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wienerbarnes · 4 years ago

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Much Ado About Nothing (3/6)

Pairing: Bucky x Reader

Word Count: 2,357

Warnings: enemies to lovers, au series, some DRAMAAAAAA

A/N: this chapter is where it gets JUICYYYYY YALLLLLL

MAIN MASTERLIST | MUCH ADO MASTERLIST

“I’ll go on and check out the situation in Italy after the wedding.” Sam says, talking with Steve, Bucky, and Tony about talk of an underground HYDRA facility. Guess I spoke too soon about a break, Bucky thinks.

“I’ll go with you.” Steve promises him, aligned with the promises of a Captain and leader.

“Please, I’m not taking you away from your new marriage and wife like that. I’ll take Bucky with me, he’s single and Cupid seems like he’ll be staying away from him for a while.” Sam teases.

The three men await Bucky’s response; his usual wit, his banter with Sam, an insult, a comeback. But nothing comes. Only a dismissive hum as Bucky doesn’t meet any of their eyes.

“Should… Should I repeat myself? Did I not stick the execution?” Sam asks.

“I’ve… changed over the last couple days.” Bucky starts, unsure of how to approach his feelings, especially to his close friends, two of which are already in committed relationships with their feelings already figured out.

“You know, you do seem more serious. You shaved your beard and everything.” Tony agrees.

“I hope he’s in love.” Steve wishes aloud.

“Oh c’mon. There’s no love in this guy’s heart.” Sam disagrees.

“I think he’s in love.” Steve continues.

“The clean shaven look really makes you look younger, Barnes.” Tony compliments, both him and the Captain ignoring Sam’s logic in the situation and choosing their own thoughts to pay attention to.

“Yeah, c’mon, Sam, when has Bucky ever shaved his beard?” Steve points out.

“Alright, alright, enough. Tony… Can I talk to you about something?” Bucky asks, and Tony nods his head, motioning for the two of them to talk elsewhere.

As they walk away, heading for another part of the building, Sam and Steve excitingly face each other.

“Do you think he’s going to go talk to him about Techie?” Sam asks.

“I hope so; Bucky’s one of the hardest guys to read.”

Their brief conversation is interrupted when someone else enters the room. Sam turns to greet his brother as John sends the two of them a polite smile.

“Hey, Sam.” John greets him as Sam throws an enthusiastic arm around his shoulder.

“What’s up, Johnny?”

“I was wondering if I could talk to you about something.” John begins.

“In private?”

“Well, Captain Rogers can stay, as it kind of concerns him, too.” He explains, and Steve cocks his head in confusion.

“What’s the matter, kid?” Steve asks.

“Are you still planning on getting married tomorrow?” John asks him, and Sam answers, growing suspicious of his younger brother’s behavior.

“You know that he is.” Sam tells him.

“Well, I don’t know if he is after he finds out what I know,” John argues.

“Spit it out, John.” Steve commands.

John pauses and Steve urges him on, “If there’s any reason you think I shouldn’t get married, then you should tell me.”

“She’s unfaithful.” He finally spits out.

“Who, Sharon?” Steve asks.

“Yes.”

“Is that possible?” Steve turns to Sam, asking his best friend to tell him that his brother is lying.

“No, it’s not. John, where the hell did you get that stupid idea?” Sam scolds him.

“I saw it with my own eyes, man, I’m telling you. If you don’t believe me, meet me in the lab tonight, and I’ll show you all the proof you need.”

“This is stupid.” Sam repeats.

“Okay, okay. I’ll meet you in the lab and if I see something tonight, I’ll talk to Sharon tomorrow, before the wedding.” Steve compromises.

“You’re seriously having doubts?” Sam asks incredulously.

“Sam, what reason would your kid brother have to lie to me about this?” Steve defends.

Seeing as his work here is done, John slips out of the room. The seed has been planted. He’d been thinking of ways to sabotage the wedding, just to spice things up in the tower a bit. He thought about childish pranks, like loosening some of the chairs in the ballroom, or sneaking into the kitchen to put laxatives in the food. Maybe hiring a stranger to object, or setting off the sprinklers in the middle of the event. The possibilities are endless.

