There is a craving for the ideal artistic social media platform that ADR has the potential to fulfill. In a space adjacent to online novels and writing, ADR can provide a platform mostly for the use of fandom and discussion with creators. A public forum for things that people enjoy that, for convenience sake, are featured exclusively on ADR.
Generally, user activity and interactivity creates better analytics for better adsense qualifications. Offering this side program of a social media means more traffic to the website and the stories there.
People naturally want to connect and share their interests, so what if that was also a method of independently generating some pocket change? It is possible that this would encourage more mindless engagement schemes, but it is also possible that this would encourage lurkers to comment more and leave more love for people who put their all into their social media accounts. That would assumedly be the case if basic interactions were more rewarded.
Using the same model of rewardable interactivity as on the reading portion of the site, this should be applicable. That is, applying the model of community monetization for the passive reader to the accounts on the social side of the site could work out well.
This is assuming that bots are eradicated and/or unable to make accounts on the site and farm interactions. We will either need to implement a more specific system of monetization that discourages bot behavior while still appreciating the ravenous person who likes and comments on everything, or set up sound barriers to ensure that bot accounts cannot be registered to begin with, or that bot accounts cannot generate money for themselves or others. As of now, the plan is to make any interested accounts go through a timed screening process before they are able to access the passive earn system.
Because of the trickiness of the above, it is recommended that the social side not be advertised to writers or newcomer readers so that they remain true to the essence of a social site, which is to share things that people love. Social media gets tiring when it is all promotional content or engagement traps. This should just be a sweet side to our cause. That means limiting traffic in a sense so that it does not become the top site for businesses and corporations to establish relevancy with their customers. That ideal is reserved for mainstream platforms, not our art-centric site.
It seems that a lot of modern industry standards will have to be dropped from this site.
Now, the flow of monetization can also be made to reward those few accounts who take on the task of maintaining fandom pages and such. This will have to be worked out before we allow users to reach that post at all.
This is the base idea for building a social media side to the Audertist Originals website.
Different
How would this “social media side” be different from others?
- It is solely concerned about fandom and conversation on ADR works (and provided anchor works).
- While this may bleed into other things (topics researched to produce the work, how the work can be interpreted by different communities, zeroing in on characters and the feasibility of their traits in the real world), having a place dedicated to ADR works can make it easier to track conversation and “police” fandom.
- Creators of works can interact and benefit directly from the discussion of their work online, either as an extra revenue or community enrichment. They can tell their intended boundaries for their work and offer further insight on the worlds they share.
- Accounts that establish or volunteer as a moderator for a fandom forum may earn revenue for the activity in that area. Creators can earn a small general royalty for having their works mentioned, but the majority goes to the active participants of the forum and the moderator(s).
- It is possible to earn money from your own activity
- Moderators and creators get a dedicated cut from the forum’s overall activity. Everything else is distributed amongst participating users using the passive earn point system.
- Positivity versus toxicity rating dictates how much activity points are withheld by the site. If more users report negative experiences or if reported content does not get reviewed regularly by mods, then fewer points will be distributed in the fandom (which should mean less revenue for mods, since they get a cut and not a pointage system of earning).
- Users on the social side are required to fill out an etiquette exam and are constantly given the opportunity to review them as well as community rules.
- The platform wants to cultivate intelligent and indulgent discussion, as well as out-of-pocket ideas. The current trend of the internet is to rely on personal attacks and discriminatory language to show opposition to each other. This is not productive or interesting for this site. Users will have to refrain from usual internet speak and learn to speak more conductively if they wish to participate. Not an act of sanitization, but one of encouraging actual conversation.
- Outrage, nonsensical escalation, rage-bait, and diverging conversation can all be reported as such by other users and hidden under the corresponding label. Mods can deploy or dismiss these labels as need be. (example: [32 users determined that this comment is rage-bait] show comment)
One reply on “Fandoms & Communities”
This was written after I got into understanding how to run a social media account for the website and was constantly presented with writers who bemoaned the atmosphere of social media in relation to their craft. Many, if not all, were unimpressed with the grind of uploads and interactions and wanted their own community. Some were satisfied with Facebook groups, others found them to be clique-y and desired a more open ecosystem to talk about their writing with others. They wanted conversation and interaction, but not the sort that the current social media provided.
I saw all this and came to a shallow conclusion that writers/readers needed a specially defined space where they could talk about books without the addictive appeal of social media. Goodreads, for example, sets an interesting precedent in that it is designed for book reviews but also allows the user a certain amount of personalization and statistic that imitates hyper social media. There’s a limit to what book reviews can cover as well.
So I thought, with the idea of the Audertist website in mind, that we could develop more in the direction of fandom and community enrichment within writing. But what I came up with was a plan that simply applied our model of community monetization to current social media platforms. That might be well enough, but that doesn’t erase the issues that people have with social media. If there were to be many people on this platform, for example, then an algorithm would be needed to present the posts in a consumable way. It’s very different from simply uploading online novels to an online library that one could browse at their leisure. That’s a whole other site to build, actually.
This is an idea for another day. I want us to focus on the ease of upload and revenue collection for online novels first. When we have a bigger team, this will be revisited.