so cesperanza's post about Multi-Level Marketing and monetizing fandom is still going around, and I keep wanting to put mostly-side-issue long comments on other people's posts, so here they are here instead.

I commented on the original post about how I felt like the correct comparison was not MLMs to fandom patreons (etc), but pyramid schemes to predatory publishers. The people who tell you how your novel will be a best-seller now that they've discovered your genius, and all you have to do is give them thousands of dollars for them to ship you thousands of copies of a badly-edited, badly-bound book for you to sell to your friends and family, they're the ones coercing writers to destroy their own social networks for other people's profit.

And in a lot of ways, the fandom monetizing methods actually inoculate against this - a member of a fan community who know about things like patreon and crowdfunding and kindle originals and legit self-publishing, who is friendly with other pro authors, who knows the histories of other people who've made the transitions and can chat with other people in the process and has things like beta-readers and knows that there's more to getting readers than just writing a thing - that person is way less likely to fall victim to a predatory publisher.

There's a lot of people misunderstanding MLMs in this discussion, too. ( on mlms and pyramid schemes )

MLMs are legal; pyramid schemes aren't. So the pyramid schemes have to have just enough of a 'product' to pretend they're a real MLM long enough to take the money and run, which makes them harder to talk people out of. And the problem isn't so much the MLM structure as that the whole thing's a swindle.

And we certainly have swindles in monetized fandom! Any method of making money can be turned into a swindle, by someone who wants to swindle people. We can probably all name several exciting chapters in the history of online fandom when fan swindlers have succeeded, for a little while at least.

And any method of making money can feel like a swindle if the people involved in it are just really bad at it (which also applies to a lot of v. small publishers who look predatory through sheer incompetence, but aren't actually making any money for themselves either.) We can all name situations like that too, probably.

And any profit-prioritizing corporation under late-stage capitalism is, at some level, built on a swindle, because our entire global economic system is currently built on a series of stacked swindles. So there's some stuff that does make me side-eye things like Patreon and Kofi, and what they try to promise people, even as fandom uses them more and more, but that's really pretty ancillary to the question of MLMs. And even at their worst, they don't require the initial outlay of capital to chain you to the swindle, or pressure you to pressure your friends to put themselves into the same level of debt as you.

So I'm still way more worried about predatory publishers going 'ooh, girls are selling fanfic now! Our fandom market's not limited to boys with no social support and WoW-with-the-numbers-filed-off epics!' or about homegrown swindles and for-pay fanfic sites than I am about people using crowdfunding or commissions to fill out that last couple of hundred dollars of rent. The real, ongoing problem with monetizing that destroys relationships is large corporations recruiting people to swindle other people for them, not individual fans looking for compensation for labor.

(The question of compensation for creative labor in general is an entirely different one.) (as is the question that's silently threaded through this whole discussions about helping needy people via pure charity vs. under a smokescreen of nominal 'earned payment', and whether that choice should be up to the helper or the helped.)(as is the question of to what extent patreon and company are themselves exploiting the fans who use them.)

(one of my cousins over christmas seemed to think I was anticapitalist or something, dunno what gave him that impression.)