NaNoWriMo shut down after AI, content moderation scandals

Technology
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NaNoWriMo, a 25-year-old online writing community-turned-nonprofit, announced on Monday evening that it is shutting down.

NaNoWriMo — an abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month — is an annual challenge for writers to complete a rough draft of a novel during the month of November. After starting as a Yahoo! mailing list in 1999, the project grew into a self-described “internet-famous” writing challenge with hundreds of thousands of participants over more than two decades.

The organization says it has had longstanding financial issues that have made it difficult to operate, but its other problems became more public last year.

NaNoWriMo lost significant community support when it took a stand in favor of the use of artificial intelligence in creative writing.

New York Times bestselling authors Maureen Johnson and Daniel José Olderresigned from the nonprofit’s board in response, reflecting a growing concern among writers about how their work is being stolen to train the very AI models that threaten their livelihoods.

Around the same time, the nonprofit was also lambasted for inconsistent moderation on its all-ages forums, which created an unsafe environment for teenage writers, community members claimed.

According to NaNoWriMo, these controversies over content moderation and AI did not directly lead to the organization’s demise. But they certainly didn’t help.

“To blame NaNoWriMo’s demise on the events of the last year does a disservice to all struggling nonprofits,” a NaNoWriMo spokesperson, Kilby, stated in a YouTube video. “Too many members of a very large, very engaged community let themselves believe the service to be provided was free.”

Source: NaNoWriMo shut down after AI, content moderation scandals | TechCrunch

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Damn, Ive been a Nanowrimo participant since 2019 but quit last year on the account of their terrible letter regarding AI. They were hiding behind accessibility in order to continue having these AI sponsors back them. Added with the allegations from the forums and the whole mess with MLs (local organizers) being mistreated etc.

I do think its a real shame for the volunteers who were with Nano so long and believed in it but otherwise I think this was inevitable. Nano of the last two or so years was not the same Nano anyway so maybe it’s for the best that the challenge doesn’t belong to one entity and is just a challenge. Even the whole thing with Inktober being trademarked left a bad taste in my mouth when it happened.

Last year I just did Wrimo (Writing Month, not a very creative name) for myself and actually almost got to 50k. So hopefully people will still partake in it without the need of the org from here on in like many already do.

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oh my goodness. what an internet icon. the controversies they were getting into lately definitely turned me off to the organization, though, and they should’ve read the room.

RIP nanowrimo, you were on my calendar every year and i never participated. :broken_heart: maybe i’ll just pick a different month.

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“Too many members of a very large, very engaged community let themselves believe the service to be provided was free.”

Wow that’s some industrial-grade blame shifting, Kilby.

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not surprising at all!

i do want to be a bit annoying here, as this article is surprisingly ill-informed and misrepresents… kind of the whole situation on multiple fronts. for context, i participated in nanowrimo 12 times & was active on the forums.

the scandal was not “content moderation” and to describe it as “inconsistent moderation” deeply underplays the actual issue. nanowrimo didn’t have “content moderation” because it doesn’t have “content”, it had forum moderators for the forum.

for many years the nanowrimo forums were a hotbed of transphobia, homophobia, and racism. official forum rules included a ban on arguing and confrontation; if somebody posted something deeply offensive, it was against the rules to argue with them, because that was being too combative and insufficiently welcoming and friendly.
nanowrimo has always been an overwhelmingly white community with the same pervasive racism problem that emerges in every overwhelmingly white community online; this is not the sort of issue which fixes itself over time.

2019 was the last year i participated in nanowrimo after over a decade of fond feelings, because the forums were intensely and consistently transphobic. the moderation team refused to do anything about it and refused to answer questions about why they weren’t doing anything about it. (from me. i asked. repeatedly.)
participating in the forums was exhausting and miserable, and the mods were doing nothing about it. i was not the only person who quit around this time. the forums had a locked subforum for POC and a locked subforum for the LGBTQ+ community. these would be, ideally, “safer spaces” for members of marginalized communities to chat in.
the announcements of these subforums were met with widespread backlash from forum users, none of which was moderated - it’s a healthy debate, you see. amonst the rampant racist and transphobic backlash were occasional people (like me) pointing out that a “safer space” was nice and all in theory, but it would really be nicer if the forums at large were moderated so that a safer space wasn’t so necessary.
making racism against the rules didn’t happen until 2020; their announced commitment to diversity & anti-racism was met with, surprise surprise, more backlash and bickering on the forums, along with further grumblings about how unpleasant the forum culture was.

in 2022 a member of the forum moderation team (who was not a good mod) left or was removed; i’m not sure why, but the split was acrimonious. not long after their departure, this mod publicized a conversation they’d had with the head forum mod in which the two of them had a racist chat about how the only black moderator had only been hired as a “diversity hire”. she (the head mod) publicly resigned in shame.

right after this / around the same time, teen users of the “kid-friendly” portions of the website (there’s a separate forum & site for children) made a LOT of reports of years worth of a variety of unpleasant behaviors from users & moderators in the kid-forums, including allegations of grooming & abuse.

in 2023 the nanowrimo board decided to lock the forums & remove all local event organizers/regional subforum mods & all mods/organizers/etc involved with the kids-only forum/program, essentially shutting down the event entirely. this was supposed to be temporary; it was not temporary. forums and events remained nonexistent in 2024.

nanowrimo boohoohooing about donations declining over this time period is embarrassing. they know full well why donations were declining and even admit to having EVEN MORE PROBLEMS that nobody knew about in their announcement video.

it was a poorly-run organization with little regard for community safety or wellbeing, and i think it’s frankly embarrassing that any authors associated with the org quit over the nothingburger AI “”““policy””“” instead of anything else.