But he soon realized that none of these things would actually ruin the wedding. Seeing the way these people act around each other, they’d make a show of whatever problems arise, celebrating them even more. John doesn’t want that.

He needed to think deeper. He needed to cause a problem at the root: their relationship. So, he discussed with some other interns on the team who also share his disdain for the Avengers.

Leila and Kennedy Gordon are the ones that agreed to his plan. A married couple themselves, but the difference is that they value professionalism in the workplace, just as John does. It’s time that the Avengers are humbled and realize they don’t stand at the center of the universe, and that the world doesn't revolve around them.

The couple will be staged in one of the spare rooms of the tower; one of the spare rooms whose window is visible from a spot in the lab stations. John is lucky that Leila fits the build and stature of Sharon Carter, same hair style and length, too. In the dark of the night, their silhouettes will simulate Steve’s beloved fiancée caught in an interesting predicament with another man.

If John succeeds, the wedding will surely be canceled, finally serving the much-needed reminder that the Avengers are not as invincible as they think they are.

…

Tony and Bucky stroll silently through the open lot of the hangar. Tony knows Bucky’s about to unload on him about all his undecided feelings, but decides to let him come out with it on his own. It has been about seven minutes of silence, though, and Tony’s started to feel uncomfortable.

“When did you know you loved Pepper? I mean, you guys have been together for so long now, and have known each other even longer.” Bucky finally asks, not looking at him.

“Well, I’ve always loved her, it was just a matter of me realizing it for myself. Same with her, I suppose.”

“Yeah, but, what made you… know? Like what happened that made you realize?”

“Barnes, there’s no big red arrow pointing out the exact moment. It just happens.”

“Ugh, but that doesn’t help me, Tony!” Bucky stops, rubbing a hand over face, becoming frustrated.

“Well, maybe if you told me a little about what’s going on instead of asking me these impossibly complex questions with impossibly complex answers, I could help you better.”

“I take it, you think you love someone?” Tony asks.

Bucky finally meets his eyes in a silent answer. He rolls his eyes, though, when Tony starts grinning like an idiot.

“Tony, stop.”

“C’mon, Mister-Sworn-to-Celibacy has finally found himself a girl and you expect me to not make fun of him?”

“Okay, definitely not sworn to celibacy -”

“Doesn’t matter. Who is it?”

“What?”

“What do you mean what? Tell me who the girl is.”

“...No. You’ll tell everybody.” Bucky says, immediately seeming to shrink down, shyness crowding his body like a middle schooler talking about his crush.

“So what? You know what, it doesn’t even matter. I already know who it is.” Tony claims.

“What? Who?” Bucky asks. He only figured it out himself a few days ago, how does Tony know?

“The webmonkey in my lab.” Tony tells him, rather than guesses.

How does he know?!

Bucky doesn’t have time to object or tell him otherwise before Tony gives him that shit-eating smile again. Bucky rolls his eyes once more, knowing now that Tony definitely knows.

“How did you even know? Has she told you anything?” Bucky asks now, curious.

“No, she hasn’t. But she doesn’t have to. I have eyes.” Tony says simply.

…

Sharon and Nat occupy the private tailor in the tower as Sharon tries on her wedding dress, Nat offering different accessories for Sharon to choose from. Bows, lace, diamonds, earrings, bracelets, and of course, the type of garter she will wear on her thigh underneath the dress.

You walk in, with coffee as you’d promised the two other ladies, and they greet you.

“What’s got you all giddy?” Sharon asks, gratefully taking the coffee.

“Yeah, you hate all this lovey-dovey stuff.” Nat agrees.

“What, I can’t be happy for my best friend?” You ask, not ready for an interrogation right now.

“Mhm.” Sharon hums incredulously.

“I think you need some Jameson.”

“Jameson? Is there some kind of double meaning there?” You ask, surprised by her word choice.

Sharon and Nat glance at each before looking back at their friend.

“All I meant was that I think you need a drink. Why, would it have a double meaning?” Nat asks, knowing smile teasing her lips.

