Tuesday News: Charging readers to comment, Patreon done with VAT, authors and social media, and Melanie’s Marvelous Measles
Publishing NewsAmazon / commenting / crowdfunding / EU / fan-fiction / fandoms / Literary fiction / Patreon / paywall / reviews / social media / trolling / VAT13 Comments
Join the Conversation on Tablet – Although I think this is a disastrous move, I’m really curious to see how Tablet Magazine’s decision to charge its readers to comment will play out. That’s right – for a mere $2 a day, $18 a month, and $180 a year, you can buy the right to comment on Tablet’s site, all in the name of civil discourse. Because trolls aren’t going to pay to troll? I think they’re underestimating the dedication some trolls have to trolling. And if you can’t afford to comment, you don’t have anything important to say?
But the Internet, for all of its wonders, poses challenges to civilized and constructive discussion, sometimes allowing destructive—and, often, anonymous—individuals to drag it down with invective (and worse). Instead of shutting off comments altogether (as some outlets are starting to do), we are going to try something else: Ask those of you who’d like to comment on the site to pay a nominal fee—less a paywall than a gesture of your own commitment to the cause of great conversation. The donation rates are small because we are not looking to make money, but instead to try to create a standard of engagement likely to turn off many, if not most, of the worst offenders. All proceeds go to helping us bring you the ambitious journalism that brought you here in the first place. –Tablet Magazine
Patreon to Europe on #VATMOSS: “Not our problem, mate.” – So I haven’t been following this issue with Patreon and VAT, but apparently Patreon has indicated that it’s passing the work involved in collecting VAT on to its users, both those who solicit funding from European donors and those who donate. Specifically, “People who use Patreon as creators to share digital output within the EU will be personally responsible for calculating and processing VATMOSS taxes for each and every patron.” This will affect those who use Patreon for the creation of comics, music, ebooks, videos, and other digital content and subscriptions. It used to be that VAT was calculated based on the location of the seller, but as of January 1st, assessment shifted to the location of the customer. VAT is already causing a great deal of confusion among authors who self-publish on Amazon and sell in Europe, and it’s become incredibly unpopular very quickly. Here’s a pretty good explanation of the changes that occurred at the beginning of the year that have led to the current mess.
Patreon is, to the best of of my knowledge, the first major platform provider outside the EU to use VATMOSS as leverage to call time on Europe. They have not barred European creators and patrons from using the service, of course; they don’t have to. By stating that they have no responsibility for complying with or enforcing European law, they pass the full burden on to those directly affected by it. It’s a bold and necessary move, and one which may raise eyebrows at the EU. Those eyebrows frankly need to be raised. But as with everything in VATMOSS, this geopolitical chess game takes out the pawns first. –Idea15
What Is an @uthor? – Although the prose style of this piece is a little too densely academic, and some members of the Modern Language Association (MLA) are a few years out of date, some of the issues raised here are pretty interesting. Specially, the author, University of Maryland’s Matthew Kirschenbaum, looks at how literary criticism (and fan culture, for that matter) may be changing now that authors are using social media and actively engaging in interpretive exchanges about their own work. Kirschenbaum uses William Gibson as an example, looking at the way “authority” is exercised by the author when he or she is a living presence in the discussions around his or her work. This piece really made me wish Derrida were still alive, because I think he would have been fascinated by and deeply engaged in discussions about Twitter and social media as it’s developed over the past decade.
