Let’s break down NaNoWriMo HQ’s email

On 3 October 2024, NaNoWriMo HQ sent an email to the community. Normally an email around this date would promote a winner shirt preorder or a NaNo Prep campaign or get people excited about the upcoming writing frenzy in some way.

This email does none of that.

Let’s take a closer look.

To Our NaNoWriMo Community:

To be clear, you mean the community you’ve ignored and actively looked down on over the past year, right? That you could have been listening to the whole time? Got it. Moving on.

There is no way to begin this letter other than to apologize for the harm and confusion we caused last month with our comments about Artificial Intelligence (AI).

This should have happened several weeks ago and not after you pissed off your community, and by extension, the entire internet. Also, last month? Last month? This makes it sound like much longer ago than it really was.

We failed to contextualize our reasons for making this statement,

Correct, like… why did you feel the need to make this statement in the first place?

we chose poor wording to explain some of our thinking,

SOME of it?

and we failed to acknowledge the harm done to some writers by bad actors in the generative AI space.

Only some writers? Let’s be real here, if you’ve put anything on the internet, it’s been used to train generative AI models. If you’ve published books, if it hasn’t been used to train GenAI models. If it hasn’t yet, it will soon. I would bet good money that your own published books have been used to train models, Kilby. How does that make you feel?

Our goal at the time was not to broadcast a comprehensive statement that reflected our full sentiments about AI, and we didn’t anticipate that our post would be treated as such.

Of course you didn’t anticipate this. No one could have. But surely you know that the organization has been losing community trust for the past couple of years, long before you stepped in. Surely you knew that anything you put out as a statement will be scrutinized, especially as people start to remember that NaNoWriMo exists again.

This statement could have been an opportunity to educate writers on the many types of AI since the words “AI” and “ChatGPT” are almost synonymous now. As a tech worker whose circles are split between AI enthusiasts and anti-AI creatives who throw “I hate AI” around while also complaining about their ducking autocorrect, I personally would have enjoyed a nuanced discourse on this. But alas, NaNo HQ spends their free time shitting on nuance.

Earlier posts about AI in our FAQs from more than a year ago spoke similarly to our neutrality and garnered little attention.

Here’s the previous statement referenced earlier. Again, why did you feel the need to make another statement? The original statement captures enough of what I assume was the actual question. I’ve been around long enough to remember when “Can I write the same word 50,000 times in a row?” was an FAQ. And the answer was “No. Well… no.” See? That was easy. The ChatGPT question was straightforward enough. Why muddy it?

Side note: that FAQ was written over a year ago, when the NaNo trashfire was contained to the forums and maybe one or two Discord servers. Also, Zendesk wasn’t the primary source for communication back then.

We don’t want to use this space to repeat the content of the full apology we posted in the wake of our original statements.

You mean the apology that we misread your statement and that you still mean everything you said. None of us misread it.

But we do want to raise why this position is critical to the spirit—and to the future—of NaNoWriMo.

What does this position have to do with the spirit and future of NaNo??????

I give zero shits if someone uses Grammarly. It’s your writing, whatever. If someone needs assistive AI like voice to text or a screen reader, go for it. Lumping all of these assistive writing tools with generative AI is an insult to everyone’s intelligence. Some of the things we know and love (or hate) are powered by AI. Autocorrect on phones. Speech recognition. Image processing. Beating chess grandmasters. Any recommendation algorithm. Not all of these are the same.

There are bigger fish to fry, like how there’s no easy way to untrain an LLM, or how humans are training OpenAI for pennies on the dollar, or how the majority of LLMs in business have no business model if they had to obtain proper access to use all the works they’re training on. It’s one reason you see more and more large media sources getting into partnerships with OpenAI, which is not open in the slightest–OpenAI gets their data in exchange for the media sources getting to use the LLMs for the enterprise.

Supporting and uplifting writers is at the heart of what we do. Our stated mission is “to provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page”.

That’s your mission, and it became my personal mission for over twenty years. If only you cared about it.

Our comments last month were prompted by intense harassment and bullying we were seeing on our social media channels, which specifically involved AI.

You mean the many valid critiques of your statement? Sure, I saw some comments that were toeing the line.

