I’m just dropping a few words to formally acknowledge a few changes in my social media presence. I’m leaving a few sites (willingly for some, unwillingly for others) and starting up in some new places.

New-ish: Tumblr

All things come full circle, and I’m experimenting with returning to Tumblr.

You can find me at atrfiction.tumblr.com and I’d really appreciate followers and reblogs. (You’ll need an account to view my stuff, and you’ll need to set it to show mature content rather than hiding it.)

Yes, I used to be “alltheseroadworks” on that site. I closed that account during the Tumblr porn purge, and apparently after I did so someone hijacked it and domain-squatted, using some of my old branding but hard-redirecting it to pages full of porn ads and malware.

I contacted Tumblr about it, and their response was to nuke that username so no one can use it – so now I’m “atrfiction”.

At the moment, Tumblr is getting two posts a day, in a format of “text, with a SFW title banner image”, drawn from a mix of (a) old serial stories and (b) one-shots from the last few months of the free queue. At some point I’ll sync it up with the free queue and make it daily, and from that point it will show the same content as this site and all the other daily free queues.

What has prompted this is partly the difficulty with other sites, and partly Tumblr’s alleged return to mature content. You can believe their propaganda that mature content never left, and the changes only applied to images, but as I’m experimenting, it becomes clearer and clearer that that was not the case, and never has been. A range of mature hashtags and terms are completely blocked in search results, making it hard to find relevant content. Communities are making up new terms to get around search bans (“bimbofication” appears to be banned, so people are now using “bimboization”). Mature text isn’t welcome. Rather, it needs to hide in the shadows and hack its way around the platform.

Leaving: Reddit

My Reddit account has been shadowbanned. This appears to be the result of automated spam detection processes. I have no idea what triggered it – a community mod that could see one of my offending posts referenced a “disguised link”, which as far as I can tell is supposed to be when you do something like use Bit.ly to link to a banned or dangerous site. I don’t use those services, and I only link to my own site, so unless Reddit has blacklisted this site for some reason I don’t know what happened.

From everything I can find, this kind of ban is never supposed to apply to a human-operated account engaging in authentic interaction on Reddit. If a human-operated account is posting dangerous links, they’re supposed to be receive a formal ban or suspension, which would come with a notice of that ban and a reason the ban was applied.

I can still log in to my Reddit account, but to other users my account appears as banned, and all posts have been deleted. I can’t comment or send messages. I have tried contacting Reddit on multiple occasions through both the appeals form and the helpdesk, but I have received no reply of any kind, no formal notice of a ban, no reason for this account action, and not even an acknowledgement that my messages have been received.

I can only assume that this is adult content discrimination of some kind, and whether or not the original action was automated, moderators have since looked at my account and gone “it doesn’t break any rules, but I just don’t like it”, and refused to follow their normal policies and procedures around account actions.

It sucks, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Experience of other users in this position suggests that if I make new accounts, they’re likely to immediately get IP-banned, and I don’t want to prejudice the account of my partner, who also uses Reddit through this internet connection.

So therefore I’m probably done on Reddit for now, which sucks as it was clearly a platform where my contributions were valued, and where they connected with thousands of readers.

(For reference, my account there was u/AllTheseRoadworks, but as mentioned, it will appears as banned to other users.)

Leaving: Literotica

Literotica is the worst, you guys.

The site famously has a no-monetisation policy. No links to outside sides, no encouragement to readers to buy your books, no even mentioning that you theoretically have books that people can buy.

Meanwhile, Literotica runs paid ads next to your content. I have no idea what Literotica’s balance is between paying for their server costs and actually making profit, but it doesn’t matter, it’s inherently predatory to raise money off the work of writers without allowing the writers themselves to monetise.

It’s also an issue because Literotica is regularly scraped by bots that republish stories elsewhere. I know from experience with other sites that when you include a text link to your site in a story, it tends to get scraped by bots as well, with the result that bots end up giving you further free advertising. If there’s no such link – as is the case on Literotica – your work is going to end up being re-sold on Amazon with no author attribution.

I recently returned to give Literotica another try because they’d implemented a feature that allowed you to link to your Smashwords or Amazon shopfront at the bottom of each story, and I felt like I should give it a chance. However, the links are tiny – they’re hard to see even if you know to look for them – and there’s zero evidence of an increase in Smashwords sales since I returned to Literotica, despite my stories consistently rating highly.

On top of all that, Literotica has one of the most toxic reader communities of any erotica site. Yes, there are some absolutely lovely members of the community – but there’s also far too many readers who feel they have to attack any story that doesn’t fit their personal taste and kinks, and it’s the only site anywhere on the web where I consistently receive some level of trolling. It doesn’t really bother me – the knowledge that people pay real money to read my stories fairly decisively drowns out the petty criticisms of random incels – but it also doesn’t make me feel much loyalty to the site or the reader-base there.

So following the publication of the last chapter of Secret Message on Literotica, I’m once again going dark there. (The last chapter is currently held up because the mods are objecting to an afterword in which I explain why I’m leaving the site, which is just another example of why I’m leaving.)

(You can find my Literotica profile by clicking here. I still control the account, but won’t be posting any more in the foreseeable future.)

Unchanged: Everything Else

My presence on the following platforms is unchanged. (Some will require you to log in to an account to view my content.)

Thank you for your continuing support. In a world where adult creators face constant platform discrimination and censorship, it can be really exhausting to keep working to build readership on platform after platform, only to lose a ton of work due to a ban or shadowban or platform restructure, but seeing readers turn up every day to buy my books lets me know that it’s worth the time.

With thanks,

All These Roadworks
14 May 2023

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