#ngl them having to keyword-drop pageviews and csam concerns is...

[e-rated-beardo]

The amount of work it takes to even run a website this huge, keep it from basically exploding every other week, and just do the minimum required to follow binding laws while also making occasional improvements to that website's features is... a damn big amount of work. I've worked on some, so I've got an inkling.

Now, doing that in your free time, with a shoestring budget, while also having actual morals that much of the sales and management parts of the IT business (I feel us actual devs are split pretty evenly, but it usually isn't us that you get to talk to) simply can't comprehend, as per above?

✨ Bloody magicians. ✨

The amount of doggedness and resourcefulness and strength of principle it takes to keep doing this and doing this and doing this is fucking breathtaking. And it's so very important. (That goes for everyone doing this sort of background/infrastructure work in fandom, by the way, not just ao3. Ao3 is just very visible, and very transparent, so it's possible to know exactly how much work they do with how little.)

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.