Another Depressing PSA About The Capitalist Hellscape Vortex Incoming But This Time It's Relevant · 2:48am Dec 13th, 2021
So, Wattpad. Wattpad is a general fiction posting website, but it's mostly known for fanfiction. Wattpad, it turns out, has cut a deal with Viacom, to let Viacom mine the site's content for ideas for original IP, including tracking user behavior with invasive datamining to really see what's popping with those ineffable gen z'ers and millennials. They've even already moved ahead with making content based on IP-scrubbed fanfics.
The insidious part of this, and the part relevant to you is twofold: first, just because they are publicly taking some ideas wholesale and compensating creators doesn't mean they have or are going to. It's gonna be easy enough for them to scalpel off parts without saying so. People come up with similar ideas all the time. This ambiguity of originality is often why creators don't read fanfic of their own IP - too easy to get sued down the line if something comes up. Second, people apparently steal fics from other sites, and post them to Wattpad.
So, if you have stories on Wattpad, or are worried someone might have reposted your stuff there, now is the time to double check and decide if you want your content in the gaze of the All Seeing Eye of Viacom to be swept up and adapted for streaming services.
So, yeah, just wanted to let you all know.
oh heck
I'm glad I never got around to signing up there. D:
Fucking Christ....
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Same here.
Based commie revolution when
Although hey on the bright side maybe finally my Clifford the Big Red dog/monsters versus aliens/ThunderCats Yaoi incest mpreg story will finally get some more attention like it deserves
Hey, Capitalist Hellscape Vortex news is always relevant. Anything informative helps.
...Well. That's... yeah.
Thanks for letting us know.
I’m on Wattpad too
Interesting -- i went to their site to try and search for any stories of mine being reposted -- but they dont have any sort of search by story title functionality. LOL
Never signed up for it, not going to now. Trying to do a search, but it keeps shifting to my native tongue, so I can't see any English stories in the results. How do I know if anything's been hijacked, then? Just some regular Google fu with site:wattpad.com and some obvious potential hits?
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We're extremely spoiled here on FimFiction in having an actually functional and useful user interface and search capabilities. I don't really use those other fanfic sites, but it kind of amazes me how awful Wattpad, Fanfiction.net, Archive of our Own, etc. seem to be according to the poor souls who attempt to.
Now I’m tempted to get a wattpad account just to post the crackiest, trolliest stuff I can think of, possibly while drunk, in the hopes that some Viacom exec accidentally greenlights a train wreck. Or else gives himself PTSD.
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Direct action.
C'est la seule chose que je peux faire
Et ce n'est pas bon, ma
Ils ont changé ma chanson
This seems more likely now we’ll have cringe media being made from whatever data they get from that site.
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Hasn’t been enough to totally engage my muse (yet), but there’s the sober realization that I’ve got a fair bit of stuff already I could just dump there which would confuse the AI, If I were clever enough to find a way to game the ratings-bot, I’d potentially get something they’d notice (and hopefully once a human got involved, regret).
As opposed to the communist paradise in which the government tells you what to write and how much they're going to pay you, and there is no such thing as IP, so anybody can steal anything you wrote anytime.
Anyway, it's hard for me to imagine any scenario in which Viacom stealing my ponyfic ideas and turning them into TV shows would make me worse-off, but easy to imagine ways it could make me better-off. In the worst case, it's still free publicity and more readers / viewers.
I looked into Wattpad a few years ago, and they published nothing but One Direction slash fanfic.
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I tried all those places, and they are all utterly awful slush piles from Hell.
The user interface at fimfic is better and prettier; but also, the community does a lot of work reviewing & promoting fics! And they're very good at it!
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It would be unsurprising and very cool if our community is studied by anthropologists in the future as an example of a productive and tightly knit online community
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I'd like to use it RIGHT NOW as a model for publishing all kinds of fiction. Cut out the middleman editor and publishing house, who have become ideological gatekeepers serving their own interests. Power to the readers! In this endeavor you and I are comrades.
Oh, except I still want the writers to make money. Details, comrade, details. We can try to icepick each other over that once we've gotten the basic distribution system working.
