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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24990 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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I recommend "Beware of Chicken", here's a royal road link. It's kind of a parody of the genre, so should be a lot easier to get into.

Edit: Nvm, the author had the brilliant idea to hide the novel behind a paywall. You can use the wayback machine to view the old chapters but it's a huge pain in the ass and probably not worth overall.

BoC is now stubbed. Chapter 4 up to book 5 are gone from Royal Road.

My bad, I didn't realize. I've edited the original message with a link to the wayback machine and won't be recommending that author in the future.

the author had the brilliant idea to hide the novel behind a paywall

I won't be recommending that author in the future

That's a rather harsh assessment. Removing a book from its original free location after publishing it on a paid platform is a common practice. I think it's explicitly required by Amazon's self-publishing terms.

Hiding books that were previously free is a bad practice for a host of reasons.

It's bad from RoyalRoad's perspective because it hurts the objective of the site (namely, no-name authors get a chance to become someone and casual readers can read potentially good fiction for free, with a few small caveats).

It's obviously bad from the user's perspective because what used to be free and convenient is neither anymore. Even if I take the obvious next step of filtering out works with the 'stub' tag, maybe I find a story I like, come back to it in a year and find out most of the content is now gone. And this also changes my perspective of the site: it used to be "This is a pretty good way to introduce casual readers to decent fiction", and now it's "This site is unreliable, any story could be removed at any time". Naturally, I will no longer link to such stories, which hurts everyone.

It's arguably bad from the perspective of the author because they trade short-term money for a loss in popularity, word-of-mouth circulation, comments, reviews and even freedom (in the sense that they are stuck with Amazon).

But the main reason this is bad is what it does to the community and people's way of thinking. If we have an environment where information is freely distributed, everybody benefits. The authors get a little bit of fame and a little bit of money, the readers get to enjoy what is usually way less accessible. But if a few authors start reneging on this unspoken rule? Well, everything changes. A lot of authors will see this is allowed and start thinking "Why not me too?", a lot of the community members will start subtly guilt-tripping the unhappy fans in the obvious, predictable ways. And the unhappy people will leave silently because of the widespread censorship that will follow any negative public expression. And in no time at all, you end up with a completely different atmosphere: fewer positive emotions all around, more aggressive monetization, way worse access to good content for everyone.

The RR owners screwed up in a huge way when they didn't immediately punish the defectors in this game of Prisoner's Dilemma. I can't change that but I can push-back on a personal level against what I perceive is a phenomenon that significantly hurts something I care deeply about (fiction, writing, free sharing of information).

Also, the version originally published online is often different from the version that ends up available on other platforms down the line.

What the author considers 'minor' changes to a story can nevertheless have major effects, and when I recommend story X I want to recommend story X, not story Y that the author considers very similar to story X.

Two instances that come to mind here are Ra (the author did at least keep the original ending available, although you need to dig for it) and Léon: The Professional.

The Wayback Machine is your friend. I'm currently reading cached copies to my wife in the evenings. I also should mention that the audio books are excellent for long road trips.

Haven't read BoC, but a LitRPG parody I quite enjoyed was "This Quest is Bullshit!".

I have mixed opinions of BOC. It has a strong start, but ends up becoming repetitive once it keeps playing up its core shtick. Not great, not terrible.

Yeah, I felt the same way.

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