ATTENTION! A couple commenters told me that some of my editing in the intro sequence flashes too quickly. So, if you are sensitive to flashing images, please SKIP PAST 3:34-4:09, and also 14:25-14:29 in this video!! I hope I can get timestamps as a whole added soon. Thank you to the two commenters who made me aware of this.
Am I the only one who didn't realize that NaNo was an official group/company before all this? I just thought it was a challenge people did and that you either did it or not.
i knew of its existence (since i made a video for them in 2019) but tbh i think a lot of us didn't think of it as a "company" or an "organization" - i always just treated it like a casual challenge. which is what i'll continue to do lol
nope! this video and the title (because i wanted to watch savys video i knew shed be making first so id hear it from a much more inside view than i think d'angelo would be since i dont THINK d'angelo has atleast publicly done nanowrimo before) of d'angelos video are the first time im hearing ANYTHING about the organization. heres to creatives keeping the spirit alive!
I know that the organization was a thing, but most of the people I no that have participated haven't really been attached to the organization very much. I think a lot of people treated it more like an individual challenge rather than part of an organization.
"She tends to come off as an human version of the British Empire" That's an insult I never expected the hear someone say, but I'm definitly going to remember for a next time.
Thank you for speaking up! It's a shame that the only way nanowrimo highlighted writers with disabilities was to cover their own asses, especially when the site was free to use (besides all the donation spam emails) and could have done a lot of great marketing towards impoverished communities. But if they could have those thoughts, they probably wouldn't have had such a broken site in the first place 🙃
@@ollie-ollieoxenfree I stopped using the website because it wasn’t accessible. Not on desktop, neither on mobile. Not even basic dark mode toggles for people with light sensitivity problems. I don’t like getting into a “fight,” but I like even less to be used as a shield in defense of art theft.
The first time I heard of this organization was because of the AI situation and Nanowrimo using us disabled people as a shield for their terrible actions. I am also legally blind and I was so livid. Side note though, what screen reader do you use? I'm looking into trying to use one to help boost my computer use. Hope you sell a ton of copies of your book!
@@BlindZubathi. I knew of NaNoWriMo since 2014, way before I even thought of becoming a writer. Also, I use the screen reader that comes with my devices. On IOS and MacOS items called VoiceOver, for the screen reader that spreaks everything that’s on screen. And the feature I use is called Spoken Content. That one has a control that I can play and pause. I use that for reader specific parts of text, or social media comments or ebooks. If you’re on a Windows computer, it’s on your Accessibility settings, and in that case you need to search for Narrator. Hope that helps.
Hi Dal! It was so cool to hear you in this video! Yeah, what the NaNo organization did was pretty disgusting. I'm glad you explained the distinction between assistive AI and generative AI. That is a very important distinction! Hope you're doing well!
I say we just make a discord channel with a monthly writing challenge called Write Club, with the first rule being "We don't talk to corporate sponsors about Write Club."
Now that’s a movie I would watch on repeat. Rule #1: We do not talk to corporate sponsors about Write Club Rule #2: We DO NOT talk to corporate sponsors about Write Club Rule #3: If a writer yells “stop!”, speaks up, or taps out, the critique of the work they’ve presented is over Rule #4: Only one writer gets subjected to a critique at a time Rule #5: One person speaks at a time Rule #6: No grooming, no spamming Rule #7: Critiques will go on for as long as they have to Rule #8: If this is your first time at Write Club, you have to submit something for critique
I feel like whenever a positive internet creativity trend has or acquires an Official Governing Organization, it always ends up ruined. Didn't Inktober have copyright drama?
Official Governing Organizations should have to be some kind of much stronger nonprofit form than a US 503c or whatever it’s called, to be taken seriously. Nonprofit should be the absolute bare minimum. Then: only donation-based or public arts funding allowed (say the word if you want me to go off on public funding), no commercial contracting at organizational scale (only open market allowed), governance selected from free participants without monetary compensation, no ability to own patents or industrial assets, copyright ownership limited to some form of partial copyleft.
Great video, thank you so much for giving this issue more visibility. Since the AI issue has been pretty well covered by the various news articles, I can provide some context about the other controversy - the grooming scandal (a news article is dropping soon about it, but here's the tl;dr). I was one of the group of users who compiled the initial report about the grooming issue to send to NaNo HQ and the FBI. NaNoWriMo’s forums were incredibly understaffed, and existing staff was overwhelmed. One of their moderators volunteered to take a large portion of the workload involving the forums - migrating NaNoWriMo’s new forums to Discourse, as well as independently handling the teen thread of minors (a very fast-moving thread with lots of active posts). NaNo HQ, burned out and understaffed, allowed this volunteer moderator far, far too much power on the forums, something that went on for several years. Apparently no one was checking on how this moderator was interacting in the teen thread - which regularly hit the max-post limit due to the fast-moving nature of teen convos, meaning most conversations were buried quickly. A group of users discovered that this mod, who was also a ML at one point, also ran a NSFW adult fetish website (where they also used Discourse), and talked about grooming the teens within the teen thread to invite them to the fetish website. In addition to this, adult fetish site users were invited into the teen thread to interact with the teens. This was immediately reported to HQ, with screenshots and evidence, to convince NaNoWriMo that they needed to act immediately to freeze the moderator’s access, freeze the teen thread, and launch a full investigation. That investigation… never happened. We now know (via leaked internal screenshots and talking with past staff), that NaNo HQ was completely unprepared to handle something like this. The teen-space moderator had claimed to have a terminal illness, so (and yes, we have this backed up by former moderators, and have screenshots), NaNo HQ decided to just “wait for the problem to solve itself”. Which is just… awful, in so many ways. The director of community relations even went into the ML discord and told existing MLs to “starve this issue of oxygen” (and yes, we have screenshots) if any hint of the grooming scandal made its way into regional discords or chat spaces. NaNo staff then began banning people on the forums who spoke up, deleting threads of other grooming victims who came forward, silencing users and giving MLs talking points to try and sweep it all away. Anyway. The board stepping in gave everyone a brief glimmer of hope, but they’ve so grossly mishandled pretty much everything that I think it’s really time to let the NaNoWriMo organization fade into the sunset. Watching Kilby, the interim executive director, puppet around the corpse of NaNo for financial solicitation while embracing stances that go against the core principles of the event should give everyone a reason to leave.
It at least they tried to do something it would alt least show some trying, but the sorting itself out is just so cynical? And yes awful. Not mentioning in the grooming and teenage unsafe, and didnt even try to make it safer?? WTF
@@elizabethking6395 Oh, thank you! Sorry, I guess it was silly of me to check the comments before I watched. It seemed like a good idea while I had my farm sim booting up, since I was going to use the video for background viewing during it.
Even *if* everyone could go to one writers retreat a year... daily forums with multiple people coming in with support, advice, etc still seem like a great thing to have!
@@SAVYWRITESBOOKSI mean sure, but it was a community event for me. I am awful at personal challenges … but if you have a lot of writers participate and have discords and UA-cam livestreams in November … it’s always so fun and productive. So yeah, you could always challenge you with a month of 50k words … but for me it wouldn’t be the some tbh 😅
@@IxiaRayne I have seen that Jess Owens (UA-camr) is doing her own version this year, but I don't know if there's a dedicated discord for it as I haven't looked into the details.
@IxiaRayne I feel the same way. Having the community for support was a good way to keep myself on track, because I can't set and maintain personal goals for myself because I know I'm a pushover 😅 I've been looking for other spaces but it just doesn't have the same vibe (which is a good thing, in some ways, considering the allegations)
I feel so bad for the kids that lost their creative outlet and their online friends when the YWP shut down. As a middle schooler I was heavily involved in an online fan forum for a book series I loved, and I met people on that site I still keep in contact with to this day (in my late 20s). The forums eventually did shut down without warning but by that point we had moved on to email & WhatsApp to communicate. The mods werent paid on my forum but were dedicated young adults vetted by the author of the book series so I never felt unsafe. I wish those kids had had a better experience 😢
It cracks me up that they tried to take the AI defense route of “it’s ableist to say people can’t use AI to generate a story when some people can’t write 50k words in a month” when you’re apparently also an iteration of the group that’s like “who needs online communities when the in person stuff is more fun!” There are people who do have disabilities that prevent them from making 50k words in a month I’m sure. But rather than using a generative AI to create a bland slop version of a story that is missing their unique touch I imagine there are other tools that could meet their needs and allow them to actually put their own words on the page. Or, you know, they could just choose a smaller number than 50k words for the month that’s challenging without being impossible. But I guess that’s just me, not being an AI grifter
Yes, initially the 50k words goal was just a guideline to encourage people to just write! It’s not like you win anything but bragging rights and maybe a finished draft of a novella.
Місяць тому+14
I cannot believe they had the gall to say that. A LOT of people who do NaNo are neurodivergent. I have a steel plate in my head!! (that's just the beginning of the fun...) So for them to appropriate disability culture like that was beyond inexcusable.
That's such a good point about other tools they could promote. I've been using a pay-what-you-want app called Stimuwrite which was made by an ND developer and is really great if you struggle with getting started or concentrating on writing!
