Writing.com

The admins are lying about the server load. They are forcing users to pay for the one service (interactive stories) that is actually popular. They censor criticism of it and act very passive aggressive. Do not use this website for interactive stories.

Scam that forces you to pay for the only feature of the site anyone likes by lying about server load.

Writing.com touts itself as a website written by and designed for writers of all ages, styles, and skill levels. But after over a year of stumbling around the site at fairly regular intervals, I slowly grew to realize that all I was doing was enabling a small cult of arrogant psychopaths who built a pyramid scheme around their own personal interests. It hides itself well, but the longer you spend with it, the more you will realize that it is just a scam, aimed at your wallet and your personal time. And if you aren't in that special little circle, you're wasting both.

When I first joined the site, I was optimistic with my free account. I spent some time learning how to navigate the website, customize my page, and set up my own portfolio. I learned all of the quirky controls, the awkward categorization and folder systems and everything in between. The bulky pages and scattered controls scream of a site that is long overdue for a serious overhaul, and the layout for the main page looks bizarre even with the ads disabled. Compound the difficult navigation with a coding language semi-unique to the website, and you're looking at a pretty steep learning curve. If you were hoping to just whip up a story to share on a sudden creative impulse, you better read some tutorials first. The web design is about as welcoming as a jar of spiders.

So I bit the bullet. I figured it all out, and I whipped up a fun little poem just to see if the community could redeem the terrible site design. I was pleasantly surprised. In a matter of hours, I found four reviews of my poem by four different authors. Their feedback felt very valuable to me, and it indicated a large, active community of readers and writers. I grew more excited as a few more days led to more reviews, and it was even featured in one of their newsletters. For a moment, I thought I had found my happy place. But then again, so did the residents of Jonestown.

Happy with the community of reviewers, I moved on to do some reviewing of my own. This is where my fall from grace began. I learned very quickly that the general rating scale (one to five stars) was alarmingly inflated, and most veterans of the site would become emotionally distraught if they saw a review with a rating lower than they felt they were entitled to. My first review ever landed the writer (also a moderator) in question 2.5/5 stars. To me, that was the middle of the road, not necessarily a bad piece but also not something that will be in my mind for weeks to come. I got a response almost immediately by a strangely dismissive retiree with too much free time who informed me that I didn't understand how to rate yet because I was new, and that it was ok because all of his friends bumped up his overall rating to 4.5 stars. Needless to say, that was the last review he ever got from me. I was there to give honest feedback, not massage a geriatric's ego that was as swollen as his prostate.

I continued to review, however, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was fun handing out feedback, and became a great writing exercise for me as I insisted that every review be personally tailored to its target author, including jokes and jabs that could only be made by somebody who was really paying attention to the story. Many of the writers enjoyed the personal feedback, and I had a pretty good time with it myself.

Then came the biggest surprise. Seemingly at random, an anonymous member bestowed upon me three free months of an upgraded subscription. I was ecstatic. It meant I could expand my portfolio and add even more stories. I had some work to do.

In no small amount of time, I had a good number of reviews as well as stories in my portfolio. It seemed like everything the site had promised had come true. I found myself able to brush off the crappy web design and the emotionally unbalanced veteran authors as I carved out my own corner of the muddled website.

This honeymoon lasted about 60 days. Then I discovered some unpleasant surprises that all seemed to build on each other and helped me draw the conclusions that I draw now.

For the first two months after account creation, you are a newbie. In that period of time, it is very apparent that your writings and reviews are actually on a higher profile than many others. The reason I was seeing so much activity was because the experience was tailored that way. After my time in the newbie spotlight was over, I found myself in the pit with the rest of the rabble in free account hell. While I managed to double the size of my portfolio in this time, I never saw another review, and all of my story views never broke the single digits. That's what it's really like to not have a yellow, purple, red, blue, green, or whatever color tag after your name. You're forgotten.

To put it simply, the sense of community was a sham. There is a button on the main page that brings you to a random piece to review. Nine out of ten times, this was an 'elite' member who had obviously put a lot of money into their accounts (I know those 'preferred' author tags don't come free). Seeing a piece of writing from a non-newbie, standard author via this tool was very few and far between, which is interesting considering that this is the bulk of the members. After seeing the same author (blue name) show up three times in a row with three different stories, I stopped making reviews for preferred authors and above entirely. They got enough exposure as it was, and were much higher on the pyramid.

What made me stop reviewing in its entirety was when I began to see the quality of the reviews of these preferred authors. What I saw time and again were dozens upon dozens of pre-made templates full of flowery pictures and enormous, spiritless introductions filling most of the page. These 'reviews' were being churned out dozens at a time by none other than writing.com's much-esteemed preferred authors and above, with the actual body of the review being nothing more than three sentence fragments or less. I've seen robots with more emotion. I compared their efforts to my own and almost felt ill. While I tried to make an author feel special, they were merely bolstering their review numbers. After I entered one of their monthly contests and received this exact same treatment from a handful of disinterested judges, I lost all interest in the site entirely. I feel that if writing.com is going to require their members be on a paid subscription in order to partake in these scams, they should at least set a standard for their judges. They don't, and they probably never will.

