The name Ben Johnson might ring a bell.  He was (is) a track runner who competed for Canada during the 1980s, at the Commonwealth Games, the 1984 Olympics, the Goodwill Games, and the 1988 Olympics.  During that time, he won various medals and broke numerous records, and in 1988, at the peak of his career, he won a gold medal in the 100m with a time of 9.79 seconds, setting a world record.  He was also running against a great rival of his: Carl Lewis.  Lewis’ time was 9.92 seconds.

You might wonder why I’m bringing this up, and that’s because his title and medal were stripped from him when it was discovered that the reason he’d won, beaten his rival, and set a world record, was because he was on steroids.  It remains one of the biggest stories about cheating surrounding the Olympic games to this day.

Strap yourselves in: this is going to be a long one, but please read.  I think it’s important.  The site mods are already aware of the issue, but I've tagged them anyway.

Another story: this year, there have been various accusations of sajaegi, or chart manipulation by bulk-buying albums to make it look like they have sold faster – and more copies – thereby making the groups 1) look popular and 2) rise in the charts, with the result that 3) they end up taking high profile spots that other groups have worked hard to try to get, but being in these spots means that they have much more exposure.  You can see why they’d want to do that.  Oh, and 4) in some cases, this might mean that they end up being nominated for – or even winning – end of year awards.  BTS (Bangtan Boys) were accused of sajaegi in May this year.  In June, it was AOA.  Last year, it was B1A4 and Sistar.  Usually, when this happens, a fan war breaks out, especially when there are big names in the charts and new, not-quite-so-popular groups are selling more than people expect them to.  The fans of the big names get very upset that the smaller names are cheating, and the fans of the smaller names are very happy that their favourites are finally getting somewhere, doing well (especially with the competition), and incredibly upset that they have been accused of cheating.  This leads to explanations all over the place about why one particular side is correct.  Whether or not sajaegi has actually happened is a completely different matter, and the tensions in the fan wars usually get high enough that even when an official announcement is made, the side that is proven wrong is very unhappy to accept that ruling.

And now for something much closer to home: upvotes shops on AFF.  I spent some time debating over whether or not to post something about this (especially since various others have, which you can find on the following links: x, x, x, x, x, x, x and importantly x, x, x, x, X and X), but now that I’ve had a while to look through everything that’s going on, seen some of the mods’ responses, and also cool my head off (virtue of a broken computer and the time needed to get and set up a new one), I’ve decided to tackle it.  The response to the issue is slower than I would have hoped, as it’s now been a couple of weeks.  Yes, this is not an awful lot of time if any coding in the website needs to be done, but the mods I’ve seen replying to things have, in various cases, made their disapproval of the ideal of upvotes shops known, and have said that they are discussing it with the site admin, and going in to change the TOC at least as a temporary matter and officially banning it wouldn’t take that much time (maybe a decision has yet to be reached, in which case fair enough).  But it’s not so much that as the fact that I, and various other people, are afraid that the discussions will come to nothing and nothing will be changed, which will leave things as they are and cause much deeper-rooted and entrenched problems, as I will discuss below.  This isn't just about not earning the points yourself and stealing the featured spot from somebody else: there is much, much more to it than that, and nobody has yet addressed those issues, so I'm going to here.

And before I start, I would like to emphasise that it is the upvotes shops that bear the brunt of the blame here, even though most of what we see is a result of the actions of those who purchase upvotes.  The important thing is to work to get upvotes shops taken down.  If you're going to start bashing users for something they can't undo, and which many of them have come forward to apologise about and say that they regret, you're a cyberbully.  That's all there is to it.

The mods have come out and said that it’s against the spirit of the upvoting and featuring system, but that, according to the letter of the TOC, it’s technically not prohibited.

I think there’s a fairly strong case for saying that it actually is prohibited.  The UK and the United States of America (except for the state of Louisiana) operate under a system of Common Law, which builds based on precedents, and also overturns based on precedents.  If something is not done about the upvotes shops, then it will pave the way for other manipulation of the votes and featuring system.