Yeah, like, text to speech software has been around a VERY long time. I remember when it was advertised when I was a kid, to help your teen do their homework more easily.
Coming from the illustration field where the exact same bs has been debunked, it makes me feel demented to hear the same bogus talking points over and over again. I suppose their corpo overlords gave them all the same playbook.
I did NaNoWriMo for 10 years, and so many of my formative creative memories are linked to those projects. To see something that was such a cornerstone of the writing groups and sites and culture I grew up with fall into such a shitty state breaks my heart. Fantastic video, Savvy. Thank you for giving voices to so many of these people, and treating the situation with the depth and critical analysis it deserved.
I’m glad you explained that part about how publishers want first dibs on your book, if they want it at all. As a writer who has yet to attempt to publish any novels, I’m exactly the kind of person who’s vulnerable to scams like that.
I did my first NaNo in 2003 when I was still a teenager and I at least attempted (and occasionally won) every year for over a decade. I would often hang around the forums especially in those early years, and it was always a good time. I hadn’t participated in many years and was actually contemplating a return this year literally the day before Daniel Greene put out his video. It’s unbelievable that this humble writing challenge exploded into something truly monstrous.
it's wild! i'm glad we still have an online writing community on youtube, because i'm gonna need motivation for how much i need to write during the last quarter of the year
OMGs! WHY WOULD YOU IUSE SOMEONE’S NAME AS YOUR OWN!? I’m so sorry. This hurt to hear. Everything in my writing is to honor people I love deeply. Some are still alive, some are no longer here. Everything I write, I swear. Not ONCE I’ve used any of their full names in the text, to protect their identities. I could use the name here, the surname there, or a made-up name but the character’s description matches the real person. Such things. This “Kilby Blades” thing made me cry in frustration. Damn! I wasn’t ready for THIS level of controversy, but here we are. What a disaster.
to me it feels especially weird given the topic of her writing? the fact that she uses a pen name specifically because she doesn’t want it linked to her… but it’s fine to use her deceased friend’s name? maybe that’s just me though
I have dyslexia and I’ve been using speech to text since before it was a feature that came with most phones. Back when I had an app created by speech with ologist and not tech giants. *Edit: “with oligist” was meant to be pathologists. Screw you tech giants! What I hate about the AI stance is that it completely goes against the spirit of what nanowrimo used to be - an everything goes experiment where your first draft doesn’t matter as long as you wrote it. spelling mistakes, plot holes, nonsensical sentence structure. Their stance gives the impression that you have to be good at everything on your first try. That you have to be marketable on your first try. Nothing anyone does anymore is for fun.
Me seeing this thumbnail: Oh, I know about their whole ai controversy, I guess this video goes deep on that. The first minute of this video: This contains discussion of the exploitation and abuse of minors! Me: 😱😱😱
Oof, hard same!! I've heard about the AI thing, thought it was garage, and have been generally falling out of love with NaNo over the last few years, mostly because I've been doing it alone, but I'm sorry, THE FBI???!!!
Considering you can very easily find an obituary for a Kilby Blades who matches the description I do think it’s their deceased friends real name. There is something there that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, where I feel like instead of honouring them it feels like an erasure of their friends legacy to use the pen name in this kind of professional role. I think I have less issues with it used as a literary pen name, it is a fantastic name and that does feel a little more like honouring but still, the knowing attachment of a real name of a person you knew to a body of written work that they themselves admitted they don’t want their real name attached to feels icky. I also can’t help but feel like they didn’t choose to use their pen name in the executive director role to protect their identity but instead to focus the attention that comes with the role towards their writing, to get more eyes on their work from the acclaim that comes with leading nanowrimo and that community. Especially since they seem willing to watch the organization burn to the ground around them after they already got the initial new attention that came with filling that role. It wasn’t an identity protection thing, it was a way to promote their written work which they would have been unwilling to do under their real name.
Also, I will say the dates and ages are a wee bit off (ie 2004 not 2003 and more like mid-twenties vs early) but that could be because of our own faulty memories when remembering things. I know for myself in my own memory I’ve thought a loved one passed away when I was one age and therefore in a particular year but it’s been a bit off a bit when I actually check the facts but I’m not going to do that when I’m giving/writing a little anecdote about them.
Totally agree with all of this! Also, now that late friend's real name has been inextricibly linked to all the bad shit that happened under NaNo-Kilby's tenure.
I'm actually very confused because I looked up the 990s (which are supposed to have legal names) and Kilby Blades is listed on the most recent form on Guidestar. It's not on earlier forms so maybe she actually changed her legal name?
@@gio_giotte oh boy, it's a niche for sure, but a very dedicated niche, with its own niche controversies (mild ones, to be clear) like the "oh you can totally preserve [X] in this way that will definitely not lead to botulism or anything, bacteria are a conspiracy" group. They're not huge, but definitely loud. I'm not even in canning groups or anything, I just occasionally make jam and stuff, and I read some pretty weird posts about people talking about canning stuff in ways that are unsafe.
I looked it up really quick and found an obituary for Kilby Blades that fits the description of the deceased friend. It seems like it was her actual name. Actually if this is the right obituary she was an awesome person who was extremely accomplished.
I was wondering if anyone looked for an obituary! I find it weird that to “protect their identity” they chose to use the steamy romance pen name in their professional organization role and I find it even weirder knowing it was a real name of a person they knew. It almost feels in a way like they’re trying to undermine the accomplishments the friend managed in their short life instead of an honour?
@@LavenderTea-lr3hc Yeah, not sure why that's just glossed over in the video. It's weird as hell to take your dead friend's name for writing your saucy novels.
Another insidious issue with having AI help writing your book, check the tos on programs that use it, they can train on ANYTHING written in the program, so say you buy in for the inspo option, use it a couple times, maybe even go the distance to reword the offerings, your entire manuscript is now part of the training set, not just the generated parts, it's bad enough they're stealing work to train on, now people are paying to be stolen from!
My thoughts exactly! There are allegations of not only child grooming on the NaNoWriMo forums, but also of the NaNoWriMo HQ deliberately ignoring and covering up those allegations... I didn't hear anything about it for over a year! Meanwhile, NaNoWriMo makes a dumb statement about AI and the whole internet goes crazy! ... Priorities, people!
I think the fact that it was a public statement just made it more accessible, but everyone I've heard talk about the statement does bring up the other, far worse, stuff, too. I mean, if NaNo literally covered up the grooming and child endangerment, then it makes sense to me why the broader public hasn't heard about it until now... The cover-up worked. The AI nonsense is the crack that's opened up all this garbage for the public, as such scandals tend to do. You find out about something mostly just stupid, and in looking into it, you discover far, far worse things behind it. I've participated in NaNo for, I don't even know, ages, since I first heard about it, and am only just hearing about all the horrifying stuff now because of the AI thing.
@@SAVYWRITESBOOKS because when you can use the correct words for things, you have to have a good code word. grape has a pretty obvious one, but sending smut links to minors really doesn't.
AI thing took off because it's big money, and because it's something that can be talked about on social media without algospeak. Until Elon decides "plagiarism" is a slur now, anyway.
@@SAVYWRITESBOOKS definitely, considering NaNo intentionally tried to hide the weird behavior of their mod and never made any official or public statements on it.
Kilby Blades sounds *exactly* like a woman I’ve had to work with the last few years. So full of herself and convinced of her brilliance that she’s letting the organization she runs burn to the ground because she’s unwilling to let anyone else do anything.
Minor correction (around 1:05:00): In Quebec, for situations that are covered by the language laws, French is required, but English is definitely optional!
It's crazy how NaNoWriMo's public downfall only began after the AI-drama and not back when the grooming and the mismanagement of that situation came to light.
Thing is the grooming never came to light outside of nano. For example I stopped doing nano 10 years ago and i only heard about the ai debacle bc someone on tw from another fandom rt it.
Some of the initial reporters tried to tweet out about the controversy, but no one had big enough accounts to really get the word out wide. Whereas when users started tweeting about the AI statement, big name accounts and big authors started picking it up right away.
With that language translating “just use google translate” thing. Google translate isn’t the greatest translator, although it has gotten better, but you also have to consider different dialects of languages in different areas.
I've seen Japanese people BEG foreigners to use anything but Google translate. They will learn just enough english to tell you the names of better programs! It's that bad!
as someone far too close to this whole situation, i really appreciate you interviewing people who were actually involved and know the whole story! i recognized almost everyone you interviewed from name/context and they are legit and know their stuff! izzi with their PHD in CFology has done so much work, yall don't even know
For your RPG's book layout: - Make an introduction with both an intro to your theme and one to your game, and a general idea on how it's gonna be played. - First chapter has to be basic mechanics, which should include the role play you envision for your game, the conflict resolution mechanic, and the minor mechanics needed for your game to work (but not in detail yet). - Next chapters should be mechanics in deep, and a chapter in how you intend to run the game (if it needs a GM, the rules for them, or if it's GMless the tables or other mechaics needed). - Don't forget to include plenty of examples and iustrations. Also do a character sheet (the prettier the better). - If the game it's gonna have it's own rich lore, include a couple chapters for it after the basic mechanics (this is personal preference, you can place them wherever, I prefer to read first about the game mechanics and then the lore of the game so I have a good idea on how it's played since start). For your conflict resolution mechanic, the most popular are by far dice and cards, but don't be afraid to use other unconventional methods. Those are the tips I can think of right now, hope they help you.
