Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2025-12-22 07:03 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2025-12-22 07:03 pm
[ SECRET POST #6927 ]
⌈ Secret Post #6926 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 34 secrets from Secret Submission Post #989.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Er, OP...
(Anonymous) 2025-12-23 12:18 am (UTC)(link)Re: Er, OP...
(Anonymous) 2025-12-23 09:40 am (UTC)(link)Re: Er, OP...
(Anonymous) 2025-12-23 01:15 pm (UTC)(link)Sure, NaNoWriMo is basically just an encouragement-to-write event; HOWEVER: (1) there's actually a lot of logistics involved in that, and (2) a lot of side activities have sprung up around NaNo that have widened its scope beyond what the organization can actually handle. In particular:
- NaNo relies on a bunch of volunteer labor in the form of regional leaders (I don't remember the specific role name) who organize digital systems and in-person events/meetups for their region, which are things that tend to be very motivating and a big part of the sense of community associated with participating in NaNoWriMo. But there was never very clear processes about what to do if your local leader is abusive, or if a local chapter of NaNo has a recurrent troublemaker participant who they would like to ban from coming to events and things like that. A lot of these regional leads had complaints about not getting a lot of support from the parent organization and just kinda being left to fend for themselves when local issues arose.
- Relatedly, NaNoWriMo had a forum for teen writers. Here too the process of becoming a mod and what happens when people complain about a mod were very muddy. This became clear when the teens on those forums accused one of the mods of behaving inappropriately around the teenaged members and, having no process for investigating or disciplining and likely having the realizations of "Why the fuck do we even have these forums?" and "These forums are way more effort to run than they're worth and also a legal liability", the parent NaNoWriMo organization just immediately went the "instant shutdown" route and closed the forums (which was of course also very unpopular).
- Finally, NaNoWriMo, like any other organization, even nonprofit and heavily reliant on volunteer labor, does have costs that it needs to cover. They ended up getting funding from/partnering with a gen AI writing company. Yep -- a gen AI company advertising its services for generating AI-written words, sponsoring an event where the challenge of writing a whole lot of words in a short span of time is the whole POINT of the event. A spectacularly bad choice of sponsor and I have no idea what the heck was going on with whoever made this decision. NaNoWriMo absolutely should have turned down their money, but instead they were either too desperate or too greedy for the funding, and that ended up completely undermining the whole premise of the event and driving the final nail in the NaNoWriMo coffin.
I'm not an expert in the drama so I might be missing some of the controversies or being a bit simplistic or inaccurate in my summaries, but as far as what I know, all three of these things have exploded into huge controversies independent of each other and it's been a hot mess.
Re: Er, OP...