Also, NaNoWriMo is an organization. Organizations aren’t people. Organizations can’t think or have emotions about things. If you’re leading an organization, especially in a time of crisis, you need to be capable of understanding when people are criticizing the organization and not you personally.

If you keep equating critiques of the organization you run to critiques of you… then maybe you shouldn’t be running the org. How’s that executive director search going?

When our spaces become overwhelmed with issues that don’t relate to our core offering, and that are venomous in tone, our ability to cheer on writers is seriously derailed.

Where exactly has NaNo HQ been cheering on writers this year? This is a genuine question. There are no forums. Most of the regions that I know of (and I know a lot, ask me how many I’ve visited) have split off to do their own thing. Your only interactions on the Facebook group when someone asks a question is to redirect them to Zendesk. The NaNoWriMo Twitter is a ghost town. Instagram barely gets any interactions.

It’s October 3. (How dare you besmirch Mean Girls Day like this.) Normally the hype for NaNoWriMo would be palpable. Instead, here we are.

One priority this year has been a return to our mission, and deep thinking about what is in-scope for an organization of our size.

This doesn’t sound bad on the surface, but let’s see.

A year ago, we were attempting to do too much, and we were doing some of it poorly.

Now you’re doing almost nothing and you’re still doing all of it poorly!

Though we admire the many writers’ advocacy groups that function as guilds and that take on industry issues, that isn’t part of our mission. Reshaping our core programs in ways that are safe for all community members, that are operationally sound, that are legally compliant, and that are mission-aligned, is our focus.

So you’re admitting to being out of compliance? Very interesting. Have this truth potion and tell me more.

So, what have we done this year to draw boundaries around our scope, promote community safety, and return to our core purpose?

A whole lot of nothing, but let’s take a look for the folks who are ending their NaNoWriMo-free hibernation with a rude awakening.

We ended our practice of hosting unrestricted, all-ages spaces on NaNoWriMo.org and made major website changes. Such safety measures to protect young Wrimos were long overdue.

AHAHAHAHAHAHA. So remember the moderator who was allegedly grooming minors and luring them to a fetish site? Clearly the solution was to get rid of those pesky minors.

Also, the only adult website changes were closing the forums and verifying a date of birth. I’m two thousand years old now according to the website!

Oh, and taking down the staff and board pages. Very important website changes, you see.

We stopped the practice of allowing anyone to self-identify as an educator on our YWP website and contracted an outside vendor to certify educators. We placed controls on social features for young writers and we’re on the brink of relaunch.

Why on earth weren’t educators being verified in the first place?

You mean to tell me that anyone could sign up as an educator, create a private classroom, and use it for any purpose, including nefarious ones?

Some YWP teens used these private classrooms as group DMs or chat rooms, which is an innocuous use. but let’s talk about how none of these classrooms were moderated by NaNo staff. That’s right. None.

Oh, and did you know that any virtual classrooms that were previously created are still active? I don’t want to think about this.

I’m not holding my breath on that relaunch.

We redesigned our volunteer program and brought it into legal compliance. Previously, none of our ~800 global volunteers had undergone identity verification, background checks, or training that meets nonprofit standards and that complies with California law. We are gradually reinstating volunteers.

Here we go with the compliance bit.

I will be extremely shocked if a single ML is reinstated this year. Even the MLs who said they were interested in returning have yet to hear a peep from NaNoWriMo HQ. I’m in over a hundred regional servers and I’ve gotten @everyone after @everyone saying the region is doing their own thing this November because they haven’t heard a thing from NaNo HQ about becoming an ML again. And this doesn’t include the regions who have actively separated from NaNoWriMo.

nanoscandal.com has the tea on the ML contract disaster, which effectively places all the liability on the MLs personally and not on HQ.

We admitted there are spaces that we can’t moderate.

Including your own official spaces, apparently.

We ended our policy of endorsing Discord servers and local Facebook groups that our staff had no purview over.

This isn’t new so stop acting like it is. Offsite regional spaces have never been official or endorsed by HQ.

Surely you’re including the ML server in this now that its admins are mad at your and its founder is an alleged predator.