@@SAVYWRITESBOOKSthe thing is, you will never write an RPG that makes everyone happy. I am the exact opposite of the commenter above. I prefer a book that starts with the lore and the setting so I can decide if I am excited about that. Mechanics should come last, that’s the least important part.
@@robinsanford5682 I guess that just means making the chapters very easily findable by having a clear and obvious table of contents and a good index is key. Those who want lore can find it quickly, those who want mechanics can find it quickly, and if you want to look something up real quick, like a specific rule, it isn't a full time job to find that.
Thank you for making this. And stating that we can do the challenge independently. I have 3 openings I have written for 3 different novel ideas. I wanted to do it this year, but I felt icky about it. Thanks for making me feel better.
Been doing nanowriomo since I was a tween. The online groups got me through the pandemic. I will always respect my local group leaders but the higher ups have messed stuff up enough for me to dip. Having established groups to easily join, having meeting info on forms, and a well designed website does more for disabled writers (me) than AI ever will. Such a dumb hill to die on.
I LOVE Writers Beware. I actually asked Victoria Strauss about a bunch of weirdos that called me about getting my book made into a movie(????) I don't even know how they found out about it. I mean I did a Kickstarter and sent copies as far as California but how in the name of the gods did scammers in the Philippines find out about a massive romance book written in the Midwest?
I was in the forum as it imploded, and one of the things mods kept saying was that "The board didn't know" which bothered the crap out of me because the board is supposed to oversee the CEO. Minors are always heavily monitored, so it strikes me as odd that they were actively in danger and still encouraged to participate.
Now that I hear about the controversy with children, it’s clear to me that this “non-profit” has gone after every vulnerable group of people out there. Children, people of color, disabled, even the dead. I really don’t want anything to do with NNWM anymore.
Thank you for covering this Savy! I was a wrimo from 2011-2023 on and off, but I deleted my account last month. Nano was formative for me, and I have made many lifelong friends on the forums and at write ins. I'm saddened to see it fall apart in so many different ways.
Seeing this comment reminded me that I needed to delete my own account, so I just did. And wow. When I clicked that final confirm button, it said, "*You're* account has been deleted." YOU'RE. I'm just...damn. Yes, this is very sad.
i think the most important thing when it comes to discussion about AI is to separate generative and assistive AI. because despite claims to the contrary (which are generally only made in defense of generative AI) AI can in fact be categorised and talked about within these categories. and we can in fact tell people that we support AI built upon only pre inputted stuff that was programmed by a human and exists as its own entity separate from the internet (e-readers, image description, ect) and condemn AI that scrapes the internet for whatever it can find upon only minimal input from a human. and the sooner we can get people creating and using strict definitions of what counts as assistive or generative AI the sooner we will be able to get legislation about it. and as creatives, it is up to us to make sure those definitions don't end up being used to benefit the supporters of generative AI.
I'm very new to web development, but something that I've already come across several times is this emphasis on making sites accessible, so it's just *ridiculous* to me that such a big site didn't even think about it?? Especially when they've always marketed themselves as "inlcusive".
I discovered NaNoWriMo when I was in high school/college. I've been a member as far back as my college days. I cannot believe you predicted how AI would be used! LOL!
The minute a company hires someone who’s main thing is to just make money…it always goes tits up…either just the basic bad that comes from every company or it goes so far off the rails it’s insane…no in between lol
The funny thing is that in the US a 501c organization is a NON PROFIT. They can't legally make money. It has to be spent. A properly run 501c would NOT want commercial deals, there focus would be larger donors who would help build a trust to continue funding. The entire board should have been true believers in NaNoWriMo and required to donate several thousand dollars a year to even get a spot on the board. So Grant's expertise is totally useless here. And the board's attitude is a sign that the board had already failed. It needs to be reported to the IRS for a solid audit.
About the ending where people are talking about their local groups and doing the challenge without the organisation: I for one am pretty upset about this all, because I've used the nanowrimo website since 2009 when I first participated, and the international forums was an integral part of my nano experience. The threads about weird novel notes, about nanoisms, and especially the care package and postcard swap threads. I honestly don't know if I can have those without the international community and it seriously makes me really sad.
BABE QUICK NANOWRIMO DEEP DIVE JUST DROPPED! Also the mention of the Tuttle Twins books on Stephen Colbert the other night made me laugh so hard because I had context from you ❤
47:18 50 shades of grey was self published, not trad pub published. A trad pub would not have picked up 50 shades of grey if she had published it with inkitt first.
I know self publishers love to claim it but 50 Shades wasn't self-published. It was published by a boutique publisher - The Writer's Coffee Shop which was based in Australia. The company specialized in filing the serial numbers off fanfiction. Then it sold so well that the trad pub picked it up and did little more than change the cover art. I was in fandom at the time (not twilight) but it was being talked about all over.
The MLs in my region, a low population state in the western US, became so inactive that there were no events, almost no communications, and nothing happening outside of random participants gathering together on their own which was very rare. The MLs were just so overwhelmed with their everyday lives that running their duties was undoable and we were pretty much on our own. I considered signing up to help out because there were people in my region that wanted to meet and have events or even just online communication and I thought I could help out. I ended up looking at the responsibilities and realizing I didn’t want to be forced to do such an intensive job on top of work and school for no pay. It’s really sad they didn’t just hire people to run the regions. Or just keep the forums functioning as they were. There were so many basic quality of life t things that were falling apart in addition to the giant controversies.
I just realized something: Some of these issues were alluded to by my ML (they trusted me enough to vent about it, but also didn't get into details). I remember them mentioning "I feel like they're really pushing fundraising this year and I don't really want to do that," and "what where they THINKING with that sponsor? We shouldn't be promoting some sleazy vanity press!" I just wish my local writing community stuck together or I kept in better contact with everyone.
i remember thinking this was just some wattpad/writing challenge when i was around 15. Didn’t realize how deep it went and how many people were hurt. I think i will watch this video in oarts
OOOOOH! yeah i was working on a campaign scenario for the doll RPG draft called "time travel tea party" where all the dolls go through a time portal to meet up for tea
@@SAVYWRITESBOOKS even better. 🫡 Are you thinking about a tabletop RPG? I imagine collabing with someone using an RPG maker would be way too overwhelming and not nearly as tactilely satisfying.
Nano should just have said "we've never put any conditions on how you create your 50,000 words, and we're not going to start now; do whatever you want!" or other words to that effect. And really there should never have been a huge organization in the first place; those always attract people who shouldn't be running organizations, and things fall apart.
Me: Who the hell uses Google Translate for official communications? That seems... not good... Also me: Savy jest piękną kobietą i mam nadzieję, że będzie miała dobry dzień.
Thank you so much for this investigative presentation on all aspects of NaNo. I won it last year and didn’t know any of this until I started seeing videos about it this year. And yes, the AI was what I first heard about, but now my head is spinning with all of these inappropriate moderators and people assuming a deceased friend’s name for their professional name AND their spicy books, but their just walking around persona is different. This sounds like a bad novel created by AI if it weren’t all true. Your interviews and support for the story validate all of the rumors and I am sure are still only the bare tip of any iceberg we will see. So so sad. It just needs to be gone. But also there has to be a way to contact the children so they are not lost and think this is acceptable behavior. I don’t have any of the answers, but will certainly pray for them and share appropriate information when necessary. I too am following Heart Breathings Challenge and I will most definitely continue to follow you as well.
I've done NaNo for nearly a decade, routinely doing Camp as well as the traditional November NaNo. I actually initially defended them because I thought the claims were another attack by the christian groups that had been trying to get them shut down for allowing LGBTQ groups, only to be shown the depth of the problem. The realization of what was really going on led to the creation of a writing group that now has nearly 150 members on Discord and is doing our own version of a NaNo challenge we're calling the DiNoWriMo Grand Prix.
The faux anti-classist defence of chat gpt etc is pretty common. There was an article in the guardian recently implying that without chat gpt poor students wouldn't be able to write decent papers 🤣 as someone who was a poor as dirt student once i found it both hilariously bad logic and offensive.
I did Nano back in the early 2000s, meeting up with local writing groups in Japan and Canada. It was a blast. However, I just can't get behind AI taking away the experience of generating raw word count. NaNoWriMo's horrendous take that it's classist/racist to think using AI is a form of cheating/plagiarizing has completely stopped my support of the organization. This lead me into all this other conflict, which has only confirmed that I made a good decision.
@@AgingStudent firing their unpaid volunteers because they were unable to use the site (due to lack of accommodations) is also not ableist, somehow, but criticizing genai is... Hmmm.