“No!” You answer quickly, hoping that the conversation will change. You’re really not ready to talk about all your feelings right now.

“Is there a special James in your life?” Sharon teases.

“No -”

“I think that you think that we think you’re in love. Which we do.” Nat confirms.

“But -”

“You know, Bucky didn’t believe in love just like you did. But he’s changed, and now he’s allowed himself to love someone ungrudgingly. And even though you think you don’t deserve it, I think you should do the same. How we’ll convince you to do that, I have no idea,” Sharon trails off.

There’s a pause of silence as both you and Nat take in Sharon’s serious words.

“I think I really like Bucky. I don’t know about love. But I’m allowing myself to admit that much.” You finally admit in a quiet voice. You don’t meet their eyes, even though you feel their stares. This is probably the most vulnerable you’ve been in front of them.

Even when you’ve gotten out of bad relationships, going to Sharon and Nat for comfort, you never allowed yourself to open up too much. You knew that you’d always heal, always get back up from your internal wounds, and always knew that things would pass. You never whined to them, rarely cried, and for you to admit your honest feelings to them was… a lot.

Sharon and Nat can’t help but celebrate, though.

Girlish squeals are heard among your annoyed groans as they crowd you, enveloping you in a hug, the poofs of Sharon’s dress nearly suffocating you.

You suppose you’d rather suffocate via lace than love, though.

…

It’s late at night when Sam and Steve go to meet John in a private station in the lab. Sam advised against it at all costs, knowing his brother can be a troublemaker and knowing Steve is incredibly gullible.

“So, you said Sharon was seeing a friend tonight, right?” John asks, setting up the situation for tonight.

“Yes, she said she was going downtown to see a friend who wouldn’t be making it to the wedding.” Steve confirms.

John begins his speal; how he heard Sharon telling an agent that she was instead going to meet with one of the other recruits tonight, as a final affair before her wedding. There’s a walkie-talkie hidden in the desk they’re crowded around, an identical one in the room where Leila and Kennedy sit, waiting for the code word to come about for them to put on their performance.

Sam is annoyed. The irritation is radiating off his body, he feels as though if he rolls his eyes any harder, the earth will start spinning backwards. He watches Steve tense up as John relays his story of overheard gossip, and he gets even more angry.

How is Steve going to believe a teenager about this stupid shit? He tries to take a step back, remembering that not everyone knows John as well as he does, knows how he likes to start trouble, knows that this is the kind of stuff he does when he’s bored. He also can’t imagine what it’s like to hear that your fiancée may be cheating on you. So, he remains silent, letting this go on, knowing there’s no way it can be true.

“I’ve seen them here only twice before, always at nine,” John explains, casually emphasizing the number in order to signal his accomplices.

“Look! There they are, now!”

The three of them look to the window, and the shadows of two people appear. Sam and Steve don’t want to believe it, but the girl looks just like Sharon - same height, same build, same hair; they can even see the silhouette of long nails on her hands, nails Sharon got done earlier that day.

The two bodies clearly begin to embrace each other, heaty kissing and groping visible to the men in the lab. The taller man’s hands slip down to pick the other person up, them wrapping their legs around his body as they continue to kiss.

Steve doesn’t say anything, just walks off back towards the elevators where they came from, and Sam follows quickly behind, refusing to leave his best friend alone.

John struggles to hold in his amused laughs until he hears the elevator doors close. When they do, he quickly reaches for the walkie-talkie inside his desk, telling his associates that they did a job well done.

“I figured it’d be easy to fool those two meatheads, but I didn’t think it’d be that easy.” John admits.

Meanwhile, Sam is trying to stop Steve from having a full blown panic attack in the elevator ride back upstairs.

Steve quickly dials and redials Sharon’s phone, repeating the process every time she doesn’t answer.

“Man, relax -”

“Relax?! You want me to relax?!”

“Okay, bad choice of words -”

“You know what, I’m just going to wait until she gets home. She told me she wouldn’t be home late because tonight's our last night staying together before our wedding night, and when I see her, I’ll confront her.”

