Glimmer Fics Writer Exploitation... (Those Choose Your Own Adventure posts)
I have seen so much of this bullshit popping up in The Pitt tag that I decided to have a look into it.
Firstly I am very much against this whole fucking thing because of the generative AI aspect but I decided to look into it because I couldn't understand why someone would want to engage/put their work into it.
This is the summary of what I've found.
Last year, Glimmer put out this call to action on Linkedin:
However when I went on their page recently to look into this, there is no mention of payment at all for authors which leads me to believe they needed authors intially to kick off the launch so they could market across channels the way they have been doing.
Authors don't actually make any money at all from what I can tell.
However Glimmer makes money when readers 'daily turns' run out on the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' part - which they ensure happens very quickly because everything you say is a choice you have to click through (a turn). This keeps readers buying more 'turns' to keep playing or buying 'do overs' when they make a wrong decision.
Or you can earn them by basically marketing the fics:
Nowhere on this website could I see anything about authors earning a cut of that money despite the fact they're the ones driving people to pay out?
So it appears the company are making money off the backs of these writer folks - and then manipulating them into continuing to post their stories by promoting readers to leave comments in order to get turns. - so not genuine thoughts on the story off their own back but as a way to gain something in return that feeds into the content making machine.
Happy writers, make more stories, happy readers, buy more turns.
I also took a look at their Approved Writer Program:
And it turns out as a writer you only get a certain amount of Testing Turns per week, if you go over these you start using your regular turns which leads to... you paying for more regular turns if you want to test/read more fics... so their actually charging the authors too.
And for the author program they're basically encouraging you to market your own stories so that you can get... more testing turns and a bigger word count???
WHAT IS THE POINT? I don't see why you would willingly sign up to feed your work into a generative AI machine just to be exploited by some random company making money off your hard work while you get.... turns.
If you are a writer for them feel free to DM me and give me a little insight but for everyone else, my advice is not to take part in something so blantantly manipulative as a reader or a writer.
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