First of all, let’s start with what actually is in the TOC.

Under Prohibited User Conduct, we have this: [you will not] use the Site or its features and services in any manner that could interrupt, damage, disable, overburden or impair the Site or interfere with any other party's use and enjoyment of the Site, including, without limitation, spamming, pinging, “flooding” servers with requests, mail bombing and piracy of software.

Interrupt or interfere with any other party’s use and enjoyment of the site.

“Including, without limitation” means “these are examples, but this is by no means an exhaustive list”.  In contract law, “including, without limitation” means that you can add things to it – it’s deliberately open so that if you find something that’s exploiting an oversight or a loophole you want to close, you can do that.

Part of our use and enjoyment of the site is a featuring system that plants on the front page, for three days, stories that the users of our community have enjoyed enough to express a measure of enjoyment by voting – something that they can only do when they have earned 25 karma points to show that they are active in the community.  Well written or not, a lot of time and effort has been spent on the stories that end up on the front page.

I am dead certain that there are plenty of users on this site who subscribe to stories and read them, and would like to upvote, but cannot, because they do not have enough karma points (in fact, this is without a doubt one of the reasons why the votes-to-subscribers ratio is often so low – I’ve trawled through the site out of curiosity on this, and my most famous fic, TBBC, has one of the highest, if not the highest, votes-to-subscribers ratio out of the top twenty-five stories in most of its tags – in fact, it’s one of the only stories I’ve so far come across to have well under 10000 subscribers but significantly over 1000 votes).  This might be for a variety of reasons – there are a few different ways to earn karma points, after all.  These are:

1. Commenting on a specific story once every twenty-four hours.
2. Receiving a comment on your story.
3. Somebody subscribing to your story.
4. Somebody upvoting your story.
5. Somebody donating karma points.

If you don’t have any stories of your own, then only 1) and 5) are viable options.  There are always reader-only members of the site who comment prolifically, but they’re never going to have as many karma points as somebody who also writes, because there’s only one channel instead of four that they can rely on to get karma points.  Many read-only members of the site don’t get that involved, either: they’ll happily read a story, but they won’t necessarily chat to the users of the site and get to know them, and I’ve come across many who feel very shy about commenting and so don’t do it.  Which leaves only the fifth method open, and if you don’t know and talk to people much, you’re unlikely to get karma points donated to you.

And then we have false accounts made by people running upvotes shops for the specific purpose of upvoting stories, when these false users are not even involved in the site for anything other than artificially boosting another story’s popularity.

This isn’t just insulting to the authors on the site who don’t use these methods: it’s incredibly insulting to the readers on the site who don’t have enough karma points to upvote the stories they might otherwise upvote.  Some people will argue that if they really wanted to upvote something, they’d go out and get those 25 karma points, but that’s like saying if somebody really wants an app, they’ll pay 99p for it.  The majority just won’t bother.

As for insulting the authors on this site, particularly if your story is new or you’re not well known, it takes a lot of time and effort to get featured, and how quickly you get featured is 1) a measure of how good your story is and 2) a matter of pride.  I, for example, am very proud that, as an unknown author who had been on the site for half a year, writing about an idol who was often not the focus of a story, TBBC got featured within two months.  I am sure I am not the only one in such a situation.  I am not an athlete, but to me, this is the equivalent of long hours of training and completing the 100m in 9 seconds.

And then you have people who don’t spend that time and effort, and who haven’t waited to see how the community judges their work – indeed, who are too impatient to do so – who (in one case I saw) start a story, use upvotes shops, and three days later are on the front page with half as many votes as subscribers.

That’s like completing the 100m in 9.92 seconds and being beaten by somebody on steroids who came in at 9.79.

Call me butthurt.  I’m pretty sure you would have been butthurt too if you were Lewis.

Oh, and regarding why there’s even a cap on needing a certain number of karma points to vote in the first place?  If you look at the site’s FAQs, you will find that many other people have asked this question.  The answer is this: Since karma is an objective measure of how active your account has been, it prevents someone from making multiple shell accounts to vote on their own story.