If there is one thing I did to make this terrible place a little bit better was to call out a very bogus practice of their on their Facebook page. Simply put, the monthly contests are rigged. Within the contest description, the names and contact info of the contest's judges would always be listed prominently. That's how you know if one of your friends is judging, and who else you need to butter up like a Paula Deen Christmas turkey. Though they did remove this feature when I called them out on it (They never acknowledged it, but it disappeared mysteriously the next month and never returned.) I still feel that all those emotionally-demanding 'authors' in that inner circle are aware of who is judging what.

If you need a tldr for this blob of rant: Writing.com is a top-heavy pyramid scheme that is collapsing hilariously inward upon itself. It feeds on new members, at first giving them a false sense of belonging in the community, and then later rejecting them until they pay them enough money to be reviewed by robots and interact with conmen. Pay attention to it! It needs your money!

EDIT: I believe the site's owner, who commented below, meant to use the word 'jilted' in his uncaring, condescending dismissal of of my grievances regarding his terrible website... but this is writing.com and I wouldn't expect anything else :)

At first they spread out the welcome mat so fast it makes your head spin. But you quickly learn that it is nothing but a cheap commercial scheme aimed at boosting the egos of some people with no lives and a superiority complex.

In a nut shell, if you don't pay, you forfeit your right to being considered a good writer by the oh-so-supportive community of this website.

They even lure you in and offer you an upgraded membership for a few months when you first join.

My advice, stay away from this website, unless you enjoy interacting with overly entitled, no-talent, snobs.

Also, the reason why there are so many positive reviews on here is that they actually offer rewards to the writing.com community for reviewing products, their own site included.

This site has some creative resources that can really help develop your writing skills. it was the first writing site I had ever used, Then I switched to another, which was full of nasty stalkers, so I returned to writing. Com. Unfortunately, My stalkers followed and when I complained to the site admin, they were unresponsive and it continued, leaving me no option but to leave. I believe the story mistress there may have known my harasser, as she awarded a music badge to him or her, and allowed the breach of their so called policies to continue. I was then hacked by this stalker, but they remain on writing.com. I can no longer recommend this as a safe site.

Writing.com offers a whole lot of tools for a budding writer, but is really more interested in selling you t-shirts and artificially inflating their participation numbers.

A wealth of tools, contests, prompts, and inspiration? Good. Locking 90% behind a very pricey pay wall? Bad. Membership fees range from $20 to somewhere around $450 per year, the numbers listed above with the discounts applied to purchasing a year all at once. I'll let that sink in. Of course, the more you pay, the more you get. That applies to a lot of aspects in the site, from being able to store more than 10 items in your portfolio all the way to your work actually being visible to the rest of the community. That's right. If you actually want those disinterested glances and forced reviews, you have to pay for it.

In addition: their membership seems to function in a caste system. First, you have the free members - the unwashed masses with their unheard voices and unseen creativity. Then come the paying members - good for receiving a robotic review or two, and access to the 'premium' contests they will never be allowed to win. (This is no exaggeration: I just checked their news excerpts for the past year and didn't see a single winner that wasn't of preferred status or better). Lastly, we have the 'preferred' members and moderators at the top of the rung. They are the ones who help run the site, the contests, and choose which of their friends gets the cash prize that month. This final run is hand-chosen by the owners of the site based on the amount of money one puts forward or the quality of their oral relaxation techniques. On the bright side, you are now qualified to win the contests you pay to participate in. The most common prize? A small pile of non-redeemable, fake cash that you can exclusively use on their own store to buy pencils and really lame t-shirts. Does that really sound worth it to you? Did I also mention they really, REALLY want you to buy their t-shirts?

An active, thriving community? Good. A community that has voluntarily split itself into a million tiny factions? Bad. I cast out one decent item that somehow attracted the attention of a few people even though I only put 15 bucks into the pyramid scheme. I checked my account a few days later and found myself accosted with JOB APPLICATIONS for the Joyous Joy of Joys group, and the Fornicating With Your Neighbors Kitten group, and the Using Your Left Eye Socket as a Pencil Sharpener group. Most of those names probably aren't entirely accurate, but there's nothing more alienating than to see gangland America on a website about writing, no matter the intention.

Being able to review the work of your peers? Good. A community that only uses this tool with the promise of a cash reward if they do? Bad. All this has done is creates a massive pile of hasty, insincere garbage that almost feels like it could have been automatically generated. I've seen way too many reviews with attached images from whatever writing.com street gang the reviewer belongs to actually taking up more space than the review itself. It's sad.

So here's my bright, shiny one-star review, spit polished and dragged through the dirt as a warning to anyone who may be tricked into parting with their well-earned cash. In closing, I just thought of one final question you can ask yourself: Why are 17 of the 22 five-star reviews from the same 4 days in January of 2014?

Writing.com, the most paranoid, censored website ever. - Writing.com purports to be a site for would-be writers to develop their skills in a friendly accomodating community. It is so far from that ideal that it's almost criminal. The place is run by paranoid control freaks who will ban, suspend and delete you for the slightest infraction. A slight infraction could be anything from posting that you are unhappy about something to posting that you were treated unfairly in one of the biased contests. And let's get this straight, the contests on the site are all fixed. Don't expect to be judged fairly if you enter one of the contest that Writing.com seems so proud of. The contest are run by semi-literate wannabe authors who don't know the difference between a pronoun and a verb. It's shocking. This site is strictly for wannabe and failed writers. If you're serious about writing, don't bother with this place. And if you do give it a run just for the hell of it, steer clear of a judge named Arakun on the site. She fixes every contest she runs and will ban you for even the slightest criticism about her appalling grammar. Be warned.