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Bad horse I love you dearly but I'm not entirely sure you understand how socialism works. Yes, technically communism is a classless moneyless stateless post scarcity society, but until then, the core concept of socialism is workers owning the fruits of their own creation. Which means that yes, I want writers to be paid.
(Of course given technological advances and automation I also feel that we should have Universal basic income, 6 hour days and a four day work week. People would have massively more time and money for creative endeavors and automation would benefit everyone in the form of less work needed to be done rather than just the bourgeoisie who own the means of production, in this case computers and robots and AI
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I think you're grammatically mis-parsing communism. When Marx said he wanted the workers to own the fruits of their own creation, he didn't mean he wanted each worker to privately own the fruits of his own creation. He meant he wanted "the workers" as a whole to collectively own all the fruits of all their own creations. "The workers", of course, are represented by the central committee, which in practice owns everything. So, no, authors don't own their writing.
In practice this can be implemented in different ways. In the USSR, writers were collectivized, which meant that the government decided who could be a writer, and assigned those people to particular tasks, often collective ones--typically, they'd send a team of writers out like journalists, to cover some big industrial project like the building of a dam, and write a book about it showing how it was difficult work but the workers pulled together through proper class consciousness blah blah glory of communism blah blah etc.
This meant
The situation is even worse for movie authors, because movies under communism are usually provided free to the public, as for instance they still were in China when my brother lived there in the 1990s. That means only a very small number of movies are made, chosen by a committee, and everything that gets made gets shown, usually for the same number of showings, and you have no good way of knowing whether people liked the movie or not, because they don't have to pay but instead just show up and watch whatever is showing because it's free and they don't have any choice of any other competing movie to watch instead.
There are 2 basic forms of intellectual property, one in which the property is a method, process, or invention, like a steam engine. Communists see that kind of IP as capital, so don't allow inventors to own their own inventions. Marx said that explicitly.
The other kind is copyright, which covers a particular expression, like a novel or a musical composition. One might argue that this is something the individual writer could own. In practice, however, this "ownership" is merely symbolic under communism, because it isn't worth anything. Even if a writer is allowed to technically "own" a copyright to his book, he still can't publish it, because (as I mentioned) he can't own a printing press, and can't hire a printing press. Nor can he in practice stop the government from printing his book if it wants to, nor from assigning it to some other writer to rewrite. His "ownership" grants him no effective rights at all over the work.
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Okay, but you're basically saying, "Marx said this, and the USSR did this, so these two manifestations of communism are what communism is." You acknowledge that (Oh fuck I'm doing close text analysis quotation sandwhiches I feel like I'm in high school again)
, but then go on to focus exclusively on a singular implementation, one which was understandably very flawed but (in my view at least) nonetheless extremely impressive given the numerous challenges and constraints the USSR was up against which I'm too lazy to list but can probably find an article about if you want.
HOWEVER, and now I'm going to copy and paste two comment I wrote in a thread in that malodorous Unsafe Space group which honestly I would love for you to join so we can dunk on the weird alliance of AnCaps and Fascists over there, the first regarding tendencies and the second regarding the evolution of ideology via dialectical materialism because they're quite germane to this conversation. I encourage you to read the entire thread here: https://www.fimfiction.net/group/212032/the-unsafe-space/thread/485031/remember-kids but holy fuck I'm tying a lot and not even using voice to text lol ALSO disclaimer 99% of my political and econimic knowledge comes from memes and shitposts. Talk to GaPJaxie or MrNumbers or EtherEchoes or Aragon or Cynewulf or basically anyone who isn't me if you want more nuanced rigorous educated explanations.
Basically first comment was a reply to someone who like you generally associates the idea of communism strictly with AuthCom tendencies because a century of American propaganda is a hell of a drug:
And a brief explanation of Dialectical Materialism in regards in that thread to Marx being anti semitic and in your case to hewing only to what Marx wrote 150 years ago:
Wow I wrote a lot but it feels good to feel like I'm able to adequately and accurately articulate and defend my claims. :)