I may only have been on this site for a year and a bit, but I happen to know that the whole reason this system was introduced was because a user created numerous shell accounts to upvote her own story and get it featured.  She was found out and banned.

I genuinely see no difference between somebody creating shell accounts to get their own story featured and creating shell accounts, asking for karma payment (probably in part to fund those shell accounts with 25 karma points so that they can vote), and voting for somebody else’s story.  It’s still manipulation of the system.  For example, back under the old system, if I had said to my good friend get2herheart, hey, mind making a bunch of shell accounts and upvoting my story for me? I reckon 50 will do it, that would have been pretty much identical to me doing it myself.

Especially considering that the minimum of 25 karma points was brought in to avoid this kind of situation, this is a clear violation of the karma system.  And if it’s not a violation of the karma system, the minimum of 25 karma points ought to be removed so that the genuine users of the site who do not have karma points but who subscribe to and read stories can vote on them.  That might at least balance out what’s going on in the upvotes shops.

According to the FAQs, karma is an objective measure of participation on the site.  If an account is used for providing upvotes that are bought, and has not earned 25 karma points on that account, that is not an objective measure of participation, but an abuse of the system.  Karma is meant to be an objective measure to provide – communally – an objective judgement on how much a story is enjoyed, through the upvote system.  If the karma system is abused, then the privileges that go with the karma system by extension are likely to fall prey to abuse as well.  In this case, it is the upvote system, and with it, the featuring system – and with that, the advertising system.

I have seen users of upvotes shops defending themselves by saying one of two things:

1. I just wanted to get out there and advertise my stuff.
2. I wanted to be higher on the “most voted” stories in my tag so more people would think it a good story and read it.

Ben Johnson wanted to do better than Carl Lewis when it came to running.  He didn’t necessarily want to smash world records and carry away prizes at competitions.

Look, with a ranking system, you have competition.  You can do one of three things when it comes to competition, and they are these: a) stay out of it and not care at all – but you’ll still be affected by it anyway; b) enter into it and play fair; c) enter into it and play dirty.

Quite honestly, #2 is like saying I cheated in that public exam.  It wasn’t because I wanted the #1 spot or an A* or anything – I just wanted employers and teachers to notice me and not think my grade is really low.

Also, it would be more understandable if there weren’t numerous different ways that you can view the list of stories under a tag, including most commented, most subscribers, most views, most chapters, completed, ongoing, newest and most recently updated.  The site also helpfully takes you to the most recently updated or latest as a default when you click on a tag.  The thing is, there are so many options when it comes to looking at a story – and frankly, especially up at the top end of something ranked by votes, unless you’re in a little-known tag, the top end changes very slowly and very infrequently.  That means, if you’re going to bust your way up there, you need to buy many more upvotes (you’re not as likely to get noticed on a little-known tag, in any case), and that means that getting featured through those upvotes is a much higher likelihood – in fact, it’s a very likely bi-product of receiving those upvotes.  Most people are aware of that.  They can say “oh, that wasn’t my intention” as much as they want, but the reality is that they knew it was a possibility.  To use the same argument in a vastly different example, in WWII, the Allies dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima when they knew what that bomb was capable of.  The intention was to get the Japanese to surrender as quickly as possible to stop the war from dragging out.  The result was millions of civilians dead in what could be considered a war crime.  (Before anybody tries to say I’m equating upvotes shops to the atomic bomb, I’m not: I’m just demonstrating how intention is different to reality, especially when you know what could result from your actions.)

Considering the default when you click on a tag is to show you the latest updated story, the majority of people will scroll through that before scrolling through the ones with the most votes – particularly on tags that they visit often.  In fact, if it’s a tag that they visit often, one of the list views they’re probably going to avoid is the one with the most votes, because they’ve probably already read them.  If they want similar stories, they’re most likely to be looking in the completed, latest and newest sections, which are all organised by date.  Most people will want something that they can either read without having to wait for updates, or that they can be assured will have relatively regular updates.  I know that my first instinct whenever I click on an ongoing story is to see how many chapters there are, when the story was updated, when its last update was, and from there to work out on average how long it takes for a chapter to come out.