We paused the NaNoWriMo forums pending serious overhaul. We redesigned our training to better-prepare returning moderators to support our community standards.

You paused the NaNoWriMo forums for over ten months as of this writing. Surely that was sufficient time to do some sort of overhaul, so what’s going on there?

Here’s what the training should be: “Look at how NaNo HQ communicates on Facebook and Zendesk and do the opposite.”

We revised our Codes of Conduct to clarify our guidelines and to improve our culture. This was in direct response to a November 2023 board investigation of moderation complaints.

The Codes of Conduct did need some clarification, finally something I agree on! But the new updates hardly clarify anything.

We proactively made staffing changes.

You mean how everyone quit or was fired? And I suspect most of them quit because they couldn’t stand working with Kilby?

We took seriously last year’s allegations of child endangerment and other complaints and inspected the conditions that allowed such breaches to occur.

Let’s take a look at the timeline. Dates are taken from nanoscandal.com.

Early May 2023: A group of concerned participants sends a document to NaNo HQ requesting to investigate or Mod X. The intent of the document was to investigate Mod X, not to present hard evidence, as actual evidence was of a nature that would be illegal to send.

NaNo HQ, however, equated reading this document and having a meeting to conducting a proper investigation. It turned out that HQ wanted to de-mod Mod X anyway because they were becoming unmanageable, and this was a good excuse, but Mod X had gained so much power on the Discourse forums since the new site launch that it took significant effort to remove those powers. That’s right, Mod X remained a moderator during all this.

Oh and this moderator were dying. There’s a whole rabbit hole I won’t get into here, but they do appear to be dead for real this time.

Mid-June 2023: Six weeks later, Mod X was finally de-modded, along with their other moderator account. Yes, they had two moderator accounts, something no volunteer mod has ever had to my knowledge. Meanwhile they’re still hanging out on the forums, acting like the resident expert on all things Discourse and the forums.

October 30, 2023: Mod X is banned for threats against the organization. The rumor is their “conservatee” (who is yet another alt) went to Discourse to try and get NaNo’s hosting contract pulled. Yes, this is what finally got this person banned. Not the child endangerment but actually threatening the organization.

November 2023: The same group of concerned participants realizes that NaNo HQ never actually did anything and escalated the issue to the NaNoWriMo board on November 7, who heard about the issue for the first time. Kilby Blades was the board president then, and the community had a brief period of hope.

No employee who played a role in the staff misconduct the Board investigated remains with the organization.

Good, but I repeat my previous question: is this because they were fired or because they quit? I know HQ can’t publicly comment on staffing decisions in this way, but think about it.

Beyond this, we’re planning more broadly for NaNoWriMo’s future. Since 2022, the Board has been in conversation about our 25th Anniversary (which we kick off this year) and what that should mean.

Wait, you’re kicking off NaNoWriMo’s 25th anniversary? You could have fooled me with all these communica… wait.

The joy, magic, and community that NaNoWriMo has created over the years is nothing short of miraculous.

I agree! You know who created that joy, magic, and community? The people cheering each other on, offering prompts and caffeine word sprints and lamentations and dares and write-ins and more caffeine and candy buffets and NaNoisms and mascots and traveling shovels and last-minute dashes and fifty-headed hydras and hugs in a fancy ballroom and lifelong friendships all because we decided to try something hard just to see what would happen.

That, friends, is NaNoWriMo. Not a faceless organization.

And yet, we are not delivering the website experience and tools that most writers need and expect;

Your only offering right now is a word count tracker, and there are far better ones out there.

we’ve had much work to do around safety and compliance;

Yeah you do.

and the organization has operated at a budget deficit for four of the past six years.

Hi, previous Community Advisory Team (CAT) member here. This was presented as a concern during my time on the team, but the staff presented it as a middling concern to the CAT. I asked about this regularly since it appeared that they were running very lean, and I remember the days when NaNo was run by a few friends in coffee shops. Running on a deficit isn’t uncommon for nonprofits, especially one that relies on grants and gets most of its income during a few months of the year.

As a fellow CAT member said on Twitter, there’s blood in the water. Don’t drink it.

