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Now, it’s not about the $... I could afford to throw another $1200/y at this without making it up in revenue, but that would feel like vanity publishing to me. It’s a bit of a personal challenge to at least break even. I’m kinda vain about keeping the blog non-vanity 😎
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But frankly, that seems very dumb to me because I know of better ways to make money if that’s the goal. Even taking on a dull consulting gig is a more interesting way to make money than this kind of shitty media-business thinking
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Maybe I’m just rationalizing laziness. Maybe I’d think differently if I had to make payroll for even one full time staff writer. But I’m not *that* lazy. I think a lot of the problems with new media (are we still calling it that) is pursuing uninteresting growth.
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I get why clickbait is popular and drives large, shitty media properties. At least for a while. Dumb demand is a constant. But I have to wonder about the supply side. How does someone who presumably enjoys writing choose to produce dreck rather than do almost anything else? 🤔
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There *are* aspects of growth that attract me. Reading about Murdoch empire had me salivating at the thought of that much authoritah to boss the world around. Money per se is not that interesting, though it's nice to have a lot rather than a little.
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This 3-part big read on the Murdoch empire is educational. Don’t @ me, but the phrase “Death Star of shit” crossed my mind reading it. nytimes.com/interactive/20
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But doing it the Murdoch way, by creating zombie armies of Fox News watchers... that's not that interesting.
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I like to keep an eye open for media properties that are at the next tier of scale relative to ribbonfarm, AND interesting AND sustainable in ways I'd like to keep things interesting and sustainable. I honestly haven't found any.
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Replying to and
The idea that gives the site and organization momentum is basically that transformative works, aka fanfiction, are worth paying attention to, archiving, sharing, enjoying, holding writing festivals for, tagging, etc. AO3 facilitates those things with infrastructure.
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AO3 gets way less attention than it would in a culture without a dismissive bias toward "girly" stuff such as fanfiction. It has sort of been able to grow quietly, not quite sneaking under the radar of mainstream culture, but almost.
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It's mostly written by and read by women, though men and non-binary people are not excluded, and indeed have written some famous good fics. Also, sometimes when men do write fanfic it is not talked about that way. For example, Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton is a Real Person Fic.
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