So, essentially, the effectiveness of trying to boost your visibility by number of votes really falls into whether or not you get featured.  Particularly on the big tags, that’s the only way you’re going to be anywhere high on the list, in any case – all of the ranked-by-most-votes fics at the top of their tags are featured.  That makes argument #2 fairly void.

In any case, if your story is young and new – and people do look at those kinds of things – they’re going to think it’s good if it has a fair number of votes despite only being on the site a short time, and that’ll mean they give it a chance, but they’re going to think you’re desperate and manipulating the system if you have tons, unless it’s a sequel or unless you’re a very popular author, and many people won’t give it a chance if they think that’s the case.

Visibility, of course, concerns #1.  I personally think that this is a much flimsier argument than #2, and here’s why:

There are so many ways to get your stuff out on AFF.  Yes, some of them do require you to have karma points, but let me just list some:

1. Posting and updating – your story will show up on the front page and in the “latest” updates for your tags.  If you’re lucky, your story will also show up in the “trending” or possibly “recommended” tags, too, if you go on the “popular” tag of the site.
2. Posting and updating regularly – your story will do 1) more frequently, which means more people will see it – and the more people see it, especially if they see it more than once, the more people will click on it.  The time you pick to update is also pretty important, as is the day.  More people are online at weekends, and you tend to get slightly more readers if you post when America’s awake.
3. Tagging your story with the right tags – that way, the right people can find your fanfic.  Story time: when I was first writing DLWL, it met with limited success until I put it under the Sehun tag.  Despite being new to the site and the fic only having about 30 chapters, my subscribers and votes actually doubled overnight when I did that.
4. Advertising (i) – dropping by walls and advertising yourself.
5. Advertising (ii) – getting an advertising shop to do (i) for you.
6. Advertising (iii) – via the AFF advertising system.  You can get the karma for that either through donations, through stocking it up yourself (which, yes, takes a long time), or through buying karma points (which, coincidentally, funds the development of an AFF app, which I’m sure many of you would love).  If you really want to advertise your story that much, you can pay for karma points.  If you can’t do that, well, there are eleven other ways on this list, and also two other ways in this particular point.
7. Blogging about your story.
8. Making a post in the chats about your story.
9. Offering read-for-reads or comment-for-comments in the chats or via other forms of communication.
10. Suggesting to a recommendations thread that they give your story a chance – most will allow self-referrals, and you can get a lot of readers from those (and they’re easy to find under the recommendations tag).
11. Asking a review shop to review your story.  A lot of people do follow them, especially if their own stories were reviewed there, and pick up things which they think look like interesting reads from them, especially if the review is favourable.
12. Getting a trailer made, or a poster made.  If people like them enough, they will read your stuff.

There is absolutely no need, and no excuse, to abuse the featured story system when there are so many ways to advertise your stuff.

In fact, if people are going to treat the featured story function as a glorified advertising system, rather than as the reward it’s intended to be for those who have earned it, there is absolutely no point to having a featuring system.  Either that, or there’s no point to having an advertising system – since they’re both used for the same thing – and it would be best to scrap one of them.  After all, if you can pay 50-100 karma points for 50-100 votes and get featured for three days, and therefore get a lot of exposure, readers and votes and viewers, that’s vastly cheaper to paying 10000+karma points for 24 hours with a much smaller tagline and no poster or statistics to impress or woo the reader.

But getting rid of either one would have severe consequences for the site.  Let’s take a look.

Advertising system

If AFF users stop paying karma points for the blue advertising slot, that’s going to filter back into the fundraising for the app, which is largely supported by users buying karma points which are then spent on that advertising slot.  Getting rid of that advertising slot would severely impact on the speed with which an app appears.  People have been clamouring for an app for AFF for some time, and just a few months back, we passed the halfway mark in raising the funds.