I've been participating in NaNo since 2007, and when I say it genuinely saved my life, it's not an exaggeration. I was an ML several years between 2009-2014. I haven't kept up with all the chaos beyond AI, but it's genuinely heartbreaking to see how their bad decisions led to their downfall. I'm only 15 minutes in, and I'm scared to watch this since I recommended both the main challenge and YWP to so many people over the last decade. I know it's bad, but when you mentioned the FBI, it must be BAD BAD.
Especially if someone's using your name to write romance smut! Like, guys... ew. How does that not give people the creeps? This poor person died, now their name is associated with all of this. Yuck. Poor woman.
Wow, and here I was thinking no one was gonna disgrace their beloved monthly challenge more than Jake Parker, the creator of Inktober, but here we are😒😒😒
I was on the YWP forums from 2020-2022 and it was a very interesting experience and I would never want to do that again. I was not a fan of the mods, especially when they did nothing with all the weird dating/‘marriage’ drama between other users
This honestly makes me so sad. I have such fond, nostalgic memories of browsing those forums (though I was definitely using the main site under 18, I had no idea what the YWP was and didn't care- I didn't start doing NaNo until I was about 14 anyway). I went back to look at them recently and they are so ugly and awful now, my local chapter is entirely on discord which I hate, and I'm just sad that it's all gone and all this has happened. It kind of feels like that era of my life really is gone forever and I can't revisit even a tiny part of it in those forums. C'est la vie I suppose. I'll just have to mourn the loss of what was and look forward to what's next. Thanks for this informative video! Happy I found your channel.
I wrote my first satirical humor novel with NaNo that was published. I participated in various local NaNo writing meet ups, I visited the "Mother Ship" in Berkeley a few times to volunteer or do "in the window" writing hours. I even applied for a job at the organization. I went to the parties and used it for many other projects. However all of this was under Chris. It is so sad this is what has happened.
Man, I don’t understand the amount of work and burden they were putting on the backs of unpaid volunteers. Obviously it’s good to have basic standards for volunteers to follow but that’s different than expecting them to essentially be employees. I personally do believe free resources and volunteers are invaluable, but under our current economic system you can’t expect people to commit to this amount of time and labor out of the goodness of their heart, especially when they aren’t even being treated well.
Another informative banger, Savy!!!! I especially appreciate that you interviewed people who experienced these events as well as a writer with a disability. ETA: OH MY GOSH the poor MLs!!!! My heart is hurting for the way all their passion and effort was thrown back in their faces.
to me the best part of nano was always our discord group, which i am happy to say keeps going as a writers group now! our ml’s stepped down from nano this spring and explained the situation to us and now we’re going through with our own november challenge!
As a TTRPG connoisseur, I would LOVE a doll themed one! It sounds like so much fun! Props on how much work and research went into this video, as well. You're always so thorough and caring towards the people affected by these organisations or people. I couldn't believe you're not even at 100k subscribers yet (as a long time lurker/ subscriber myself!) so I really hope you make your goal! You deserve it!
Omg I'm so excited for your doll RPG! I'm a big MH fan and love TTRPGs/immersive games. Please keep us updated! 🤗 Also, I'm soooo not surprised it involved someone faking their death. The writing community has a habit with that, it seems 😭
@@alpha1solace the UA-camr Heart Breathings has started her own version of the challenge that I will be doing and it’s more than just once a year. After diving more deep into it it seems pretty split on people doing thier own thing or still doing nano just not using the site or getting the merch.
Man when I found out about this and the forums being closed I was so sad, the forums were like 99% of the reason i ever interacted with the website, that and I love statistics and yet to figure out how to make a Google sheets that gives me the same charts and stats nano did
same. I was wondering how the AI thing could make for a 2 hour video then the first 3 minutes made me realize i had no idea how deep this iceberg goes.
What's wild is I discovered Nano through Writers Digest magazine's best websites series when I was I wanna say maybe like 13-14ish. I think in the beginning I perused the forums but I don't recall ever like doing much there. I often forgot about Nano or like didn't have enough time to prepare and some of the times I did do it it was like updating word counts on the site and that was it. I did look through their winner goodies and that's pretty much the only reason I was on the website ever. I don't even remember the last year I attempted it but seeing all of this was like Whoa! As someone for whom this was such a big part of my teen years this was like shocking.
I did nanowrimo in 2014, 2017, and 2019. I was going to do it again this year because i loved the forums and community. Then, I learned about the AI issue. And that led to learning about all these other issues. I'm going to do my own personal nanowrimo, but I'm going to miss the comradery.
1:39:27 this sounds exactly like what happens with Nedry in the first Jurassic Park movie! 😮 He knows he's likely to get fired so he jumps ship, screws up all the coding, and thus lets all the dinosaurs loose in the process. Woah.
I appreciate this deep dive greatly. I was an ML for several years but not active in the forums or in the unofficial official ML discord, so I had no idea what was really going on. We did our own thing and puttered along until the forums shut down. Everything was incredibly fishy from that point on, and I didn't really have context for most of it. While I'm not glad for the (family-related) reasons I had to step down after NaNo 2023, it's clear that the timing was serendipitous. I will always be grateful for what I gained from NaNo the event, at least, because it helped me start writing and connected me with people I otherwise would never have met.
So, I have not finished the video, but I had to say this. I started watching you WAY back in 2020 it's wild to see how much you have grown! The video quality is out of this world! Fantastic work
Haven’t started watching yet, but am very happy that you’re covering this since I know you were a fan of doing NaNoRriMo each year. I used to try and participate, but never stuck with it.
Thank you for making such an in-depth video on this. I've been a participant since 2013, and I've donated multiple times to the organization, but after everything that happened last year with the YWP and the forums (and in 2022, with the scam sponsor), I've decided to no longer participate on the official website.
Just started the video but had to pause to say, *Hey! I have that mug, too!* And a couple of other mugs, a few t-shirts, some stickers… Yeah, I had a good run with NaNoWriMo. It’s really a shame that things came to this.
ATTENTION! A couple commenters told me that some of my editing in the intro sequence flashes too quickly. So, if you are sensitive to flashing images, please SKIP PAST 3:34-4:09, and also 14:25-14:29 in this video!! I hope I can get timestamps as a whole added soon. Thank you to the two commenters who made me aware of this.
Thanks for this helpful information.
Protip: hit spacebar to pause and unpause youtube videos!
Am I the only one who didn't realize that NaNo was an official group/company before all this? I just thought it was a challenge people did and that you either did it or not.
i knew of its existence (since i made a video for them in 2019) but tbh i think a lot of us didn't think of it as a "company" or an "organization" - i always just treated it like a casual challenge. which is what i'll continue to do lol
nope! this video and the title (because i wanted to watch savys video i knew shed be making first so id hear it from a much more inside view than i think d'angelo would be since i dont THINK d'angelo has atleast publicly done nanowrimo before) of d'angelos video are the first time im hearing ANYTHING about the organization. heres to creatives keeping the spirit alive!
I know that the organization was a thing, but most of the people I no that have participated haven't really been attached to the organization very much. I think a lot of people treated it more like an individual challenge rather than part of an organization.
Not the only one - I had friends who kept trying me to join the challenge, I just never ended up doing it.
And I'm such an oblivious dumb dumb that I never even heard of NaNoWriMo until this blow-up...
"She tends to come off as an human version of the British Empire" That's an insult I never expected the hear someone say, but I'm definitly going to remember for a next time.
r/RareInsult as I've ever seen one!
I clicked on this video like “oh yeah their whole defense of AI thing that was pretty shit” and within minutes I was going “THE FUCKING FBI?!?!?!?!?!”
Bestie, SAME.
like, the intro _just_ finished and I guess I better buckle tf UP 😭
Oh, I might have to watch this all the way through, I thought it was just the AI stuff
same 😂
SAME!!!!!
Same! I clicked expecting a video essayabout the weird ai thing and the whiplashhhh
Btw… I am that blind writer who depends on screen readers. Hello.
Thank you for speaking up! It's a shame that the only way nanowrimo highlighted writers with disabilities was to cover their own asses, especially when the site was free to use (besides all the donation spam emails) and could have done a lot of great marketing towards impoverished communities. But if they could have those thoughts, they probably wouldn't have had such a broken site in the first place 🙃
@@ollie-ollieoxenfree I stopped using the website because it wasn’t accessible. Not on desktop, neither on mobile. Not even basic dark mode toggles for people with light sensitivity problems.
I don’t like getting into a “fight,” but I like even less to be used as a shield in defense of art theft.
The first time I heard of this organization was because of the AI situation and Nanowrimo using us disabled people as a shield for their terrible actions. I am also legally blind and I was so livid.
Side note though, what screen reader do you use? I'm looking into trying to use one to help boost my computer use. Hope you sell a ton of copies of your book!
@@BlindZubathi. I knew of NaNoWriMo since 2014, way before I even thought of becoming a writer. Also, I use the screen reader that comes with my devices. On IOS and MacOS items called VoiceOver, for the screen reader that spreaks everything that’s on screen. And the feature I use is called Spoken Content. That one has a control that I can play and pause. I use that for reader specific parts of text, or social media comments or ebooks.
