Pondering.

[eleanorjane]

I love AO3 - I use it all the time as a reader and on the rare occasions I write, I'm glad it's there. I'm truly grateful for its existence, and the immense amount of work that AO3 and OTW volunteers put in.

I can't help but wonder, though, at what the AO3 might have been if it had been launched as a commercial venture, using the same kind of model as Dreamwidth. What might it look like today?

Comments

[copracat]

A03 would have grown more slowly, features-wise, but with less yuletide-sized debacles. There would be many fewer users as there's no way that it would have raised the same income from users paying a premium for features access as it has from fundraising. Less money means it may not have been able to support the server capacity they have now, particularly if the business owners were trying to pay themselves even a fraction of wage so they could afford to live and run it.

We would still have it, but we wouldn't have almost one million works and over a quarter of a million users.

Dreamwidth's continued existence has relied on the owners' business nous, a capacity I've never seen demonstrated by OTW's founders, for all that they have awesome skills at making shit happen, and making it happen big. OTW would have a different set of challenges to face.

OTW wouldn't be doing so much, either. Open Doors, Fanlore, Legal and all the other non-A03 parts, and all they have achieved, would look quite different, if they existed at all, simply because of the different tensions that would exist between business owners and a large group of volunteers compared with a a large group of volunteers and a board elected from their number.

Gosh, that's more thoughts than I knew I had on the topic.