Goodness, I had like 7 wins in NaNoWriMo! (maybe more I can't remember). Here I thought the crash was due to politics. I didn't know the deeper story. Thanks for sharing and giving the world warning.
There are still sprinting sites and I'm in a group now for that. Writing alongside others helps us to stay on track. It's a shame about NaNo.
One of the lessons should be "Not everything needs a national group organizing it." People could write 50k words and post about it without salaried people distributing templates and logos. I suspect it's that lack of need for organizers that led to the infiltration by predators. With no real work needed, people could use the org as camouflage for their own agendas.
The SCA has the "Cascading Bureaucracy Meme" to warn against this tendency:
"We can, so we do. We do, so an officer must oversee the doing. The officer must report monthly, or we will lose our nonprofit status."
How it started: Let's have a fun thing for writers!
How it ended: Okay, we're running out of money because we alienated authors saying they could just use AI to beat the contest in less than 60 seconds, and oh, that child grooming thing.
Rule #1: Don’t involved Children in ADULT activities.
And I’m not talking about anything sexual here. The entire thing was aimed at and for adults, not children. You start bringing children into these things and you attract predators. That’s just a fact of life.
You missed the debacle of 2024, where they told everyone to use AI to write their books, and shamed those backwards idiots who still want to write books themselves. Their downfall has been a long time coming.
I made my NaNoWriMo profile in 2023, and quickly abandoned it after the pēd0 news broke. I imagine I'm not the only one. That event and the way they handled it is hard to bounce back from. I'm sure their 2024 numbers were abysmal.
I didn't know about the scandals and financial difficulties going on behind the curtains of NaNoWriMo. It honestly explains their inexplicable decision to allow AI writing.
I loved doing Nano, and I loved the community. But, like many I left because of the controversy. Providing a safe community is so essential for online support, something Meta should really consider given recent moves.
Nanowrimo never meant anything to me personally, but I recall there was also a big backlash when they announced a 'relaxed' policy towards AI generated prose. They followed this is up with a garbled attempt at clarification which made things worse - that seems to be their style.
Goodness, I had like 7 wins in NaNoWriMo! (maybe more I can't remember). Here I thought the crash was due to politics. I didn't know the deeper story. Thanks for sharing and giving the world warning.
There are still sprinting sites and I'm in a group now for that. Writing alongside others helps us to stay on track. It's a shame about NaNo.
One of the lessons should be "Not everything needs a national group organizing it." People could write 50k words and post about it without salaried people distributing templates and logos. I suspect it's that lack of need for organizers that led to the infiltration by predators. With no real work needed, people could use the org as camouflage for their own agendas.
The SCA has the "Cascading Bureaucracy Meme" to warn against this tendency:
"We can, so we do. We do, so an officer must oversee the doing. The officer must report monthly, or we will lose our nonprofit status."
How it started: Let's have a fun thing for writers!
How it ended: Okay, we're running out of money because we alienated authors saying they could just use AI to beat the contest in less than 60 seconds, and oh, that child grooming thing.
Rule #1: Don’t involved Children in ADULT activities.
And I’m not talking about anything sexual here. The entire thing was aimed at and for adults, not children. You start bringing children into these things and you attract predators. That’s just a fact of life.
You missed the debacle of 2024, where they told everyone to use AI to write their books, and shamed those backwards idiots who still want to write books themselves. Their downfall has been a long time coming.
I cut ties a while back, but I was on the YWP forums for years and had no idea this was going on! I would have left sooner if I had.
I made my NaNoWriMo profile in 2023, and quickly abandoned it after the pēd0 news broke. I imagine I'm not the only one. That event and the way they handled it is hard to bounce back from. I'm sure their 2024 numbers were abysmal.
I didn't know about the scandals and financial difficulties going on behind the curtains of NaNoWriMo. It honestly explains their inexplicable decision to allow AI writing.
I loved doing Nano, and I loved the community. But, like many I left because of the controversy. Providing a safe community is so essential for online support, something Meta should really consider given recent moves.
Nanowrimo never meant anything to me personally, but I recall there was also a big backlash when they announced a 'relaxed' policy towards AI generated prose. They followed this is up with a garbled attempt at clarification which made things worse - that seems to be their style.