If you’re on a Windows computer, it’s on your Accessibility settings, and in that case you need to search for Narrator.
Hope that helps.
Hi Dal! It was so cool to hear you in this video! Yeah, what the NaNo organization did was pretty disgusting. I'm glad you explained the distinction between assistive AI and generative AI. That is a very important distinction! Hope you're doing well!
I say we just make a discord channel with a monthly writing challenge called Write Club, with the first rule being "We don't talk to corporate sponsors about Write Club."
Now that’s a movie I would watch on repeat.
Rule #1: We do not talk to corporate sponsors about Write Club
Rule #2: We DO NOT talk to corporate sponsors about Write Club
Rule #3: If a writer yells “stop!”, speaks up, or taps out, the critique of the work they’ve presented is over
Rule #4: Only one writer gets subjected to a critique at a time
Rule #5: One person speaks at a time
Rule #6: No grooming, no spamming
Rule #7: Critiques will go on for as long as they have to
Rule #8: If this is your first time at Write Club, you have to submit something for critique
ok but can this be a real thing
I know this was posted as a joke.
But this sounds like something that could work.
Or maybe don't reference such pluralphobic media for no reason?
I feel like whenever a positive internet creativity trend has or acquires an Official Governing Organization, it always ends up ruined. Didn't Inktober have copyright drama?
Yuuuuup and some plagiarism that turned me away from it for a couple of years.
i vaguely remember that!
I believe that the inktober drama involved Gabriel Picolo somehow
and plagiarism drama
Official Governing Organizations should have to be some kind of much stronger nonprofit form than a US 503c or whatever it’s called, to be taken seriously.
Nonprofit should be the absolute bare minimum. Then: only donation-based or public arts funding allowed (say the word if you want me to go off on public funding), no commercial contracting at organizational scale (only open market allowed), governance selected from free participants without monetary compensation, no ability to own patents or industrial assets, copyright ownership limited to some form of partial copyleft.
Great video, thank you so much for giving this issue more visibility.
Since the AI issue has been pretty well covered by the various news articles, I can provide some context about the other controversy - the grooming scandal (a news article is dropping soon about it, but here's the tl;dr). I was one of the group of users who compiled the initial report about the grooming issue to send to NaNo HQ and the FBI.
NaNoWriMo’s forums were incredibly understaffed, and existing staff was overwhelmed. One of their moderators volunteered to take a large portion of the workload involving the forums - migrating NaNoWriMo’s new forums to Discourse, as well as independently handling the teen thread of minors (a very fast-moving thread with lots of active posts). NaNo HQ, burned out and understaffed, allowed this volunteer moderator far, far too much power on the forums, something that went on for several years. Apparently no one was checking on how this moderator was interacting in the teen thread - which regularly hit the max-post limit due to the fast-moving nature of teen convos, meaning most conversations were buried quickly.
A group of users discovered that this mod, who was also a ML at one point, also ran a NSFW adult fetish website (where they also used Discourse), and talked about grooming the teens within the teen thread to invite them to the fetish website. In addition to this, adult fetish site users were invited into the teen thread to interact with the teens.
This was immediately reported to HQ, with screenshots and evidence, to convince NaNoWriMo that they needed to act immediately to freeze the moderator’s access, freeze the teen thread, and launch a full investigation.
That investigation… never happened.
We now know (via leaked internal screenshots and talking with past staff), that NaNo HQ was completely unprepared to handle something like this. The teen-space moderator had claimed to have a terminal illness, so (and yes, we have this backed up by former moderators, and have screenshots), NaNo HQ decided to just “wait for the problem to solve itself”. Which is just… awful, in so many ways.
The director of community relations even went into the ML discord and told existing MLs to “starve this issue of oxygen” (and yes, we have screenshots) if any hint of the grooming scandal made its way into regional discords or chat spaces.
NaNo staff then began banning people on the forums who spoke up, deleting threads of other grooming victims who came forward, silencing users and giving MLs talking points to try and sweep it all away.
Anyway. The board stepping in gave everyone a brief glimmer of hope, but they’ve so grossly mishandled pretty much everything that I think it’s really time to let the NaNoWriMo organization fade into the sunset. Watching Kilby, the interim executive director, puppet around the corpse of NaNo for financial solicitation while embracing stances that go against the core principles of the event should give everyone a reason to leave.
thank you for reporting it. i'm so sorry you had to deal with all of this.
It at least they tried to do something it would alt least show some trying, but the sorting itself out is just so cynical? And yes awful.
Not mentioning in the grooming and teenage unsafe, and didnt even try to make it safer?? WTF
{raises hand} Um, sorry. ML? What's that an acronym for?
@@Cyberweasel89 Municipal Liason, aka local volunteers who were in charge of the various regions. Savy defines this and other terms in the video.
@@elizabethking6395 Oh, thank you! Sorry, I guess it was silly of me to check the comments before I watched. It seemed like a good idea while I had my farm sim booting up, since I was going to use the video for background viewing during it.
That whole "writers' retreats" thing makes me so mad. Some people don't have the luxury of a vacation involving travel.
Even *if* everyone could go to one writers retreat a year... daily forums with multiple people coming in with support, advice, etc still seem like a great thing to have!
I saw D'Angelo's video about NaNoWriMo, and I immediately went "oh I look forward to the inevitable Savy video" :p
D'Angelo is great!
@@SAVYWRITESBOOKS Absolutely, I'm so glad he's back :D
I love him too
Link? Thx
@@ChristineCavalier ua-cam.com/video/2uP7DHdc9Tk/v-deo.html
That’s rich that condemning AI is “ableist” but firing an active discord mod because they can’t read the crappy website is legit.
Walking away from NaNo was so sad. But that challenge isn’t required for anyone to write.
agreed. i'm gonna do 50k a month for oct,nov,and dec 2024 lol
😮!!! @@SAVYWRITESBOOKS
@@SAVYWRITESBOOKSI mean sure, but it was a community event for me. I am awful at personal challenges … but if you have a lot of writers participate and have discords and UA-cam livestreams in November … it’s always so fun and productive.
So yeah, you could always challenge you with a month of 50k words … but for me it wouldn’t be the some tbh 😅
@@IxiaRayne I have seen that Jess Owens (UA-camr) is doing her own version this year, but I don't know if there's a dedicated discord for it as I haven't looked into the details.
@IxiaRayne I feel the same way. Having the community for support was a good way to keep myself on track, because I can't set and maintain personal goals for myself because I know I'm a pushover 😅 I've been looking for other spaces but it just doesn't have the same vibe (which is a good thing, in some ways, considering the allegations)
I feel so bad for the kids that lost their creative outlet and their online friends when the YWP shut down. As a middle schooler I was heavily involved in an online fan forum for a book series I loved, and I met people on that site I still keep in contact with to this day (in my late 20s). The forums eventually did shut down without warning but by that point we had moved on to email & WhatsApp to communicate. The mods werent paid on my forum but were dedicated young adults vetted by the author of the book series so I never felt unsafe. I wish those kids had had a better experience 😢
It cracks me up that they tried to take the AI defense route of “it’s ableist to say people can’t use AI to generate a story when some people can’t write 50k words in a month” when you’re apparently also an iteration of the group that’s like “who needs online communities when the in person stuff is more fun!”
There are people who do have disabilities that prevent them from making 50k words in a month I’m sure. But rather than using a generative AI to create a bland slop version of a story that is missing their unique touch I imagine there are other tools that could meet their needs and allow them to actually put their own words on the page. Or, you know, they could just choose a smaller number than 50k words for the month that’s challenging without being impossible. But I guess that’s just me, not being an AI grifter
Yes, initially the 50k words goal was just a guideline to encourage people to just write! It’s not like you win anything but bragging rights and maybe a finished draft of a novella.
I cannot believe they had the gall to say that. A LOT of people who do NaNo are neurodivergent. I have a steel plate in my head!! (that's just the beginning of the fun...) So for them to appropriate disability culture like that was beyond inexcusable.
That's such a good point about other tools they could promote. I've been using a pay-what-you-want app called Stimuwrite which was made by an ND developer and is really great if you struggle with getting started or concentrating on writing!
Yeah, like, text to speech software has been around a VERY long time. I remember when it was advertised when I was a kid, to help your teen do their homework more easily.
Coming from the illustration field where the exact same bs has been debunked, it makes me feel demented to hear the same bogus talking points over and over again. I suppose their corpo overlords gave them all the same playbook.
I did NaNoWriMo for 10 years, and so many of my formative creative memories are linked to those projects. To see something that was such a cornerstone of the writing groups and sites and culture I grew up with fall into such a shitty state breaks my heart.
Fantastic video, Savvy. Thank you for giving voices to so many of these people, and treating the situation with the depth and critical analysis it deserved.
it's such a sad situation. thank you f or watching
I’m glad you explained that part about how publishers want first dibs on your book, if they want it at all. As a writer who has yet to attempt to publish any novels, I’m exactly the kind of person who’s vulnerable to scams like that.
