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Spam submissions will stop if there is a real cost imposed on the people wasting the magazine's time with passive income/side hustle schemes based on AI, conten
by ilamont 4y ago
Spam submissions will stop if there is a real cost imposed on the people wasting the magazine's time with passive income/side hustle schemes based on AI, content farms, or whatever.
Assign a token fee, refundable in full as long as the submission meets the stated requirements and doesn't trigger the baloney detector. Even if the story is not accepted for publication, a real writer will get the fee back.
The editor says he has some kind of system to detect bogus submissions, but it apparently doesn't scale or is based on manual review. He has to review the real submissions anyway, so the only ones who end up paying are the content farm/AI spammers.
- BeetleB 4y agoNot too long ago, these magazines didn't accept electronic submissions. You were required to print it (conforming to a certain format), and mail it. The rationale at the time was that the editors weren't going to read it on a screen, and so you should print it instead of making them do it. Seems like a simple solution. If a manuscript is accepted, only then request the electronic version.
- Fomite 4y agoThat heavily restricts the audience you can accept submissions from.
- hahajk 4y agoI'll bite. Who doesn't have access to a printer? I'm pretty sure libraries have them.
- ben0x539 4y agoLibrarians might give you a funny look if you show up at a library and start printing out books?
- BeetleB 4y agoMy library charges per page. I don't think they'd mind.
- Fomite 4y agoThe problem is not the printing - it's the mailing. Clarkesworld intentionally went to electronic submissions to make it easier for international writers. International mail can be prohibitively expensive, and in a lot of places there's better internet access than there is reliable postage.
- the_omegist 4y agoCan we stop with the myth that somewhere in the australian bush there is some Hemingway or Chateaubriand waiting to be published, but his old solar panels can just give him enough energy to send his manuscript by email? Am being sarcastic but I think my point is clear that way : someone not being able / willing to send something by mail is just not the audience for the magazine. *I cannot attend the Boston marathon coz of the distance, then perhaps they should find some equidistant place for it? This absurd quest for "lowering the accessibility bar" to everything is making everyone jumping through hoops and no one is considering the cost of people who don't bother jumping through them...
- Fomite 4y agoI work enough in the developed world to know that there are a lot of people there with things to contribute to the world, and where electronics are more reliable than mail.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- the_omegist 4y agoI didn't say there is no one worthy in those countries. I am saying it is not the job of a company in country X to make all it can to make it possible for people in country/continent Y to be able to easily do something, even if it makes it unusable for everyone (else).
- Fomite 4y ago
- Mistletoe 4y agoI don't follow. What serious writer can't go buy a printer for $49.99 or pay less than $10 to have it printed? I'm assuming they would be writing their story on a phone that costs close to $1k or a laptop at the same price range.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Fomite 4y agoInternationally, there are a lot of people working on laptops and phones cheaper than that. The problem is not the printing - it's the mailing.
- ruszki 4y agoI remember the 90s when my family was poor in a middle income country. Mailing internationally was a huge barrier, we didn’t even think about it as an option. It’s 2 dollars now, but still, there are a few 10 or 100 millions people to whom that’s too much. And of course, there is no post service everywhere in the world.
- kragen 4y agoi'm typing this on a 14-year-old laptop my dad gave me because he wasn't using it, because the laptop i bought last year for US$250 broke
- Mistletoe 4y agoI mean I get that. My laptop was a Chromebook I got for $35 on eBay and then a MacBook Air I got for $75. But printing is not out of reach for almost anyone writing. Printing at the library is like 10 cents a page.
- kragen 4y agothat's subsidized but even the unsubsidized cost is maybe 50¢ a page
- Karellen 4y agoThat's the idea.
- Fomite 4y agoIt does it in a way Clarkesworld has actively said they're trying to avoid. I'd prefer not to throw the Making Science Fiction More Accessible baby out with the ChatGPT Side Hustle bathwater.
- alickz 4y ago>We don't have a solution for the problem. We have some ideas for minimizing it, but the problem isn't going away. Detectors are unreliable. Pay-to-submit sacrifices too many legit authors. *Print submissions are not viable for us.* Various third-party tools for identity confirmation are more expensive than magazines can afford and tend to have regional holes. Adopting them would be the same as banning entire countries. They say that's not viable
- teraflop 4y agoThat is one possible way to approach this situation, but it has some problems: * It's a well-established social norm (at least in the SF world) that money should always flow from publishers to writers, never the other way around. That's one of the signals that distinguishes reputable journals and publishers from vanity presses. (Google "Yog's Law".) * As Neil Clarke points out on Twitter, Clarkesworld aims to accept submissions from all over the world. Not everyone can easily make international payments to the US, and not everybody can easily afford what would be a "token fee" in developed countries. * I'm guessing payment processors wouldn't look too kindly on a business where virtually all of the payments are either refunded to real users, or falsely reported as fraudulent by spammers.
- ipaddr 4y agoThere are problems but they don't charge the card until they need to (refunding is not necessary) and they do a precheck on the card to avoid fraud.
- ilamont 4y agoIt's a well-established social norm (at least in the SF world) that money should always flow from publishers to writers, never the other way around. And that norm worked 25 years ago, barely, when publishers of science fiction magazines had working business models thanks to paid subscribers, newsstand sales, library customers, and advertisers. Now it's down to paid subscribers, of which there are few, and partnerships with online platforms, which are dwindling (he says Amazon recently discontinued a program that generated revenue for Clarkesworld). Something's got to give. He's dealing with it by shutting off the submissions pipeline, but this publication is truly at risk of going under, which would be a great loss to the SFF community. Making AI side hustle scams pay for wasting his time is not an ethical lapse if legit authors pay nothing. If he's worried about international submissions or poor writers unable to afford a token fee, set up a scholarship funded by the scammers. An alternative if the pain continues is the publication going under or selling out in a far worse way.
- Sebguer 4y agoYou're missing the fact that defying this norm makes it easier for bad papers to exploit writers, even if it improves things for the good ones.
- WorkLobster 4y agoWhile skin-in-the-game is a good tool for problems of this general class, the editor has said that refundable fees would not be workable in this particular case due to issues with payment providers[1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/117fq9m/clarkesworld_is_currently_closed_for_subs_because/j9bz9m7/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/117fq9m/clarkeswor...
- physPop 4y agoThat just seems like a problem ripe for a disruptive solution.
- yieldcrv 4y agothe fee and payment system used is the same as banning entire countries that's what the editor said, and that's true. and decade-old payment solutions work, but would alienate their audience and brand still be too costly for lots of people
- tbran 4y agoI like the idea of trying to solve this problem! Here's an idea: - Require a photo of the author with a photo of gov-issued id. - Maybe require a dated piece of paper or a Clarkesworld word-of-the-day in the photo. - If submitter is from a country with hard-to-get gov-id, or just doesn't have/want it, their submission goes in the extra scrutiny pile. I'm not too keen on requiring gov id, so maybe someone has a better idea? I'm pretty sure you just need to increase friction for spammers in meatspace to solve this. I'm not saying this is scalable, but we're just trying to fix it for Clarksworld.