Good gravy, the difference between good- and bad-faith discourse.
#SFF has a really tough nut to crack re: AI-generated stories flooding the best paying year-round slush pile in the business.
I proposed creating a delay window for subs through forum IDs that could then be blocked if the user sub'd an AI story.
But I've met with *so* many vague claims of this blocking out "the poor"--as if our industry actually gives a rat's behind about the poor! It's *just* to score virtue-signalling points.
@MLClark yeah, I saw that discussion. It's better than charging a submission fee. Meanwhile, I'm about to just say to heck with trying to break into those first-tier markets. I clearly am not writing what they want, so...maybe I just need to make a cover, format 'em, and put them up.
Sigh. Not feeling very cheerful about my future in writing.
This is just it. There are two ways to talk about "gatekeeping", & they keep getting blurred in this debate. *All* magazines are gatekeepers. If they weren't, they'd accept everything.
Same with the presses.
Folks who make claims like "what about the poor/working-class/neurodivergent?" are usually using these as token protests to avoid something that would inconvenience *themselves*. There's a LAUNDRY list of what's already keeping everyone else from being able to submit.
The hard truth is that we don't have anywhere near enough well-paying venues to keep up with all the storytellers.
Worse still? Those few venues with higher earning potential stand out as beacons of quick prosperity not just to us, but also - maybe even more so! - to people from poorer economies, who make up the vast majority of the scam AI submitters that caused Clarkesworld to close.
It's the fault of huge socioeconomic disparities, not a mark against your art. ❤️