Disgusting attempt to monetize.

What an asshole.

Fucking vibe coders

It seems like this person wanted to help with AO3 being down in their own way, but somehow decided that scraping the internet for fanworks and hosting them on a new site without asking permission from any of the creators was a good idea.

It seems similar to those people who will dump a 40k LoC Pull Request on an open source project that they vibe coded. Wanting to help, but misunderstanding every step, or like, how to interact with an established group. The article does say that the guy who made the vibe coded site is 17, so I don't wanna be too hard on him, but maybe he should have reached out to OTW to see if there was anything he could do to help first.

[the website creator] scraped the internet for works to populate the site using “a swarm of AI Agents controlling 40 virtual machines were scraping the internet for all drives, scrapes, and sources,”

Also this kind of stuff is wild because a lot of websites aren't really built to handle the insane traffic from bot crawlers.

It was a 17 year old kid from India; naive and foolish but I don't think it was malicious. His post says the audio books were an idea to try and pay for the high bandwidth usage - 120k users in 24 hours, serving over a terabyte of data.

I think he probably had good intentions, but clearly this was a bad idea and of course to many people it looked like someone was trying to commercially exploit the work of many thousands of fanfic authors, plus feeding in to the AI slop fest.

I hate to say this, but we should attack AI, the technology that made this possible.

“Yours truly, a 17 year old from India that thought they were doing something good.”

If this is true, I can cut some slack on the person being really, really fucking naive and acting on impulse instead of doing the bare minimum of talking to the actual authors.

“Why did I charge for AI Slop audiobooks? I doubt anyone knows how expensive it is to run a server like this, especially with the amount of usage this site got. It had 126,592 unique users within 24 hours of going up, and had terabytes of bandwidth in usage. In an attempt to keep the site up, I thought audiobooks were a good option. I sold like 11 audiobooks, if it’s any consolation.”

This shows how little this Ganesh thought things through. "It cost so much money!" - nobody affected cares, you acted the same way the abhorrent big tech companies do, slurping content en masse while giving the middle finger to the community responsible for creating and maintaining it.

Ah, some heros simply do not wear capes, taking down Vibed Coded sites gets an Angel their wings!

All as lord Gaben intended

Good. Fuck them.

Yuck, scumbag not only stealing their hard work but also trying to sell it.

I'm all for preserving the internet in the case of actual deletions and losses. A temporary outage does not constitute such a loss and trying to weasel some money out of it is quite damning as well. 100% support it being taken down.

I don't even know what AO3 is, and I'm not sure I want to at this point. 😅

Of course the people who use AO3 the most wouldn't be happy in the slightest about that site and especially the pay to listen audiobooks. Like, we don't need a vibe cuck coded clone ruining the reputation of both fanfiction and the largest fanfiction site in the world. Especially in a time where I guarantee fanfiction is under heavy scrutiny from dumbasses who say "ReAdInG bAd" alongside the elitist jackasses who don't consider it a valid form.of writing.

Also, the person behind the site really did a disservice to everyone by usong generative AI, which os the antithesis of fanfiction writing, IMO. Fanfiction writing requires some level of creativity, thought, and brain power. Vibe cuck "coding" a website is something someone whose brainwaves have completely flatlined could still do in their sleep.