I think it's a combination of things - people were annoyed first off by the inability of new members to vote, which I think made them bolshier about asking questions about the drive. That the amount was so high this time around I think also made people question what it was about - to which the response was something along the lines of a particularly ill-timed 'well, fandom may be fun, but the money required for servers is not!', which was like a rag to a bull. It's fairly standard for the OTW to take a maternalistic attitude towards things, but, as others have pointed out and I agree with, that works less and less well as their core userbase from the early 2010s leaves their early twenties, gets jobs and realises how ridiculously unprofessional the whole enterprise is. Matched against a marketing campaign which seems aimed at people who can't remember the AO3 starting (so... Tumblr young-uns?) and manipulating them into worrying the site might go down, it starts to seem sketchy.
Then, as people were directed to last year's annual report - as though that constituted a budget for this year - people came to realise that there was $300,000 dollars sitting in the OTW coffers last January, which I don't think anyone expected, especially given the pleading drives. Not only was it sitting there, but it was sitting in a checking account (??? I'm still assuming this just means a current account) and two PayPals. Which seems like something of an insult.
Half of this stuff was known before, of course, in bits, and there are complaints in various news and report posts from the org. But as I recall there was this level of scrutiny during the last board election too - I didn't have an OTW tag then, but I made a post at the time that I managed to find. I certainly remember a lot of other namespace posts too. So the ultimate answer is probably election. But combined with terrible PR.
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Date: 12/10/2015 07:08 (UTC)Then, as people were directed to last year's annual report - as though that constituted a budget for this year - people came to realise that there was $300,000 dollars sitting in the OTW coffers last January, which I don't think anyone expected, especially given the pleading drives. Not only was it sitting there, but it was sitting in a checking account (??? I'm still assuming this just means a current account) and two PayPals. Which seems like something of an insult.
Half of this stuff was known before, of course, in bits, and there are complaints in various news and report posts from the org. But as I recall there was this level of scrutiny during the last board election too - I didn't have an OTW tag then, but I made a post at the time that I managed to find. I certainly remember a lot of other namespace posts too. So the ultimate answer is probably election. But combined with terrible PR.