Closing Time

My time on writing.com has come to a close.

I hold no anger towards WDC, or the creator of the website. This is my opinion, and nothing more. Writing.com is a great place to meet new people and make friends. In that regard, the website succeeds. The site can also serve to inflate, or deflate, your ego rather quickly. In my case, my ego swelled up to roughly the size of the moon. This isn’t such a bad thing, as it boosted my confidence, but that was not what I signed up for. I joined WDC to learn. And therein lies writing.com’s biggest problems.

This has been coming for some time. The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, happened today around 3pm. I received a review of one of my old pieces that I wrote almost a year ago. Mind you, the story had several problems (hell, I even forgot I had the thing public, and was embarrassed to see someone had found it) but the reviewer found none of them. What they did mention, made me chuckle, but also served as a prime example of the types of “edits” you get while working on WDC.

Here are a few suggestions I received from this person who shall remain nameless:

When you have a dialogue tag at the end of a question, there is absolutely no need for a question mark. “Are you kidding me,” he asked. The dialogue tag “he asked” serves as the question mark.

I just had to sigh. But that’s not all.

“Their” is a conjunction of “they are”. “They’re” would be used if you meant “they were.”

I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.

This person went on to tell me they had a “master’s in english” – yes, “master’s” with the apostrophe – and planned on going for a “doctorage in human letters.”

Now, all of this could be a pile of bullshit, but I’ve received reviews like this before. The thing that bothers me, is the hierarchy of writing.com. I won’t go into a great amount of detail, but they have a system that purposes certain authors are more valuable to the site than others. This is shone by the color, or lack thereof, of your portfolio case. This nameless soul of which I speak, had a shiny blue case which identified her as a “moderator” for the site. They had a community recognition score of over 200, whereas mine is a lowly 49.

I do not believe this person meant to play a game on me. I believe that they were, seriously, only trying to help.

My reviewer did have the courtesy to rate it five out of five stars, but that is also part of the problem with the website. There are a handful of honest, intelligent reviewers out there roaming the halls of WDC, but they are few and far between. More often than not, you will find people reviewing you just so that you will review them back. Then you have the people that seem hellbent on crushing your hopes and dreams by belittling your hard work any way they can.

To me, writing.com has become nothing more than a social networking site for writing enthusiasts. If that’s what you’re looking for, then it’s the perfect place for you. But like wikipedia, be forewarned. Every review you get, is not gospel. Not every review is worthless either. But if you didn’t know what was wrong with your piece to begin with, and signed up just for the help of others, you’re not going to know when someone gives you bad information.

To those of you I met during my time on WDC, we’ll keep in touch some other way. It’s been real, and it’s been fun. But I’m done.

E.