I did my first NaNo in 2003 when I was still a teenager and I at least attempted (and occasionally won) every year for over a decade. I would often hang around the forums especially in those early years, and it was always a good time. I hadn’t participated in many years and was actually contemplating a return this year literally the day before Daniel Greene put out his video. It’s unbelievable that this humble writing challenge exploded into something truly monstrous.
it's wild! i'm glad we still have an online writing community on youtube, because i'm gonna need motivation for how much i need to write during the last quarter of the year
OMGs! WHY WOULD YOU IUSE SOMEONE’S NAME AS YOUR OWN!?
I’m so sorry. This hurt to hear. Everything in my writing is to honor people I love deeply. Some are still alive, some are no longer here. Everything I write, I swear. Not ONCE I’ve used any of their full names in the text, to protect their identities. I could use the name here, the surname there, or a made-up name but the character’s description matches the real person. Such things.
This “Kilby Blades” thing made me cry in frustration. Damn! I wasn’t ready for THIS level of controversy, but here we are. What a disaster.
Yeah it feels really classless and insensitive to the surviving loved ones to take a dead person's name
to me it feels especially weird given the topic of her writing? the fact that she uses a pen name specifically because she doesn’t want it linked to her… but it’s fine to use her deceased friend’s name? maybe that’s just me though
I have dyslexia and I’ve been using speech to text since before it was a feature that came with most phones. Back when I had an app created by speech with ologist and not tech giants.
*Edit: “with oligist” was meant to be pathologists. Screw you tech giants!
What I hate about the AI stance is that it completely goes against the spirit of what nanowrimo used to be - an everything goes experiment where your first draft doesn’t matter as long as you wrote it. spelling mistakes, plot holes, nonsensical sentence structure. Their stance gives the impression that you have to be good at everything on your first try. That you have to be marketable on your first try. Nothing anyone does anymore is for fun.
This is so true, instead of a first draft the goal now seems to be to have a completed, publishable book at the end of one month.
Me seeing this thumbnail: Oh, I know about their whole ai controversy, I guess this video goes deep on that.
The first minute of this video: This contains discussion of the exploitation and abuse of minors!
Me: 😱😱😱
Oof, hard same!! I've heard about the AI thing, thought it was garage, and have been generally falling out of love with NaNo over the last few years, mostly because I've been doing it alone, but I'm sorry, THE FBI???!!!
Considering you can very easily find an obituary for a Kilby Blades who matches the description I do think it’s their deceased friends real name. There is something there that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, where I feel like instead of honouring them it feels like an erasure of their friends legacy to use the pen name in this kind of professional role. I think I have less issues with it used as a literary pen name, it is a fantastic name and that does feel a little more like honouring but still, the knowing attachment of a real name of a person you knew to a body of written work that they themselves admitted they don’t want their real name attached to feels icky. I also can’t help but feel like they didn’t choose to use their pen name in the executive director role to protect their identity but instead to focus the attention that comes with the role towards their writing, to get more eyes on their work from the acclaim that comes with leading nanowrimo and that community. Especially since they seem willing to watch the organization burn to the ground around them after they already got the initial new attention that came with filling that role. It wasn’t an identity protection thing, it was a way to promote their written work which they would have been unwilling to do under their real name.
Also, I will say the dates and ages are a wee bit off (ie 2004 not 2003 and more like mid-twenties vs early) but that could be because of our own faulty memories when remembering things. I know for myself in my own memory I’ve thought a loved one passed away when I was one age and therefore in a particular year but it’s been a bit off a bit when I actually check the facts but I’m not going to do that when I’m giving/writing a little anecdote about them.
Totally agree with all of this! Also, now that late friend's real name has been inextricibly linked to all the bad shit that happened under NaNo-Kilby's tenure.
I'm actually very confused because I looked up the 990s (which are supposed to have legal names) and Kilby Blades is listed on the most recent form on Guidestar. It's not on earlier forms so maybe she actually changed her legal name?
I also thought it was a challenge people just did like Inktober, MerMay and Canuary
First time in my life ever hearing about canuary. Didn't know canning was such a thriving activity with its own internet sphere
@@gio_giotte oh boy, it's a niche for sure, but a very dedicated niche, with its own niche controversies (mild ones, to be clear) like the "oh you can totally preserve [X] in this way that will definitely not lead to botulism or anything, bacteria are a conspiracy" group. They're not huge, but definitely loud. I'm not even in canning groups or anything, I just occasionally make jam and stuff, and I read some pretty weird posts about people talking about canning stuff in ways that are unsafe.
I'm guessing Canuary is food-related then?
I think inkyober had copyright problems and was very aggressive in ensuring inktober belonged to him maybe a lawsuit?
I looked it up really quick and found an obituary for Kilby Blades that fits the description of the deceased friend. It seems like it was her actual name. Actually if this is the right obituary she was an awesome person who was extremely accomplished.
so they took the name of an actual person, and wrote steamy romance novels under it? huh,,,
I was wondering if anyone looked for an obituary! I find it weird that to “protect their identity” they chose to use the steamy romance pen name in their professional organization role and I find it even weirder knowing it was a real name of a person they knew. It almost feels in a way like they’re trying to undermine the accomplishments the friend managed in their short life instead of an honour?
@@LavenderTea-lr3hc Yeah, not sure why that's just glossed over in the video. It's weird as hell to take your dead friend's name for writing your saucy novels.
This makes the name taking even more disgusting
Getting an ad for AI-generated voices in this video is proof that AI has no idea what it’s doing. 🤣
Neat (/s) how Grant wanted to "protect the brand" with cease & desists against artist fans, but not by having an official NaNo Discord lmao
Another insidious issue with having AI help writing your book, check the tos on programs that use it, they can train on ANYTHING written in the program, so say you buy in for the inspo option, use it a couple times, maybe even go the distance to reword the offerings, your entire manuscript is now part of the training set, not just the generated parts, it's bad enough they're stealing work to train on, now people are paying to be stolen from!
My thoughts exactly! There are allegations of not only child grooming on the NaNoWriMo forums, but also of the NaNoWriMo HQ deliberately ignoring and covering up those allegations... I didn't hear anything about it for over a year! Meanwhile, NaNoWriMo makes a dumb statement about AI and the whole internet goes crazy! ... Priorities, people!
yeah! idk why the AI thing took off so much more - maybe because it was much more public facing?
I think the fact that it was a public statement just made it more accessible, but everyone I've heard talk about the statement does bring up the other, far worse, stuff, too. I mean, if NaNo literally covered up the grooming and child endangerment, then it makes sense to me why the broader public hasn't heard about it until now... The cover-up worked.
The AI nonsense is the crack that's opened up all this garbage for the public, as such scandals tend to do. You find out about something mostly just stupid, and in looking into it, you discover far, far worse things behind it. I've participated in NaNo for, I don't even know, ages, since I first heard about it, and am only just hearing about all the horrifying stuff now because of the AI thing.
@@SAVYWRITESBOOKS because when you can use the correct words for things, you have to have a good code word. grape has a pretty obvious one, but sending smut links to minors really doesn't.
AI thing took off because it's big money, and because it's something that can be talked about on social media without algospeak. Until Elon decides "plagiarism" is a slur now, anyway.
@@SAVYWRITESBOOKS definitely, considering NaNo intentionally tried to hide the weird behavior of their mod and never made any official or public statements on it.
"the forums aren't important because i go to a writing retreat every year" is CRAZYYYYYYYYY
Kilby Blades sounds *exactly* like a woman I’ve had to work with the last few years. So full of herself and convinced of her brilliance that she’s letting the organization she runs burn to the ground because she’s unwilling to let anyone else do anything.
Minor correction (around 1:05:00): In Quebec, for situations that are covered by the language laws, French is required, but English is definitely optional!
It's crazy how NaNoWriMo's public downfall only began after the AI-drama and not back when the grooming and the mismanagement of that situation came to light.
Thing is the grooming never came to light outside of nano. For example I stopped doing nano 10 years ago and i only heard about the ai debacle bc someone on tw from another fandom rt it.
Some of the initial reporters tried to tweet out about the controversy, but no one had big enough accounts to really get the word out wide. Whereas when users started tweeting about the AI statement, big name accounts and big authors started picking it up right away.
The mismanagement and grooming never came to light outside the forum/discord communities, until the AI debacle happened at least.
Just goes to show how they bury things
NaNoWriMo? More like NaNoHellNo.
If you click "Translate to English" it translates NaNoWriMo as AndNotWriting! 🤣🤣💀💀
@@mrandisg AI bros doing NaNoWriMo be like
With that language translating “just use google translate” thing. Google translate isn’t the greatest translator, although it has gotten better, but you also have to consider different dialects of languages in different areas.
I've seen Japanese people BEG foreigners to use anything but Google translate. They will learn just enough english to tell you the names of better programs! It's that bad!
51:57 banning someone for criticising a sponsor is a bad rule, period though. Doesn’t matter if the sponsor is good or bad
If the sponsor is proven to be a scam or very shady though, then that should be called out.
as someone far too close to this whole situation, i really appreciate you interviewing people who were actually involved and know the whole story! i recognized almost everyone you interviewed from name/context and they are legit and know their stuff! izzi with their PHD in CFology has done so much work, yall don't even know
For your RPG's book layout:
- Make an introduction with both an intro to your theme and one to your game, and a general idea on how it's gonna be played.
