Originally I had completed a chapter about my experience with getting a review for one of my fics, but I thought nobody would care so I didn't post it. Then I started working on grammar, but I only wrote half of that. Then I thought about doing more cliches when today happened. Advertising fics.

My first reaction→ These attention -advertising fics

ErisChaotica's blog which says it better than this entire chapter → This New AFF Advertisng

Just to get your attention, some cussing and angry ranting before the rational part.

, have you no morals? Attention , all of you that bid. You couldn’t work hard to get readers? Couldn’t just wait for a ty random feature or something? You don’t deserve any readers you gain. All that success was bought and you are undeserving! Attention !

Now that I have your attention, here is the rational part.

If I thought AFF was unfair to the little man before, I think it is even more now. Let us repeat my theory of AFF.

AFF is a market. Each author is a company, the fics are the products, comments subs and karma are the profits, there is competition between us through advertisements and products updates, nichi is our leader and the Mods are his law enforcers allowing this laissez faire, and the featured authors are the monopolizing companies with products that sell hot and have the means to sell them easily.

This is a theory that I love to explain. The really obvious ones are nichi being our leader and the Mods being the law enforcers. That is the obvious part.

dbskgirl4ever, she is going to be my example of an author that is doing really well on AFF—a company with lots of products. She is this writer breaking her fingers and developing carpal tunnel because she just slaves over her keyboard to unleash this surge of fics. She writes about almost any fandom. dbskgirl4ever has several fics and a number of of them have been featured. Her products are cheesy romance stories.

I am also a company, and this is one of my products. My product is advice on how to make your stories better.

The connections and differences between us are quite simple. dbskgirl4ever is one of those few that have been lucky enough to get featured. Not only that, she got featured when AFF was still rather new, only about 3000 users or so. She was featured the day I joined. Because of that time frame, there weren’t that many competing fics that also could get featured. She got one featured then people started to read her other fics, and those fics got featured too, then it became a cycle of her dominating the feature system. She does. She recently had an exo fic featured.

Why does this happen? People like her stories. I don’t know why, her fics are personally not my cup of tea, but they are for others. They know of her fics because she was featured. Ah, this girl got featured? She must be amazing! Let’s read all she has! And at that time she wasn’t being a fandom and writing about everyone, she mostly wrote about DBSK and Jaejoong. You guys don’t even know, but Jaejoong used to be the most popular tag besides tags like “Korean” and other countries. Romance was there too I think.

If you have seen it, or you have experienced, you know. People will read more fics by someone if they are popular and receive a lot of attention. Popular authors experience this all the time. All they have to do is tell their readers that they have a new story and people will flood to it, not even questioning the story or its quality.

I guess they have worked hard to gain this attention. Not to be a braggart, but I used to be really confident with my fics. However, I never tried to get readers. I never promoted my fics, nor advertised on walls, nor even in my fic. You can all tell how much I hate people and don’t try to make friends, that didn’t help me gain popularity. Do I feel that it is unfair that she got featured and I didn’t? No, she clearly tried harder.

What do popular companies get in return for their fruitful products? Money! Or as we have now established, karma. (Nichi even calls Karma the currency of AFF). When it was first created, you could get karma from doing almost anything. Comment on someone’s wall? Karma! Comment on a blog, any blog? Karma! Comment on a story? Karma! Upload a video? Karma! The ways to get karma have obviously been limited a lot since its creation, but it is still really easy to get. Transfer karma, spam stories, create a bunch of ty fics, etc. Especially spamming stories.

Karma was pointless unless you suddenly didn’t want to be called taeminslover0612 because you changed your birthday or if you suddenly didn’t want to write a fic anymore because you literally broke your fingers and had to transfer the fic to your co-author. Karma was good in that sense. It had no real value and people just accumulated it like they were breathing.

With the system AFF had before, it was difficult to gain subs and readers, but at least those that got it kind of worked for it. They wrote a million chapters and they had the readers that enjoyed their fics. The only way to gain attention among all these super giant companies (damn companies monopolizing this damn market) was to write well. It’s not a lie; if you write well and have an interesting fic then you will gain subs. That is the truest thing I will ever say. If all else fails, just write well!

What is this bull about buying advertisements with subs? It’s just made a system that’s bad even worse. Now people who aren’t even putting the effort into it are getting subs. Honestly, to do this all you need to do is beg friends or a karma shop for karma and outbid someone. How devious is this? That is incredibly cunning!

These people aren’t even trying! They’re just buying their subs! It’s only been two days and the fics haven’t been terrible, but wait for it. Featured fics on AFF used to be pretty good quality, wait for the ty authors to feature their fics too.

Why do you people even write? Just go to tumblr and post crap and try and gain followers. Just go, stop writing and go to tumblr for your fandom needs. Attention ! Why are you writing when your goal is to get a lot of readers and be famous? You should be writing because you want to write. Uggh, I know I went through this before, you post because you want people to acknowledge you. That is what getting giddy over one ing comment is, getting acknowledgement. Was ten people saying you did well not enough? You need fifty? A hundred? A thousand people singing their praises to you. That’s just being a ing attention who is greedy for undeserved appreciation.

Just get out of my house, I can’t stand it.

It’s not even the two people who already won, it’s everyone who even attempted it.

Just imagine how those featured authors feel. They put effort into their work, especially the ones that had decent fics, and now people can gain hundreds of subs by spending their “money” which they probably earned by commenting on dozens of featured fics and their endless number of chapters. In reality, all these people had to do was spam a bunch of fics with “update soon” and gain karma from hundreds of fics. Or they could have commented on every chapter with some slightly relevant comment. It’s so easy for them to get karma and gain popularity, they don’t even need a shred of talent to win.

The sad part is that featured authors are the ones with all this karma just sitting around. They don’t need to advertise their fics though, the effects of the original system already have them at a million subs. If they took advantage of this they’d just be awful, awful people.

And really, this advertisement crap is just an extension of the facebook chat and random feature. The only difference between random feature and the advertisement is that the random feature is usually to someone who isn’t even on AFF anymore, making its purpose less of promoting a user and more of giving you a different story to read. A majority of them have nothing to gain, won’t ever know they were featured, nothing, there is no point. That makes it clean. The sheer randomness of it makes it nice.

About spamming comments, not only do I find it rude and just as cunning as everything (see chapter 10 for more) I also think it is plain deceitful. Like on the featured fics for example. People just comment “Congrats on the feature” instead of saying, “You got featured and I read it and this is my opinion.” Even worse is on the random fics when you know that the author’s aren’t even aware their fic has been featured. Any comment on those fics is purely for gaining karma. It’s not being nice, it is getting karma.

In conclusion, it’s about time nichi implements some socialist methods to AFFs ever growing market, because this is just too much. No, better, just advertise this fic for the irony of it. 

[Edit] So, I basically completely ignore the existence of the advertised fics, but today I decided to click on it and realized that it was just another way for people to spam comments. "Congrats on winning the bid." I can't even express how this makes me feel right now. I just want you guys to know, it disgusts me.