What we want you to know is that we’re fighting hard for the organization,

Allow me to quote from my departure letter last month:

“It’s been 22 years, and given the choice between the NaNoWriMo organization and the NaNoWriMo community, I’ll choose the community every time. HQ’s actions have made it clear that the two are mutually exclusive.”

And from my original letter to the board, dated December 2023:

“If you rebuild the organization but lose the amazing community that built NaNoWriMo, then have you saved anything at all?”

Clearly no one at NaNo HQ has taken these words to heart, probably because you’ve been treating the community with active disdain over the past year. HQ is fighting for the organization, not for the community that made an organization possible.

and that providing a safer environment, with a better user interface, that delivers on our mission and lives up to our values is our goal.

So… a better word count tracker? What exactly is the goal here? It certainly isn’t putting life back into the community.

We also want you to know that we are a small, imperfect team that is doing our best to communicate well and proactively.

This has always been the excuse. The community let it go for years because NaNoWriMo was a quirky nonprofit–we had Blobby and an office duck! We embraced the slight dysfunction that later turned out to be a sign of a bigger problem.

You know what happened? People offered to help, often for free, but over time NaNo HQ became allergic to outside help. So we did it on our own. We built IRC servers and wikis and word count leaderboards and project exporters all on our own. People offered advice on improving the ML program and reducing shipping costs for international Wrimos, but that advice went in the cylindrical bin. People offered to moderate the forums but were accused of wanting to spy or gain access to the backend. (I’m still confused about this one.)

Except when they let Mod X take over the Discourse forums, and we know how that turned out.

Looking back, it’s a small miracle I got to help pack the Night of Dangerously tote bags in the office the times I did.

Since last November, we’ve issued twelve official communications and created 40+ FAQs.

This fucking sentence.

First, a genuine question: I don’t know a single participant who thinks to look at the Zendesk as the first source of information about NaNoWriMo, but it’s the only place you seem interested in updating these days. What user journeys led you to think a participant who barely keeps track of NaNoWriMo outside of November will think to look at Zendesk instead of the main website or now-closed forums or social media as a primary source of information? Especially when no communication went out that the Zendesk would be the primary source of answers going forward? Because I know the website like the back of my hand and would never look at Zendesk first for… well, anything. (Exhibit A: past staff have asked me things like “What page has the GIF of Tim petting a llama”. It was on the old website in a FAQ; I think it was the one about trademarks.)

If no one knows to look at that page, then you’re not really communicating. You’re yelling into a void. You’re lucky that a few people are watching the Zendesk like hawks now.

A visit to that page will underscore that we don’t harvest your data, that no member of our Board of Directors said we did, and that there are plenty of ways to participate, even if your region is still without an ML.

The first two are rumors that went around. The board member was actually a member of the Writers Board, which was mostly an honorary position, but all this shows how the internet plays telephone.

The last one is a big fuck you to everyone who wanted to be an ML this year. Guess how many regions have an ML right now? Zero! While many large regions (including my own) have let non-ML participants host their own write-ins in the past because an ML can be in only one place at a time, this system (which isn’t new, by the way) completely defeats the purpose of background checking MLs. Why should you be an ML and go through the whole process of being background checked and verified when you can be a regular participant and submit your own events that will likely be approved? Especially when there are no stickers.

With all that said, we’re one month away! Thousands of Wrimos have already officially registered and you can, too! Our team is heads-down, updating resources for this year’s challenge and getting a lot of exciting programming staged and ready. If you’re writing this season, we’re here for you and are dedicated, as ever, to helping you meet your creative goals!

Wait, you expect people to still want to participate after hearing all the ways NaNo HQ fucked up? Plenty of people are writing, but it won’t be tracked on the website. I’ve been watching social media and the response is overwhelmingly negative even outside of my social media circles. At least you’re not asking us to donate here…

In community,
The NaNoWriMo Team

Who is the NaNoWriMo team? You keep talking about how tiny the team is and how overworked you are. You aren’t engaging with the community. To me, you’re a faceless entity that only knows how to look down on the people who made NaNoWriMo what it is.

tl;dr “Here’s a non-apology because you misread what we said and we still mean it, we’re a tiny team uwu, let us lord over you peons”