- First chapter has to be basic mechanics, which should include the role play you envision for your game, the conflict resolution mechanic, and the minor mechanics needed for your game to work (but not in detail yet).
- Next chapters should be mechanics in deep, and a chapter in how you intend to run the game (if it needs a GM, the rules for them, or if it's GMless the tables or other mechaics needed).
- Don't forget to include plenty of examples and iustrations. Also do a character sheet (the prettier the better).
- If the game it's gonna have it's own rich lore, include a couple chapters for it after the basic mechanics (this is personal preference, you can place them wherever, I prefer to read first about the game mechanics and then the lore of the game so I have a good idea on how it's played since start).
For your conflict resolution mechanic, the most popular are by far dice and cards, but don't be afraid to use other unconventional methods.
Those are the tips I can think of right now, hope they help you.
i appreciate this so much!!! thank you!
@@SAVYWRITESBOOKS You're welcome :)
@@SAVYWRITESBOOKSthe thing is, you will never write an RPG that makes everyone happy. I am the exact opposite of the commenter above. I prefer a book that starts with the lore and the setting so I can decide if I am excited about that. Mechanics should come last, that’s the least important part.
@@robinsanford5682 I guess that just means making the chapters very easily findable by having a clear and obvious table of contents and a good index is key. Those who want lore can find it quickly, those who want mechanics can find it quickly, and if you want to look something up real quick, like a specific rule, it isn't a full time job to find that.
I got chills as they described survivors getting emails about that awful, violent game…
I hate when people pretend being creative means you don’t have to act professionally as a NPO.
Thank you for making this. And stating that we can do the challenge independently. I have 3 openings I have written for 3 different novel ideas. I wanted to do it this year, but I felt icky about it. Thanks for making me feel better.
43:00 I forgot I said that!
What a bleeping ride, honestly. Can’t wait for the day we can put this behind us.
thank you for sharing your story!
Been doing nanowriomo since I was a tween. The online groups got me through the pandemic. I will always respect my local group leaders but the higher ups have messed stuff up enough for me to dip.
Having established groups to easily join, having meeting info on forms, and a well designed website does more for disabled writers (me) than AI ever will. Such a dumb hill to die on.
I LOVE Writers Beware. I actually asked Victoria Strauss about a bunch of weirdos that called me about getting my book made into a movie(????) I don't even know how they found out about it. I mean I did a Kickstarter and sent copies as far as California but how in the name of the gods did scammers in the Philippines find out about a massive romance book written in the Midwest?
I was in the forum as it imploded, and one of the things mods kept saying was that "The board didn't know" which bothered the crap out of me because the board is supposed to oversee the CEO. Minors are always heavily monitored, so it strikes me as odd that they were actively in danger and still encouraged to participate.
Now that I hear about the controversy with children, it’s clear to me that this “non-profit” has gone after every vulnerable group of people out there. Children, people of color, disabled, even the dead.
I really don’t want anything to do with NNWM anymore.
Thank you for covering this Savy! I was a wrimo from 2011-2023 on and off, but I deleted my account last month. Nano was formative for me, and I have made many lifelong friends on the forums and at write ins. I'm saddened to see it fall apart in so many different ways.
Seeing this comment reminded me that I needed to delete my own account, so I just did. And wow. When I clicked that final confirm button, it said, "*You're* account has been deleted." YOU'RE. I'm just...damn. Yes, this is very sad.
Wow two dead people's identities being used. One allegedly because did Kirby exist. Weird and terrible behaviour.
i think the most important thing when it comes to discussion about AI is to separate generative and assistive AI. because despite claims to the contrary (which are generally only made in defense of generative AI) AI can in fact be categorised and talked about within these categories. and we can in fact tell people that we support AI built upon only pre inputted stuff that was programmed by a human and exists as its own entity separate from the internet (e-readers, image description, ect) and condemn AI that scrapes the internet for whatever it can find upon only minimal input from a human. and the sooner we can get people creating and using strict definitions of what counts as assistive or generative AI the sooner we will be able to get legislation about it. and as creatives, it is up to us to make sure those definitions don't end up being used to benefit the supporters of generative AI.
With the amount of brain power and work I do to ensure my websites are accessible, I'm flabbergasted such a popular site doesn't even consider it.
I'm very new to web development, but something that I've already come across several times is this emphasis on making sites accessible, so it's just *ridiculous* to me that such a big site didn't even think about it?? Especially when they've always marketed themselves as "inlcusive".
I was a caregiver for a 96 year old lady who was preyed upon by them regarding a book she was writing about her mother 😞. I stepped in. I hate them.
archer was giving me life throughout this whole essay
I discovered NaNoWriMo when I was in high school/college. I've been a member as far back as my college days. I cannot believe you predicted how AI would be used! LOL!
LOL in my draft it wasn't even called "AI." i was actually struggling with what to name the "new" technology LOL
The minute a company hires someone who’s main thing is to just make money…it always goes tits up…either just the basic bad that comes from every company or it goes so far off the rails it’s insane…no in between lol
The funny thing is that in the US a 501c organization is a NON PROFIT. They can't legally make money. It has to be spent. A properly run 501c would NOT want commercial deals, there focus would be larger donors who would help build a trust to continue funding. The entire board should have been true believers in NaNoWriMo and required to donate several thousand dollars a year to even get a spot on the board.
So Grant's expertise is totally useless here. And the board's attitude is a sign that the board had already failed. It needs to be reported to the IRS for a solid audit.
Bossbro is such a hilarious word lmaoooo
thank you lol
About the ending where people are talking about their local groups and doing the challenge without the organisation: I for one am pretty upset about this all, because I've used the nanowrimo website since 2009 when I first participated, and the international forums was an integral part of my nano experience. The threads about weird novel notes, about nanoisms, and especially the care package and postcard swap threads. I honestly don't know if I can have those without the international community and it seriously makes me really sad.
Love that you actually do interviews with people. It adds so much to the videos
BABE QUICK NANOWRIMO DEEP DIVE JUST DROPPED!
Also the mention of the Tuttle Twins books on Stephen Colbert the other night made me laugh so hard because I had context from you ❤
omg the tuttle twins
the kilby blades situation reminds me of yellowface 😅so that's not a good sign
I was thinking the same exact thing 💯
47:18 50 shades of grey was self published, not trad pub published. A trad pub would not have picked up 50 shades of grey if she had published it with inkitt first.
I know self publishers love to claim it but 50 Shades wasn't self-published. It was published by a boutique publisher - The Writer's Coffee Shop which was based in Australia. The company specialized in filing the serial numbers off fanfiction. Then it sold so well that the trad pub picked it up and did little more than change the cover art. I was in fandom at the time (not twilight) but it was being talked about all over.
The MLs in my region, a low population state in the western US, became so inactive that there were no events, almost no communications, and nothing happening outside of random participants gathering together on their own which was very rare. The MLs were just so overwhelmed with their everyday lives that running their duties was undoable and we were pretty much on our own. I considered signing up to help out because there were people in my region that wanted to meet and have events or even just online communication and I thought I could help out. I ended up looking at the responsibilities and realizing I didn’t want to be forced to do such an intensive job on top of work and school for no pay. It’s really sad they didn’t just hire people to run the regions. Or just keep the forums functioning as they were. There were so many basic quality of life t things that were falling apart in addition to the giant controversies.
I just realized something:
Some of these issues were alluded to by my ML (they trusted me enough to vent about it, but also didn't get into details). I remember them mentioning "I feel like they're really pushing fundraising this year and I don't really want to do that," and "what where they THINKING with that sponsor? We shouldn't be promoting some sleazy vanity press!"
I just wish my local writing community stuck together or I kept in better contact with everyone.
i remember thinking this was just some wattpad/writing challenge when i was around 15. Didn’t realize how deep it went and how many people were hurt. I think i will watch this video in oarts
Doll fanfiction --- Avengers time travel themes but instead it's American Girl dolls. 🤔
OOOOOH! yeah i was working on a campaign scenario for the doll RPG draft called "time travel tea party" where all the dolls go through a time portal to meet up for tea
@@SAVYWRITESBOOKS even better. 🫡
Are you thinking about a tabletop RPG? I imagine collabing with someone using an RPG maker would be way too overwhelming and not nearly as tactilely satisfying.
I'm listening...keep going... 😊
Nano should just have said "we've never put any conditions on how you create your 50,000 words, and we're not going to start now; do whatever you want!" or other words to that effect. And really there should never have been a huge organization in the first place; those always attract people who shouldn't be running organizations, and things fall apart.
Me: Who the hell uses Google Translate for official communications? That seems... not good...
Also me: Savy jest piękną kobietą i mam nadzieję, że będzie miała dobry dzień.
LOL
dziekuje isaac
"wait, cinnamonfridge is dead??? 😟" is INSANE
The flashing images in the intro are very uncomfortable.
