Satire and Humor

MuddyUm’s New Earnings Formula Leads to Reversal of Writing Rules Resulting in Catastrophe

Tens of thousands abandon writing career when it’s learned they now must “Tell instead of Show “as well as use put adverbs and adjectives back into their writing.

It is never easy for writers when the factors they understand to be related to their income and success change. But the newest changes made by MuddyUm to their earnings algorithm this month has had unforeseen consequences.

When MuddyUm announced that it would make changes to how earnings for writers were calculated, members were concerned. Before this, the majority of a writer’s monthly earnings were determined by the number of “claps” their articles received for that month. Readers could clap up to 50 times for each article. When the reader was a paid member, their membership fee would be divided based on the number of claps they gave different stories.

Mid-October, however, members were notified that starting November 1st, earnings would be calculated based primarily on how much time paying members spent reading each story. Speculation was that this move was made, in part, to prevent members from gaming the system through clap for clap agreements, or members of different social media groups escalating claps for other members of the group.

Following the announcement, there was a flurry of chatter that was set off among members as they discussed what this might mean for their income going forward. A major fear was that those who wrote primarily poetry and flash fiction, would find that MuddyUm was no longer a worthwhile platform for them to publish on, given that these genres are, on average, far shorter than other forms of writing.

“It wasn’t entirely clear to us at first, how they would calculate reading time,” one MuddyUm poet said. “We didn’t know if there might be some way to account for story length so that someone who writes poetry that it only takes a couple of minutes to read wouldn’t be penalized by having their earnings cut compared to writers who write essays that take twelve to fifteen mintues to read. Unfortunately, as it turns out, this isn’t the case.”

So far, MuddyUm has based the new earnings system strictly on total number of minutes a member’s stories are read for. This means that members who writer short pieces will make considerably less than those who write long pieces.

Once the surprise wore off, members began to try to adjust by determining ways to maintain their earnings. With story length now king, writers started to test strategies to lengthen their pieces. What that meant was abandoning two hard and fast rules that have permeated the writing world for decades.

The first rule came from the writing style of Earnest Hemingway, who was known for his minimalist approach to writing which involved stripping his prose down to only what was absolutely necessary to communicate what he intended. This meant getting rid of what could be thought of as the “banana peels” of the parts of speech, in particular adjectives and adverbs. Now that MuddyUm writers were paid based on reading times which were primarily determined by story length, these parts of speech would need to be put back into their writing.

“I’ve been focused on writing without adjectives and adverbs since I first read The Old Man and the Sea the year it came out. I already spent an enormous amount of time and effort to learn to write without those extra words. Now, to make a living, I have to learn to use them again?” another MuddyUm writer asked. Hemingway’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952. “You know what they say about old dogs. It may not be an entirely new trick, but after more than 65 years, it might as well be.”

MuddyUm has also turned another rule on it’s head. This is the famous, “Show don’t tell” rule. This rule refers to a long standing writing tradition which lets the reader experience a piece of writing through action, thoughts, senses, emotions and dialogue instead of exposition, summarization, and description.

“Now that we have to write longer pieces, the whole show don’t tell thing is out the window,” one frustrated writer said. “You have no idea how tough it is to learn to write that way. And as difficult as it is to do in fiction, it’s a hundred times harder to write non-fiction like that. Now that we all have it down, you mean to tell me we have to flip it back the other way again? No thanks. I’d rather work at McDonald’s.”

Starting about halfway through the second week of November, MuddyUm began noticing a drop in the number of posts that were being published on the site each day. Looking into it, they began to realize that certain members who had been frequent posters, publishing at least once and two times or more a day, were noticeably absent from the daily lineup. For those who belonged to MuddyUm focused social media groups, it was no mystery what was happening.

“There was a lot of talk about people leaving MuddyUm, and in many cases people were saying they were considering giving up writing altogether. Everyone tried to support each other and for a week or so it seemed like most people would ride it out. But when earnings continued to drop for so many of us into the second week, people seemed to panic and many announced they would stop writing, at least for a living.”

By the beginning of the third week, the loss of MuddyUm writers had turned into a crisis with there seeming to be an opening of the flood gates leading to hundreds and now thousands of MuddyUm writers washing out.

“It’s just not worth it anymore,” a MuddyUm writer and single mother of two said. “I need to be able to earn enough to support my two children and even before this it was hard to do. You don’t have to just write and publish you have to promote your work yourself which was already a 10 to 12 hour a day job. To do all that and still not come close to breaking even . . . I don’t know how many people would be willing to do it. I just know I can’t. I’m going back into accounting. It’s boring as hell but at least I know I’ll be able to put food on the table for my family.”

Since the beginning of November, over 75 percent of current MuddyUm writers have quit writing and this number is expected to rise to at over 90 percent by the end of the month just a few short days from now.

The panic, rage, and despondency seen inside MuddyUm which has lead to such a large number of writers on the platform abandoning their careers, has spread outside MuddyUm as well. Although the issue is specific to MuddyUm, writers elsewhere who don’t understand this fact have concluded that they must now completely change the way they write as well. Because of this, in recent days the writing sector has seen the loss of tens of thousands of writers world wide as they too, have decided to seek other career paths.

There’s no way to predict where this crisis will end if MuddyUm continues to calculate earnings based on reading times and there’s no indication that they plan to do anything different in the short run.

“I can’t imagine they’ll abandon the new system any time soon, given it hasn’t even been a month yet,” a MuddyUm writer said. “But if they wait too long then make a course correction that requires us to go back to the old writing rules, I think that would be it for MuddyUm.”

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