“Steve, I think you should -”

Steve ignores him and stomps out of the elevator as soon as the doors open, leaving Sam alone in the elevator to linger in his out frustration.

#bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes au #bucky barnes series #bucky barnes fanfiction #what's the teaaaa the girls are fightingggggg #so much drama

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love-is-four-legged-word · 3 years ago

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From: Someone just wants to play @WebMonkeys

#Someone just wants to play

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jaezbrainlint · 8 years ago

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Working on my website while starting a #Sharknado Marathon. #sunday #work #getitdone #lifewtr #bbof #brownballoffury #webmonkey

#webmonkey #work #lifewtr #bbof #sunday #getitdone #brownballoffury #sharknado

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academicheroes · 3 years ago

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Integrative Project

The Term Project Webmonkey is a Web development portal site operated by Wired.com. Among other resources (which you’re welcome to peruse), it has a series of tutorials, including a very interesting hands-on Internet-based tutorial on the creation of information architectures (IA) for websites, that ought to work nicely as an SLP for this class. It is organized in five parts, which fits well into…

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hollyhark · 7 years ago

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Can you explain how you provide links in your notes on AO3? I don't know how to do that haha, and I'd like to learn. Thank you :)

I just use html. I learned the very basics of it when I was 17 so I could make a Harry Potter fanfic website on Tripod after AOL banned my account because I was desperately emailing my fanfic updates out in big batches as ‘newsletters’ lol. I think the reference site I used was Webmonkey wow.

Anyway, this will help, these are the link tags! This was frustrating to me at first but if you look at some simple html tags you’ll get it!

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mr2peak · 7 years ago

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How to learn web design: 3 steps to start your programming career

Trying to figure out how to learn web design and build websites? Web development is a complex field to get involved in, thanks in part to its constantly moving philosophies and standards. If you want to become a full-time web professional, you might be in for a bumpy ride.

Fortunately, getting started on your journey can be somewhat simple. There are plenty of resources to help you begin, including books, websites and practice tools. Many doors are open to you — it’s just a case of choosing one and forging ahead. In this article, we’ll outline three steps explaining how to learn web design and development. By the end, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a full-fledged programming pro. Let’s get started!

How to learn web design

Research first.

Learn the basic principles.

Practice, practice, practice!

Let’s look at each step in more detail …

1. Research first.

Before you dive into the field of web development, you’ll first want to narrow down your goals. This is a large and multifaceted industry, so it’s important to figure out which specific niches you might like to work in. Graphic design? WordPress development? Or something else entirely? You’ll want to dig deeper into the areas that pique your interest.

If you’re interested in WordPress design, consider testing out GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress. It’s easy to use and a great way to start learning the ins and outs of WordPress!

You’ll develop a focused path and gain a head start on your chosen field. This step doesn’t have to be complicated, as you’re simply trying to identity something you want to explore further. To do so, you can:

Read some of the classic web development and design books.

Visit sites, such as Awwwards or The Best Designs, and look for design elements you’re drawn to.

Learn how to inspect the code on other websites. You’ll want to dissect how they work and make an educated guess as to why they were built that way.

Research like this can often tell you more about what you don’t want to do, which is an easy way to work through your options. However, you don’t have to narrow down your choice to a single winner at this stage. As long as you have some clear ideas about what you’d like to get involved in, you’ll be ready to move on to the next step.

2. Learn the basic principles.

Much like any other industry, there are certain development and design fundamentals that form a basic foundation for the field. Learning these will give you a solid understanding of why you’re doing something, rather than simply copying others’ work. It will also increase the quality of your decisions and enable you to speak with authority to future clients.

We can’t cover every aspect of how to learn web design and development fundamentals, but here are a few solid jumping-off points to get you started:

Coding best practices. There are plenty of resources from leading companies on important coding standards. For example, Google has a dedicated developer website introducing the latest updates and sharing the basics of programming. Layout design. Without this fundamental skill, your visitors’ browsing experiences would be severely hampered. You want to create a layout that is both intuitive and visually appealing. Typography and color theory. This can be quite the rabbit hole. You’ll at least want to ground yourself in the basics of typography choice and color theory before getting too far. User experience (UX) and user interface (UI). This is another vast and sometimes complex area. While reading a quality article or two can be a good start, you may want to take a suitable course if this is an area you want to learn more about. You’ll also want to keep abreast of any design trends that pop up over time, and take some time to read about how other developers work.

