just the equivalent of the electricity used to allow them to stay open? And doing that further as an anti who probably doesn't use the site for it to affect them either, other than to be a douchebag in the direction of all those volunteers AND the user base who does actually use it and donate? Yeah that's pretty shitty.

I went scrolling through anti ao3 tags and blogs because I was bored and not doing the shit I need to do and you know for a group of people who every year twice a year throw such hissy fits you’d think they’d at least have a point, but all their arguments make no sense(except their one main one that they almost never use?--why??) Like ok, there is one argument for why people shouldn’t give money to ao3, and that is the argument that ao3 is bad website because it has bad policies and refuses to moderate. I disagree, but ultimately if someone thinks that ao3 should update the TOS and moderate what fan fiction they allow, it makes sense that that person would be against the site making money because… well they are against the sites founding principles, I’m not shocked they don’t want it to succeed.

But the rest of the arguments!? Man they make no sense at all

“They are scamming you there is no way they need that much money”, ”its immoral to give money to ao3 because they already have so much!”, “Even if ao3 was perfect, its ridicuslous to give 100K to a fan fiction site!” — like… maybe I’m the asshole here, but ao3 made about 250,000 this spring, so they make about 500,000 a year… that’s just not that much money! That could what, pay for 10-30 employees at best! And that’s not counting the actual cost of all the shit they currently spend their money on! I get that ao3 is run by unpaid volunteers so antis think that 500K is a lot, but that’s not true! That’s not a lot of money at all! It might be a lot of money for an individual but for a company that’s practically pennies. Wikipedia, which granted is a lot bigger than ao3, with 57,218,269 pages to ao3s 6 million works, makes 155 million to ao3 500,000. According to antis ao3 has over a million in reserve and well according to wikipedia they have net assets of US$240 million. One is clearly more than the other!

I saw someone say that servers should be 1K, which is so stupid and out of touch with eveything I almost died laughing. I had a project using firebase this semester, I created 2 projects within firebase one for my school project and one to dick around and figure out. I accidentally set my test database to a “pay as you go” version instead of a free version. And almost had to pay a thousand dollars for the month! I wasn’t even using that database it was just sitting there but I check my google billing to make sure I wasn’t paying anything and it turns out I was! 150 dollars actually so that sucks! (My fault though)

Also also I keep seeing that its ridiculous and evil to pay the much for a site that “doesn’t improve” but the “doesn’t improve” is referring to A) no changes in TOS, which I don’t want to happen any way so good. B) the fact that it’s still in beta, which I don’t give a fuck about and I don’t understand why I should care. I think antis are dont like that the layout hasn’t changed but I don’t want to the layout to change. Also things come out of beta because they are a commercial product to be sold(this is very simplified), which is why some things come out of beta to waaaay to early and are glitchy as all hell! Ao3 isn’t being sold to me its slowly being built and archiving things that would probably be lost, and it will probably technically be in beta forever, but it doesn't effect me and I don't care. Would it be better if it came out of beta only to continously updated like a lot other shit does. I don't really play video games but I know ppl that do so I know at least once a game came out that didn't really work and people needed to later update shit for it to function and I'd argue thats worse than a functional website just being in beta forever. C) The claim that it hasn’t changed at all, which is just not true! They added the exclude section and eventually added the blocking shit. The blocking took too long to come out, so I guess in this sea of dumb criticism theres at least 1 piece of critism that makes sense. And finally again I don’t want it to change! Every other week we are all bitching that Tumblr or YouTube or Instagram or any other app are needlessly changing the layout or adding shit we don’t want in order to keep up with latest trends, make it more marketable or try and attracted new users. Ao3 is great because its never going to change. Ao3 and Craigslist will always kinda look like ass and I’m ok with that. If it aint broke ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I could keep going but there is no point. I just think they are all so stupid.

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The thing about beta is the funniest because AO3, like oldschool shit from the 90s, has actual criteria for coming out of beta.

It's not "we've been going for 10 years" or "we want to sell the product": it's "we've checked off all the things on this checklist".

And they still haven't done them all, so it's still in beta.