“why are pillowfort/ao3 asking for money?? Tumblr and LJ are free!!!”
y’all really don’t get how this works, huh?
Look y’all. Bottom line is large websites/web apps are fucking expensive
It’s not like a personal or small business site where you pay $25/mo for a shared hosting package and knock yourself out
You need multiple, dedicated, high-performance servers to handle a service like Tumblr or AO3, or Facebook, or what have you, to keep up with the insane amount of bandwidth and unfathomable amount of data.
Shit cost thousands of dollars a month. And those costs only go up the more users you have. Into the tens of thousands of dollars a month. Someone has to foot the bill for it. And that doesn’t include the salaries of the developers who pour hours of their time into making things function the way they need to.
“but Tumblr used to not have ads!!” you say! “They just got greedy!”
No, they didn’t “just get greedy”. This is how free services work. They aren’t magically able to sustain themselves. At any point. Ever.
Investors see proof of concept during the infancy of a project, and they pour their money– hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars– to 1) help fund the project into maturity. (Maturity = stable performance and a large, growing userbase) and 2) have a seat at the table when big decisions are made
Until that point, you won’t see ads, or be nagged to donate, or forced to pay a fee to access your content. That’s no accident.
Investors eat the cost of running and developing the service, because they know that once that userbase has been established, they can– you guessed it– SELL YOUR DATA TO ADVERTISERS.
They can’t do that until after they have users for advertisers to sell their shit to!
That’s how the investors make their money back, that’s how the service becomes profitable instead of being a giant cash pit.
So for the love of God, can we PLEASE stop slandering sites like AO3, Wikipedia, and now Pillowfort for having the audacity to ask for donations, or for having tiered/paid membership options for additional, non-essential features??
Tumblr wants to take away all adult content on the platform, abandoning a large majority of it’s userbase which uses the site for this exact matter. Please sign the above petition if you would like to keep tumblr the way it is. They need to be shown that they will lose a HUGE amount of their traffic if they’re too carry this through.
straight men trying to make Serious war dramas and accidentally making incredibly tender homoerotic cinema is the funniest thing
imagine being so emotionally retarded and raised entirely on distorted ideas of bonding that you see emotional moments between war buddies and squads going through agonizing pain and loss, where actors depict servicemen going through the worst parts of their lives, where a part of them is forever lost and go “Hm, yes, This Is The Gay”
like holy shit just fuck off, stupid maggots like you thinking they’re so against the patriarchal emotionally repressed norms but that go around normalizing them are exactly fucking why men can’t so much as hug without people thinking they’re gay and derisively tittering them like this!
god sometimes war movies are maudlin efforts that miss the mark but holy shit just fuck off with this! you pea brained worm! you fucking wrong headed jackass!
People like OP: Why don’t men open up with their feelings more?
Men: *Express even an iota of friendship towards a member of the same sex*
OP: lol totes gay lmoa
SMH
I find it hilarious the same people saying men should stop repressing their emotions are the same people who fetishize male closeness into homosexuality to get their rocks off.
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