3. Practice, practice, practice! How To Learn Web Design Codeacademy Codecademy is a frontrunner in web development and design courses. On a personal note, I first learned to design websites during the ‘90s — a period when Yahoo’s Geocities was the WordPress.com of the day, and the Space Jam website was the gold standard of design. In fact, I learned HTML from Lycos’ Webmonkey and entered code via my Sega Dreamcast.

The takeaway here is that the tools you have shouldn’t restrict you — learning by doing is the way you’ll net success. T-shaped developers, people who can utilize their knowledge to apply themselves to other areas outside of their expertise, are becoming increasingly valuable, so learning about a wide range of topics is a smart idea.

Before you actually begin coding, you’ll first want to choose a suitable text editor (although finding a perfect match is not vital at this stage). You should also install all of the popular browsers (especially the development versions), as they can help you design with a wide range of users in mind.

After that, you’ll be ready to begin coding!

Start out by experimenting with front-end languages such as HTML, PHP and CSS, before moving onto JavaScript (which is especially relevant for WordPress).

Next, you might want to look at learning server-side languages such as Python or Ruby. There are also plenty of courses you can take from the likes of Codecademy and freeCodeCamp, at various price points.

Our final piece of advice is to create websites regularly, in all manner of styles and designs. Write a lot of code, and get feedback from sites such as Stack Overflow and Reddit. You can also use live coding platforms such as CodePen and JSFiddle to share your work, but remember to not take any criticism or harsh comments too personally!

Final thoughts Given the constantly moving goalposts, getting started with web design and development can seem like a difficult endeavor. However, it’s not that hard a task if you have a clear path to follow. Use these three steps as a guide as you begin your programming career.

Here is the original article source : https://www.godaddy.com/garage/how-to-learn-web-design-3-steps-to-start-your-programming-career/

#Web #Programming

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burakispirus-blog · 5 years ago

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Bildirgeç, 3yanlis

Bildirgeç' in açıldığını biliyor muydunuz? bugün oradan çaldığım iki güzel link;

Wired News Design Documentation Ah bu tayfa yok mu? çok seviyorum. Wired, Hotbot, Webmonkey | Lycos

Investors Supporting Spyware

Bir de 3yanlis diye şirin bir site buldum.

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love-is-four-legged-word · 3 years ago

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From: The love I get @WebMonkeys

#The love I get

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miscsecurity · 5 years ago

Link

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luxus4me · 6 years ago

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Webmonkey http://j.mp/2EpUYt8

Julia Baritz is having quite a week. The Austin, Texas based developer is the founder and lead architect of Pillowfort.io, a community-oriented social media blogging platform that's quietly amassed around 20,000 users in its first two and a half years. Since Monday, however, Baritz has been inundated with more than 8,000 requests from people clamoring to join her site. Traffic to Pillowfort’s homepage has been 10 times higher than average, she says.

Baritz has porn to thank for this interest. On Monday, Tumblr announced a ban on all “adult content”, and creators have been frantically searching for a new place to migrate their NSFW art and porn blogs ever since. Pillowfort emerged as a potential safe harbor via word of mouth on social media. The site allows NSFW content to be posted with few restrictions, as long as it doesn't break any laws.

“It’s funny that adult and sexual content has become the linchpin and turning point of our popularity in a way, but I’m not surprised,” says Baritz.

Sexual content has always been a part of fandom communities online, from LiveJournal to Tumblr. And communities have a history of abandoning platforms that don’t support the free expression of adult material. It was LiveJournal’s crackdown on NSFW material back in 2007 that broke community trust in the site and initiated the mass migration to Tumblr, along with the creation of fandom sites like An Archive of Our Own. Now Tumblr’s facing its own porn-related exodus, because NSFW content appears to be at odds with its business goals.

For Baritz, the experience has been head-spinning. Pillowfort is still in beta, and this kind of spotlight is a huge test for the site.