Featuring system

Getting rid of the featuring system would get rid of the sense of competition on the site.  While there are sites that do function without such a system (e.g. AO3), I think it’s quite healthy and it really adds a lot to this site because it really encourages people to get involved.  People get out there and advertise their stories (and while I hate adverts on my own wall, I will admit to having stumbled across a few gems advertised on other people’s walls), they make recommendations threads etc. and promote friends’ stories because they think that they deserve it and ought to be read and rewarded for their hard work.  In fact, much of the way that the community functions here is structured around the karma and upvoting systems.  As I mentioned, people are driven to advertise because they want to get featured.  People make recommendations lists containing stories that they like and (more often than not) think ought to get featured.  People put their utmost into writing to the best of their ability so that people will enjoy their stories and upvote them so that they get featured.  People will put a lot of effort into claiming that advertising spot – and earning karma, which involves interacting with the community – so that they can get enough upvotes to become featured.

Without the featuring system, there wouldn’t be pride being on the front page anymore.  There wouldn’t be a sense of achievement.  Fanfiction, unlike many other areas of writing, doesn’t offer the opportunity for “winning” something very often, because it’s considered a lesser form of art.  Sure, most people do it for fun, but being acknowledged for something you enjoy is a real, very true pleasure.

There’s even an entire section of the site where the featured stories are listed by date, so you can go browsing through them.  A number of featured stories are very good, and it’s an easy way to find them, regardless of genre.

There’s a third argument I’ve sometimes come across for using upvotes shops to get featured, and that’s this: the story is good and ought to be featured anyway.

Well.  Here’s another story.

Back in 1912, an American athlete named Jim Thorpe participated in the Stockholm Summer Olympic games.  Despite being new to them, he competed in the pentathlon and the decathlon, and also the long jump and the high jump.  In spite of inexperience, he got a gold for the pentathlon, and also for the decathlon, and he also qualified for the high and the long jump even if he didn’t get any medals.

Clearly, quite a talented athlete.

A year later, he was stripped of his medals because he’d played basketball semi-professionally before.  That was against the rules.

Obviously, basketball has very little to do with those sports, and Jim Thorpe was clearly a very, very talented athlete.

Look, you can be the best writer in the world, but it still takes time for people to recognise that.  The first Harry Potter book was published in 1997, and it took a year for it to gain traction, when it won a bunch of awards in 1998, and then in 1999 it hit the NYT bestseller list and stayed there for most of 2000, too.  Two years.  And you know something?  That’s considered unbelievably fast in the publishing world, even today.  Sure, this is a site, and a lot smaller than the English-speaking countries of the world, but most of the users I’ve heard of who are using upvotes shops appear to be wondering why they’re not getting anywhere after only a couple of months.  Speaking from personal experience, TBBC got featured after two months and that was definitely a lot faster than can normally be expected.  Yes, having fame on this site gives you more exposure and means you’re more likely to be featured, but that’s why the featuring system only allows you to be featured once every six months.  The big people on this site will only ever be featured twice a year, so there are 363 other opportunities for everybody who isn’t goddess and dbskgirl4ever to be featured.

If your story is that good, it will be noticed.  It will be noticed, and people will upvote it.  Yes, there is lots of competition.  But like I said, two months, unless you’re a famous person on this site (or make it onto a massive recs list, or win the advertising bid), is very, very quick.  If you’re not prepared to stick it out and wait, then you’re being impatient – and you’re also depriving the people who are patient and deserving of their spot, in the same way that somebody who takes steroids and wins an Olympic medal deprives fourth place of their medal and second place of their gold, and in the same way that sajaegi knocks hardworking artists who’ve genuinely won their position from their stand.

Not just that, but if your story is that good and you have faith in yourself, do you really want to be claiming the credit for an achievement you know you could have got yourself if you’d just stuck it out a little longer?  If you knew that you’d be able to beat Hussain Bolt’s world record on the 100m if you trained for just one more month, would you really take steroids to beat it earlier than that?  Or if you knew you were capable of completing, say, a computer game without using a cheat, would you really feel proud about using that cheat?

