Mass Reporting: Effective Vendetta or Fruitless Activism

QuoteV's co-author policy has changed recently so writers with seniority on a story can remove newer co-authors now at any time. I don't fully agree with this policy, for the fact that writers can boot each other off to get sole credit for another's work, but I understand why. People don't know how to solve their own problems or act like honest adults. However, I think this would cause problems in the future, perhaps to the point of getting rid of the co-author feature entirely.

Let me finally tell you a story of a mass reporting fiasco. Trigger warning: trying to tell you what happened with two groups of people while trying to use singular and plural "they" ended up being a confusing mess, so I'm using "he" as a gender-neutral term, so if any SJWs read this, know I had the best of intentions and truly wanted to make the singular "they" pronoun work. Usernames will also be changed to protect the people involved.

Purdie felt like he needed others' help to fix his problem, so he posted a topic in one of the QuoteV groups griping about his co-authors ruining his story with "crack fics." Crack fics are short stories about random and wild events that often don't make sense or is wildly out of character if it's fan fiction. To my recollection, Purdie didn't name names, and only linked to the story in question. Joss replied saying he would help and went to his own Activity to post to his followers to report all of the co-authors, but villainized one in particular, linking to the story with the reasoning being that these three co-authors—we'll call them Logan, Shiori, and Happy—hijacked the story. Joss is now the instigator of the mass report.

Of course, at the first drop of blood in the water, the masses took off. The thing is QuoteV doesn't have any documented rules against hijacking. Yes, it's mean-spirited behavior, and I understand how frustrating it would to be unable to just delete their contributions and kick them out of the story, but, as I said before, the reason authors couldn't just boot their co-authors is so everyone could keep their rights to their contributions to what they wrote. As the conversation went on, some wanted more details as to what happened. Some just wanted to ingest more exciting drama, and others wanted a viable reason before reporting.

Joss let in more details. Someone else gave Purdie the story, so Purdie became the sole author, and found that he needed help and was "desperate" for a co-author. Logan became the first co-author after volunteering, and then let in their other buddies. After that, someone posted numerous chapters of crack fic, and when Purdie had told Logan to stop and to keep the story from straying, Logan called Purdie a "slave" and a "villain." I can confirm that comment myself, as I saw them in the story's comments section, but, to me, it looked like this person could have been joking around and Purdie took it seriously. However, my feelings aren't Purdie's, so Purdie could have reported this as bullying behavior if he wanted to.

I watched the drama unfold for a while without saying anything and just observed. To be honest, mass reporting always bothered me, and I'd been wanting to write about it for a long while, so I considered this as research, and had no plans to get personally involved. I noticed right away that people were eager to report all three co-authors despite that there weren't any rules against hijacking, and that aside from the "villain" comment from Logan, no one had any evidence against the other two co-authors. Even if hijacking was against the rules, no one had proof that Shiori or Happy posted any crack fics. Or Logan. Purdie could have posted it for all we knew.

Almost like magic, just as I had come to this realization, Shiori appeared to try and defend himself, saying that he never actually wrote any of the chapters. Of course the masses dismissed him and tried to demand proof or poked holes in Shiori's logic, despite his logic making perfect sense. Shiori stated that Logan, his internet friend, invited him to be a co-author, and accepted the invitation. He thought it was a role-play story and that he could post crack fics, and thought nothing of it. Some time after that, still having not written or posted anything, but may have made a small change accidentally (something as small as deleting an already published chapter's period and saving it), Logan sent a message telling him to post something to the story. Shiori was working on an English assignment, so couldn't. Then the mass reporting started before Shiori had a chance to publish anything.