If anyone understands what Baritz has been going through, it’s Denise Paolucci. As the co-founder of Dreamwidth, a web 1.0-style blogging platform that shares Pillowfort's user-first philosophy, she has seen a similar spike on her site this week. Dreamwidth is more established—it has existed since 2008 and has 53,595 active users (and 3,453,932 total accounts)—but traffic to the site has also surged to 10 times its typical amount, she says. Many Tumblr users are tweeting about their plans to migrate to both Dreamwidth and Pillowfort.

Both sites adhere to an anti-advertising, anti-VC funding, anti-corporate model that centers user privacy, control, and freedom. That's what makes them such appealing options to many disaffected Tumblr bloggers, but the challenges they face underscore why the dream of an independent web is so hard to achieve, even when there's demand.

Microblogging Like It's 2009

Dreamwidth began as a side project after Paolucci and her co-founder Mark Smith felt that LiveJournal, their former employer, had lost its way. Paolucci worked there as a community manager, Smith as a developer. They built Dreamwidth on LiveJournal’s open source code, which was already 10 years old at the time. A decade later, they still co-run the site. “The other day I realized I’ve been working on this code base for about 20 years and I had to go lie down for a minute,” Paolucci says.

The benefit of code that old is it’s incredibly stable, has been fully patched and security-audited, and it’s efficient. This week it has handled 10 times its normal traffic smoothly. “We have designed Dreamwidth to be very expandable,” she says. “We did have a big increase in traffic when Tumblr made its announcement and no one noticed because we set up the site so it can scale in an instant.”

But what it gains in stability, it lacks in new features. Dreamwidth can barely handle images, as some Tumblr exiles have noted on Twitter, and currently has no option to upload video. GIFs should work, Paolucci says, but users get only 500 megabytes of image hosting on their accounts, at least for right now.

“Unlimited image hosting is one of those features that people have gotten used to that are VC-subsidized on most websites,” she says. “We can’t afford to offer that same kind of unlimited, endless image hosting.”

Instead, Dreamwidth is a text-based community, full of everything from fanfic to erotica to you name it. Tumblr's new ban, however, focuses on visuals, like NSFW photos, video, and GIFs; the company says written content like erotica is still allowed.

Paolucci understands that Dreamwidth may not be right for all Tumblr exiles. “We are definitely thinking of this as an opportunity for users who are fleeing Tumblr to discover our philosophy and business ethics,” she says, “but there is also a certain level of people who are used to Tumblr and Tumblr's features [and Dreamwidth] may not be what they are looking for.”

Dreamwidth has been “a good lifeboat service for a lot of people,” Paolucci says—a landing place for people who have had to leave other platforms for some reason. When beloved services are shut down or change their terms, people can lose their communities and work. “Even those who have their primary hangout elsewhere use us as a permanent redirect to wherever they're socializing most," she says, "because after ten years, people are beginning to trust that we mean it when we say we're planning to be around for the long haul.”

Not Ready for Primetime

Pillowfort, on the other hand, looks a lot like Tumblr, but it can’t yet handle the traffic that comes along with popularity.

Baritz created Pillowfort in 2016 to be exactly what disaffected Tumblr bloggers are now in search of: an open-minded site that can host images and videos; allows reblogging, commenting, and community building; encourages a strong artistic bent; and doesn’t censor NSFW content. It improves on Tumblr, in some bloggers’ opinion, by offering nimble privacy features—like allowing you to make certain posts private to certain followers, while leaving other posts public—and focusing on customization. Pillowfort's terms of service also currently prohibit posts that target or harass other users, which some bloggers may crave in a new community.

It is meant to look like Tumblr but harken back to the original LiveJournal era, a simpler time on the web, when people could create small, cohesive, and specific communities without worrying too much about arbitrary censorship or ads. Baritz says she fell in love with LiveJournal when she was in middle school, and longed for a way to combine its creative, independent ethos with more modern features.

