Dude, what the hell? Of course your product is being sold.
You are asking for my TIME. There is no more valuable thing in the universe and you want me to spend my time on you.
Yet, for some reason I should not be able to warn people about or encourage people to consume your product? You want me to spend my LIMITED TIME on you and take away my ability to talk about your product because you feel MY TIME is so worthless that you are ENTITLED TO IT?
Go to hell.
I specifically am NOT asking you for your time, and I receive no benefit for you providing it or detriment for you not providing it. I receive no money, even if a million people read my work, because it is not for sale. In fact, the only entity that tangibly makes any sort of money off of my work is the site I post it to, through advertising dollars.
The very fact that your mind immediately jumped to the review system as being a way of 'warning' people about 'consuming' a product that I am not selling and do not profit from already proves my point correct. You have already self admitted it isn't a review of the work, but of it's value as a commodity. When it isn't a commodity, I don't want it to be reviewed for it's value as one.
Your tone is concerning and your insults doubly so, but I do hope you think critically about the fact you entirely avoided the crux of my argument; the written portion of a review is incredibly, ludicrously valuable to an author's ability to improve, whereas a star rating is only valuable to a website trying to make money off of advertising dollars.
It is a product, though. Even without selling for money, entertainment is a transaction. The audience pays with time. When you put something out to the public, you enter this transactional marketplace, whether you want to or not.
Whether something is meant for a specific ground or not is a whole other thing. But that obscures a simple concept and evolves it into a different topic. You opt-in the second you post.
I do wonder what people think they're saying when they say 'you pay with your time'. Like, do you actually think that you're giving up your time to
me, the author? Are you giving your time to the
website? What are you giving your time to?
Time isn't a thing you can take or give away. The thing you are accepting as transaction is the website taking your personal data and browsing habits to form an advertisement portfolio data brokers can sell.
Barring that, on more scrupulous operations you're being advertised to directly. The transaction is between you and the website, and it is one of trading speculative advertising returns and data collected for entertainment
distribution.
Hundreds of authors here don't have Patreons or YouTube channels, they do not see a dime from the
actual transaction occurring between a reader and the site; and odds are, the reader didn't tangibly
lose one either.
Time is not a quantity that can be sold or traded and it is disingenuous to try and claim that it is.
With that out of the way, I still take great issue with the assumption that 'everything must be a commodity' because if you actually believed that we'd need to have a serious debate over whether or not this very post is a commodity I am selling.
Or if your response to my first post is. Or if your old math tests from middle school are.
Beyond that the vast majority of works on SH just definitionally aren't commodities or products, claiming that
every publicly available creative thing
is is both blatantly false and morally unacceptable as a position to be taking under a discussion of
criticism.
I'll say it for a third time now. On SH, wherein the majority of fics are not commodities or products, but merely publicly available art, as system that rates things for their value as a product is flawed and against the benefit of the authors. The written reviews? Unbelievably and irrefutably helpful for authors and readers alike. Star ratings? Categorically unhelpful for the authors not selling their story, and considerably less helpful to a potential reader than a simple like/dislike ratio would be. Y'know what a star rating is helpful for? Data brokers. "Story_Marc consistently gives high star ratings to X type of fiction" is useless to YOU, and to the individual author you rated, nor did it cost you anything or benefit that author, but it sure as shit makes some data seller a few pennies richer.
Don't get me wrong, I know full well why SH has it; it's so they can continue to operate long term. I make my points as an assurance to authors beating themselves up over their star ratings. Please do not miscategorize my arguments or motivations any further.
I'm sure if I spent another half-hour fixing and refining this I could post it as it's own thing, and I might do that, but for now, I'll consider this a rough draft, and you're all just gonna have to fuckin accept that since I make no money from it, you lose nothing from it, and Sh probably also makes or loses nothing from it.