But there is also a new kind of archive taking shape. Today you cannot write seriously about contemporary literature without taking into account myriad channels and venues for online exchange. That in and of itself may seem uncontroversial, but I submit we have not yet fully grasped all of the ramifications. We might start by examining the extent to which social media and writers’ online presences or platforms are reinscribing the authority of authorship. The mere profusion of images of the celebrity author visually cohabitating the same embodied space as us, the abundance of first-person audio/visual documentation, the pressure on authors to self-mediate and self-promote their work through their individual online identities, and the impact of the kind of online interactions described above (those Woody Allenesque “wobbles”) have all changed the nature of authorial presence. Authorship, in short, has become a kind of media, algorithmically tractable and traceable and disseminated and distributed across the same networks and infrastructure carrying other kinds of previously differentiated cultural production. –The Los Angeles Review of Books
Melanie’s Marvelous Measles – I saw this book mentioned on NPR, I think, given the current discussions about measles and vaccines, but I didn’t realize it was so, uh, heavily reviewed on Amazon. Just don’t read any of these reviews with a beverage anywhere near your computer. –Amazon
$2/day is not a nominal fee. That’s a huge amount for what they’re offering. And I suspect that it’s only trolls who will be willing to pay it, so the whole thing will backfire spectacularly. I can’t imagine being willing to pay to comment anywhere, even on DA.
#VATMESS is a total disaster from beginning to end. It’s supposed to get huge companies like Amazon to pay tax properly, but the people it’s hitting hardest are, obviously, small businesses. Anyone who sells digital goods directly to anyone in the EU is supposed to track 28 different VAT rates (because each country has their own) and gather two separate proofs of location and submite the tax. It’s utterly ridiculous and clearly no one in the EU had any clue what they were doing.
The reviews for this terrible measles book are something else. Thank you :).
@Sirius: Thank you for the warning about not drinking anything while reading the reviews.
I suspect even the most dedicated trolls will get tired of paying pretty quickly and probably join everyone else in going elsewhere.
When you look at the reviews on the measles book, be sure to check out the “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed” list. It includes these books: Astrology for You, My Parents Open Carry, Raising Boys Feminists Will Hate, and the lovely Cancer is Good for You! (Seriously, those are real books.) The list also includes: My Shiney Hiney Personal Cleaning Brush Set, 10 Live Thai Micro Spider Crabs, and a Natural Pine Casket.
Aren’t US people supposed to do vatmoss as well, if they get overseas buyers? Wouldn’t this mean some people will drop out — or just eliminate patron bennies — if they have overseas donators?
I suspect that the whole “pay to comment” idea isn’t really aimed at discouraging trolls as much as preventing spam comments. I don’t know about DA (and I hope commenting software has improved over the last few years) but when I administered a site, it probably took close to half an hour every day to go through and scrub the spam trap.
@hapax: I’m going to guess that it really is more to do with trolling than spam. Tablet is a Jewish publication that posts a lot of stories and commentary on Middle East issues, including the I/P conflict, Israeli politics and other matters than can be highly contentious. That sort of thing can attract not just garden variety trolls but truly ugly commentary, and moderating such discussions is probably a huge headache. I can totally understand why they’d try to put some mechanism in place to cut down on that, though whether this is the most effective way of doing so is another matter entirely.
Re: Tablet Magazine– Would paying to comment make someone more easily traced? That could slow down a lot of trolling.
I suppose the crackpots probably self-published or sold xeroxed screeds before the e-book and print-on-demand made it easy, but it does seem worrisome that someone can write utter nonsense and sell it to kids who will grow up (if they don’t die of complications from measles) thinking they know stuff when a lot of it is bunkum.
@Anne: I quit looking when I saw the blow up sheep sex doll.
I think that Tablet, like so many others, buys into the meme that all trolls are anonymous. As anyone who’s been around the internet for 10 or 20 years knows, it’s not necessary to be anonymous to be an asshole.
Patreon’s decision is interesting. I’ve been watching this play out on Ravelry, where they came up with a different solution that isn’t 100% but is getting there. It was an incredibly onerous burden on the head developer there, who basically had a month to reinvent their way of doing business.
I don’t sell digital goods to the EU, but I’m keeping an eye on it because apparently in 2016, physical goods will also be included? (Not sure on this. The documentation is so incredibly dense and convoluted.)
On behalf of all Australians I feel I have to apologise to the world for producing the author of Melanie’s Marvellous Measles. We’re sorry. Really, really sorry.