When Tumblr bloggers looking for a new home came to Pillowfort on Monday, though, they found a site that had been offline for ten days for security maintenance after a Tumblr user posted that they had found a bug in the site’s code. Baritz and her two developers got the site up and running by the afternoon, but then the surge in traffic overloaded the servers. The site is still unstable, and Pillowfort doesn’t have the money in the coffers to just add server capacity overnight. For some Tumblr users, the experience has been frustrating.

Baritz is facing a very tricky challenge: make the most of this opportunity without bankrupting her company or betraying her conscience in the process.

“If our server costs increase by 10 times the way our overall site traffic has, then we won’t be immediately bankrupted, certainly, but it’s more expenditure than I planned for,” Baritz says.

Her plan is to approve new requests to the site in batches so that she doesn’t overload server capacity, and so that she has time to take in the money from each new user in order to pay for the server capacity to host them.

Money, Money, Money?

Both Pillowfort and Dreamwidth embrace a business model that charges users directly and aims for relatively small profits—a radical idea in a web dominated by ad revenue and data sales.

Like LiveJournal did when it first launched, Dreamwidth makes money by charging users for premium accounts, at annual rates of $35 or $50. With the paid subscriptions, you get more Dreamwidth tokens, which can be used to access perks like user icons or the ability to rename blogs.

“We’re not making a whole ton of money but we're not losing money and we have enough people who really value what we are trying to do from a business ethics standpoint that they will support us,” says Paolucci. Aside from her and Smith, the site is run by volunteers.

Premium accounts is the same business model Baritz is planning for Pillowfort. She and the team are about six months away, she estimates, from launching that pay functionality. She’s currently crowdsourcing suggestions from users about what features they want and are willing to pay for.

Until then, Pillowfort keeps the lights on by charging new users a one-time $5 sign-up fee. Baritz has also turned to crowdfunding campaigns. She raised a little more than $5,000 on Indiegogo to launch the site in 2016. This year, she quit her job as a developer at a software company to focus on Pillowfort full time, and raised around $60,000 from a successful Kickstarter in August. That money is earmarked to pay her two contractors, and to hire another full-time developer to work on scaling the company up.

“What’s central to how Pillowfort’s being planned is we’re going to be getting our money from our users. We won’t be beholden to anyone but our users, so we won’t have to worry about third parties or outside forces,” Baritz says.

Those are laudable future goals. But they don’t help right now, when suddenly 8,000 people are “knocking down my door,” as Baritz put it, and Baritz doesn’t have the money to go out and buy extra server hosting immediately.

“We have to make some sacrifices, like keeping the site relatively small right now. If we did go a corporate route then I would be nervous then we’d be under a lot more pressure to turn a profit and inevitably it would influence the way we build the site, and I don’t want to compromise on user privacy and user control,” she says.

Even without taking VC money, however, sites and platforms can still be vulnerable to outside forces, including the services they rely on to function. A number of internet infrastructure companies have taken action against users this year, from PayPal, Stripe, Joyent, and GoDaddy all kicking off Gab to PayPal cracking down on the ASMR community. Dreamwidth has had trouble with PayPal, too, when the payment processor wanted it to censor some NSFW material in 2010. And Pillowfort tweeted earlier this week that it plans to change domain names, after learning that .io domains don't support NSFW content.

And even if Baritz were willing to go the VC route, it's not a sure recipe for success. Small social media companies have raised millions from Silicon Valley in the past, only to crash and burn. Take IMZY, a site founded by ex-Redditors who wanted to create a nicer, gentler, safer version of Reddit. In 2015 IMZY raised $11 million dollars from VC firms, but after generating lots of excitement and getting thousands of users, it shuttered after less than a year. The reason the founders gave was that they couldn’t find a place in the market, but with the money they had raised they were under pressure to not just find a small niche, but to actually compete on profit with bigger companies.

IMZY was a great example, Paolucci says, of the old “underpants gnomes” business plan, a reference to a Southpark episode about the concept. (Step 1: Collect users. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit.)

She admires what Baritz is doing with Pillowfort, and hopes that the site can handle the sudden surge of interest. “I think that the web needs a lot more of the kind of sites and communities that are created with motives other than profit in mind,” says Paolucci.