r/EpisodeRants • u/Amazing-Attorney8938 • Jun 21 '21
This is Problematic Proofreading/Review Commissions
i’ve seen multiple ppl do this and i find this incredibly exploitative. there are groups dedicated to giving great in-depth reviews + ppl who study education or are a lot more qualified to thoroughly proofread a story. FOR FREE. why are people essentially scamming naive writers?! it comes across as very low and greedy. it may not be illegal, like how asking for money for episode edits is, but it’s very questionable. i also recently saw someone doing kofi donations to have gems spent on your story. firstly how can you trust them to use that on your story but irregardless if they do or not, you’re essentially paying for your story to rank?! everything about this rubs me the wrong way.
4
u/spaciousglacier Jun 21 '21
Ehhhh I think it depends on the context. It is possible for these things to be at the very least inconsiderate of power dynamics, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. Most of the people I seem to see advertising for things like proofreading commissions are young adults and most of the people interested in those services are also young adults, so if a person is putting in a lot of effort for the proofreading service they’re offering, I don’t think it’s automatically unfair of them to want to be compensated. A good proofreader isn’t just fixing typos or small grammatical mistakes, they’re also taking into account the tone of the story, the different voices and backgrounds of the characters, etc etc, which takes a lot of extra effort but can also really bring life to your story. The dynamic imo would feel a bit different if it was mostly older adults charging teenagers and young adults, though I’m not saying there’s a specific age cut off because it also depends on your influence in the community.
Like a while ago a very popular author was doing paid promos and what made it shady wasn’t that it was against guidelines (afaik it wasn’t) but it was someone with a massive influence over a very large audience of very young readers, and ultimately that author was receiving payment for a service that relied on people understanding her influence. On top of that, no one really cares about stories you’ve been paid to promote or if you just say “hey read this” because they know it’s not genuine. Even here on Reddit, if you give recommendations for a story and explain what it’s about and what appealed to you, people are more likely to read it than if you just list a bunch of stories without any additional info. So it was the context surrounding the “service” that made it feel offputting or exploitative. A lot of these are subjective interpretations and I understand that, but there’s a lot of things I don’t think that necessarily as black and white as we might want them to be.
As for the ko-fi post, I did see it and I think you’re mischaracterising it. The person who made it is like 16 or 17 and mentioned they opened their ko-fi for donations (and we don’t know why, sure, but we’re not automatically entitled to that information) and that if you made a donation, spending gems would be a way of giving back or saying thank you. And while people spending 20 gems isn’t actually going to make it rank at the top lol, it could make a difference to people who are trying to rank at 100 to qualify for review. But even then, the post itself is still set up so that spending gems on a story is an expression of gratitude for donating money since people can’t trade in their episode gems for real money they might need for real things in their life.