Because with the way that upvotes shops manipulate the system and violate the spirit with which the karma system and the featured system are set up, they’re effectively like a cheat in a computer game.  The upvotes shops have a much bigger impact than most people might think.  After all, they:

1. Call into question the relevance of the karma system, particularly the need for 25 points to upvote
2. Make it unfair and unreasonable for those readers on the site who don’t have 25 karma points but would otherwise upvote their favourite stories, and also the authors of those stories, whose statistics would be very different if they could – why can they not vote, but it’s acceptable for people to buy votes from shell users?
3. Call into question whether the user who made shell accounts to upvote her own story to get featured should have been banned, if upvotes shops are considered acceptable, which means that this would be a viable way for anybody and everybody to ensure they get featured
4. Undermine both the advertising and the featuring system, making one redundant, which would either hinder the development of the site app or affect the atmosphere of the site (actually, who am I kidding, either one being redundant affects the atmosphere of the site)
5. Mean it is possible to exploit loopholes in the letter of the TOC that go against the spirit (even if this issue is technically covered by the TOC), which, as I remember, was what got Charles X into so much trouble in France and sparked off a revolution
6. Undermine the value and achievement of getting featured
7. Steal the spots of those who have worked hard to get featured, and also discredit the effort of those of have voted from them

There are probably more, but these are the big ones.

There are, however, two things that make me very sad in all this.

One is that people are bashing and cyberbulling those who used upvotes shops.  That’s unfair and immature.

The second is that those who used the upvotes shops are often relatively new to the site and don’t know very well how the systems function, what’s available and what’s not, and see being featured as the be-all and end-all of the site.  I’ve read various blog posts and apologies from these people, and while some are utterly unapologetic and don’t see anything wrong with upvotes shops at all (and have been on the site for a while), at least two have said that they were new to the site, didn’t realise that it was in contravention of the site ethos, and, because they were unaware of other ways to get their stuff out there and were curious, that’s why they used them, thinking they were perfectly legitimate.

So I guess that’s my other really big problem with upvotes shops.  They take advantage of people who don’t know the site well.

I do wonder if it would be worth having something that newbies got as an automated message/site tour/have to read on joining the site about the way that karma, upvotes and everything else works, and the site ethos, because not everybody’s going to look through the FAQs or TOC.  In fact, most of the perpetrators haven’t, or hadn’t until this was pointed out to them.  I’d be perfectly happy to write it if it was possible to implement in some way.

As far as I’m concerned, upvotes shops directly contravene the ethos of this site.  They have a much greater impact than a lot of people seem to realise, and also, if they are allowed to stay and not banned, then it calls into question some of the other principles upon which this site runs, and that’s why I object to them so much.  I’ve already mentioned them, but seriously – if upvotes shops are allowed, genuinely, what is the difference between that and a user making a hundred shell accounts, or their friend making a hundred shell accounts, transferring 25 karma points to each, and voting up a story?  Paying karma for it does not make it legitimate.

As for the rather notorious book that a certain user on this site started to name and shame those who had been using upvotes shops, that is an instance of cyberbullying and I’m glad it wasn’t tolerated on this site, even though this person was instrumental in making people aware of the problem.

That said, a lot number of people reported it did so on the grounds that it used their stories without their permission.

Quick reminder that, under terms of fair use, it is permissible – without needing permission – to reference something (not copy it or reproduce it) with, say, criticism, as long as it is reasonable and fair.  Recs lists, for example, don’t need your permission to put your story in.  It’s a nice touch for them to ask for permission or to say they’ll remove it if requested, but they’re not obliged to, even if not everything they say about it is complementary.  Granted, on this particular occasion, it was overboard and would not have been considered fair use, particularly since it was done with malicious intent, but I just thought I’d mention that as some people appear not to be very clued up on copyright and distribution laws.