Thank you so much for this investigative presentation on all aspects of NaNo. I won it last year and didn’t know any of this until I started seeing videos about it this year. And yes, the AI was what I first heard about, but now my head is spinning with all of these inappropriate moderators and people assuming a deceased friend’s name for their professional name AND their spicy books, but their just walking around persona is different. This sounds like a bad novel created by AI if it weren’t all true. Your interviews and support for the story validate all of the rumors and I am sure are still only the bare tip of any iceberg we will see. So so sad. It just needs to be gone. But also there has to be a way to contact the children so they are not lost and think this is acceptable behavior. I don’t have any of the answers, but will certainly pray for them and share appropriate information when necessary.
I too am following Heart Breathings Challenge and I will most definitely continue to follow you as well.
I've done NaNo for nearly a decade, routinely doing Camp as well as the traditional November NaNo. I actually initially defended them because I thought the claims were another attack by the christian groups that had been trying to get them shut down for allowing LGBTQ groups, only to be shown the depth of the problem. The realization of what was really going on led to the creation of a writing group that now has nearly 150 members on Discord and is doing our own version of a NaNo challenge we're calling the DiNoWriMo Grand Prix.
The intro was so long I started to question whether the video was just going to be little clips from the interviews
Wow - a really informative deep dive. Such an eye opener. Thanks.
The faux anti-classist defence of chat gpt etc is pretty common. There was an article in the guardian recently implying that without chat gpt poor students wouldn't be able to write decent papers 🤣 as someone who was a poor as dirt student once i found it both hilariously bad logic and offensive.
I did Nano back in the early 2000s, meeting up with local writing groups in Japan and Canada. It was a blast.
However, I just can't get behind AI taking away the experience of generating raw word count. NaNoWriMo's horrendous take that it's classist/racist to think using AI is a form of cheating/plagiarizing has completely stopped my support of the organization. This lead me into all this other conflict, which has only confirmed that I made a good decision.
yeah, there's so much wrong
It is all of those things ai tools help disabled writers.
That's calssist and racist but removing forums and requiring retreats is not
@@AgingStudent firing their unpaid volunteers because they were unable to use the site (due to lack of accommodations) is also not ableist, somehow, but criticizing genai is... Hmmm.
I've been participating in NaNo since 2007, and when I say it genuinely saved my life, it's not an exaggeration. I was an ML several years between 2009-2014. I haven't kept up with all the chaos beyond AI, but it's genuinely heartbreaking to see how their bad decisions led to their downfall. I'm only 15 minutes in, and I'm scared to watch this since I recommended both the main challenge and YWP to so many people over the last decade. I know it's bad, but when you mentioned the FBI, it must be BAD BAD.
"I won't police how people honor" blah blah bullshit. Taking your dead friend's name as your pen name is fucking weird!
Yeah ew if I die and someone takes my exact name, I'm coming back to haunt them forever.
Especially if someone's using your name to write romance smut! Like, guys... ew. How does that not give people the creeps? This poor person died, now their name is associated with all of this. Yuck. Poor woman.
Wow, and here I was thinking no one was gonna disgrace their beloved monthly challenge more than Jake Parker, the creator of Inktober, but here we are😒😒😒
I was on the YWP forums from 2020-2022 and it was a very interesting experience and I would never want to do that again. I was not a fan of the mods, especially when they did nothing with all the weird dating/‘marriage’ drama between other users
lol I was on there 2012-14ish and it was exactly the same as you described
"She tends to come off as the human version of the British Empire..." I am DEAD, that FULLY knocked me out 😂😂😂
This honestly makes me so sad. I have such fond, nostalgic memories of browsing those forums (though I was definitely using the main site under 18, I had no idea what the YWP was and didn't care- I didn't start doing NaNo until I was about 14 anyway). I went back to look at them recently and they are so ugly and awful now, my local chapter is entirely on discord which I hate, and I'm just sad that it's all gone and all this has happened. It kind of feels like that era of my life really is gone forever and I can't revisit even a tiny part of it in those forums.
C'est la vie I suppose. I'll just have to mourn the loss of what was and look forward to what's next. Thanks for this informative video! Happy I found your channel.
Thank you so much for this video and all the interviews that explain so much of the nano disaster.
I wrote my first satirical humor novel with NaNo that was published. I participated in various local NaNo writing meet ups, I visited the "Mother Ship" in Berkeley a few times to volunteer or do "in the window" writing hours. I even applied for a job at the organization. I went to the parties and used it for many other projects. However all of this was under Chris. It is so sad this is what has happened.
Man, I don’t understand the amount of work and burden they were putting on the backs of unpaid volunteers. Obviously it’s good to have basic standards for volunteers to follow but that’s different than expecting them to essentially be employees. I personally do believe free resources and volunteers are invaluable, but under our current economic system you can’t expect people to commit to this amount of time and labor out of the goodness of their heart, especially when they aren’t even being treated well.
Another informative banger, Savy!!!! I especially appreciate that you interviewed people who experienced these events as well as a writer with a disability.
ETA: OH MY GOSH the poor MLs!!!! My heart is hurting for the way all their passion and effort was thrown back in their faces.
to me the best part of nano was always our discord group, which i am happy to say keeps going as a writers group now! our ml’s stepped down from nano this spring and explained the situation to us and now we’re going through with our own november challenge!
As a TTRPG connoisseur, I would LOVE a doll themed one! It sounds like so much fun!
Props on how much work and research went into this video, as well. You're always so thorough and caring towards the people affected by these organisations or people. I couldn't believe you're not even at 100k subscribers yet (as a long time lurker/ subscriber myself!) so I really hope you make your goal! You deserve it!
Omg I'm so excited for your doll RPG! I'm a big MH fan and love TTRPGs/immersive games. Please keep us updated! 🤗
Also, I'm soooo not surprised it involved someone faking their death. The writing community has a habit with that, it seems 😭
Well I’m heart broken. I went from starting my night super happy to start preptober to seeing this video. I’m not sure what to do moving forward
@@alpha1solace the UA-camr Heart Breathings has started her own version of the challenge that I will be doing and it’s more than just once a year. After diving more deep into it it seems pretty split on people doing thier own thing or still doing nano just not using the site or getting the merch.
Man when I found out about this and the forums being closed I was so sad, the forums were like 99% of the reason i ever interacted with the website, that and I love statistics and yet to figure out how to make a Google sheets that gives me the same charts and stats nano did
Thank you so much for the informative video Savy! Happy I found you!
I'm like 3 minutes in and I thought this was gonna be about the whole AI post. Man I was SO WRONG WTF??
same. I was wondering how the AI thing could make for a 2 hour video then the first 3 minutes made me realize i had no idea how deep this iceberg goes.
This was fascinating! Really appreciated the interviews.
What's wild is I discovered Nano through Writers Digest magazine's best websites series when I was I wanna say maybe like 13-14ish. I think in the beginning I perused the forums but I don't recall ever like doing much there. I often forgot about Nano or like didn't have enough time to prepare and some of the times I did do it it was like updating word counts on the site and that was it. I did look through their winner goodies and that's pretty much the only reason I was on the website ever. I don't even remember the last year I attempted it but seeing all of this was like Whoa! As someone for whom this was such a big part of my teen years this was like shocking.
I did nanowrimo in 2014, 2017, and 2019. I was going to do it again this year because i loved the forums and community. Then, I learned about the AI issue. And that led to learning about all these other issues. I'm going to do my own personal nanowrimo, but I'm going to miss the comradery.
1:39:27 this sounds exactly like what happens with Nedry in the first Jurassic Park movie! 😮 He knows he's likely to get fired so he jumps ship, screws up all the coding, and thus lets all the dinosaurs loose in the process. Woah.
I appreciate this deep dive greatly. I was an ML for several years but not active in the forums or in the unofficial official ML discord, so I had no idea what was really going on. We did our own thing and puttered along until the forums shut down. Everything was incredibly fishy from that point on, and I didn't really have context for most of it. While I'm not glad for the (family-related) reasons I had to step down after NaNo 2023, it's clear that the timing was serendipitous. I will always be grateful for what I gained from NaNo the event, at least, because it helped me start writing and connected me with people I otherwise would never have met.
So, I have not finished the video, but I had to say this. I started watching you WAY back in 2020 it's wild to see how much you have grown! The video quality is out of this world! Fantastic work
THANK YOU! i spent like 30 hours editing this so THAT MEANS A LOT
Haven’t started watching yet, but am very happy that you’re covering this since I know you were a fan of doing NaNoRriMo each year. I used to try and participate, but never stuck with it.
Thank you for making such an in-depth video on this. I've been a participant since 2013, and I've donated multiple times to the organization, but after everything that happened last year with the YWP and the forums (and in 2022, with the scam sponsor), I've decided to no longer participate on the official website.
"They're going to die soon anyway" is the weirdest excuse I've ever heard of for that.
Just started the video but had to pause to say, *Hey! I have that mug, too!*
And a couple of other mugs, a few t-shirts, some stickers…
Yeah, I had a good run with NaNoWriMo. It’s really a shame that things came to this.
Excellent video, Savy. Love the interviews. You did an excellent job as an investigative journalist.