the article links to maureen johnson’s statement, which says, completely baselessly, that nanowrimo participants work on “their platform” will be used to train AI; nanowrimo does not store participants’ writing. it is not a platform that hosts content. it counts words and updates your wordcount. that is it. it does not host novels, it does not store novels, it does not have your writing and couldn’t scrape or sell it even if they wanted to.
this was a common piece of completely offbase misinformation i saw going around when the FAQ item went live, and it is extremely annoying to see it continuing to float around unchecked!

nanowrimo did not “take a stand in favor of the use of AI in creative writing.” they added a single Q&A to their FAQ section; the question being “am i allowed to use AI?” and the answer being, more or less, “we do not care”. being neutral on the use of AI in a completely self-imposed for-fun honor-system writing exercise is not “taking a stand” nor is it even “a policy.”
nanowrimo has always worked on the honor system. you, the user, are the one who updates your own wordcount progress. how you write is completely up to you. you can copy and paste your work into their onsite wordcounter; you could also copy and paste something else. all it does is count words.

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for real, they were the same with the AI garbage. basically they said if you are against AI you are ableist despite many people with disabilities responding that its actually assuming that they cant write without the help of AI is what’s ableist (like duh)

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woah thats crazy insight into what was up! I was never on the forums so I had no idea about the extent of horrible treatment of users by the org/mods/other users. that for sure outweighs the AI stuff but it may have been reported on less (no surprise, sensationalist stuff usually overshadows the core problems like that). The Nano is stealing your writing for AI thing was super dumb, I think many people were more annoyed by the predatory sponsors that they just wouldn’t let go of.

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Will probably come back and comment again once I have my thoughts more together. For now, I will just say it is fucking insane that they literally did the “for april fools we’re deleting this entire site, sayonara you weeaboo shits” thing but for real

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Alright, as expected, I’m back with more to say.

Wanted to thank @xixxii for the breakdown on what is inaccurate in the original article. If you want some more info about the downfall of Nano, I’d recommend this video, which is very thorough in its documentation.

I very much suspected that this would happen, what with Nano continuously whining about lacking donations recently, and the AI controversy being so very widespread. If anyone is interested in potential alternatives, I made this post on Dreamwidth listing and breaking down several different ones. I personally participated in Rough Draft Month last year, and I had a lot of fun.

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thanks for the vid Azure! Will be checking out soon

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The writing group I’d mentioned joining recently splintered off from NaNoWriMo awhile ago- and they’ve been fantastic so far. There’s a great staff- several former MLs, plenty of people with experience in running large scale events, (the group was established in 2008!), a dedicated help section for troubleshooting TrackBear and a way to politely tap its creator on the shoulder if things go on the fritz, and most importantly for me: a good ‘fit’ in terms of the culture. They’re an outspokenly LGBT inclusive group, left leaning, and members care fiercely about inclusion and good representation for disabled people. They do screen members, but I found their moderation team to be attentive and quick on processing, if anyone was looking for a good Nano alternative.

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great summary! “inconsistent moderation” is covering a multitude of sins. I only attempted nanowrimo once but I stayed in a discord server with other people who were doing it & heard about the scandals as they broke. they’re getting off lightly with all this reporting that they were victims of AI backlash…

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I’ve been away from nanowrimo for years, but tbh it was going downhill for a long time, and I don’t know when that started.

I did the challenge for the first time in 2003. I loved it, it was great. You could make friends on the forums, and people read each other’s stories. We thought it was huge because there were tens of thousands of people participating! My local region started up a few years later, and I met people locally who were also writing.

Over a few years, I checked the forums outside of my regional forum less and less, because they’d stopped being fun. My interaction with the organization narrowed to just my regional group, who I could meet in person.

For a while, the donations would (once the server costs were covered) go towards building libraries in poor towns that didn’t have them, literacy programs, and the like. Once the link to that charity was removed from their donations page and no other charity replaced it, I stopped donating.

I was an ML for two years: my last two years participating (2015/2016). At that time, the ML/mod forums were a disgusting stew of massive disrespect for the writers, and it was clearly an established culture, not something new.

A timeline of nano BS came to my attention not long ago, and I added a “do not engage” caveat to my writing page where I talked about doing nanowrimo so long ago.

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Sometimes I feel like the greatest tragedy of the AI hype wave is not the technology itself (and associated spam/plagiarism/misinformation issues) but all the pointless moralizing around it. Who cares if using AI is lazy, who cares if criticizing using AI as lazy is ableist, it’s all just someone’s opinion at the end of the day… just do whatever you want to do.

Another example of gratuitous moralizing is the notion that the mere idea of “write a certain number of words each day for a month” is some kind of monetizable service. Do we even know that these Nanowrimo people are the same people as whoever came up with the idea in the first place?

It’s giving that time in like 2015 or whatever when that Youtube channel that posted a bunch of “kids react to x” “grandmas react to y” videos decided that they owned the idea of a reaction video and wanted to start charging people to make them. A little bit of knowledge about intellectual property rights is such a dangerous thing for a creator’s ego, I think.

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It wasn’t a monetizable service, it was a nonprofit funded by donations.

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I see your point, a lot of the moralizing is really over the top but the fact that AI steals art/writing for it’s process is not moralizing, it’s just happening. I feel like if you shrug too much at stuff eventually all sorts of terrible things will be normalized. In the case of Nano, the abuses on the forums and throughout the org are more severe compared to the AI stuff though.

The react thing was crazy stupid! But they got a lot of push back which I think is important and without it they probably would have just kept trying to copyright ‘react’ thing.

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IDK, for me people are concerned about AI because there are situations like someone citing legal cases made up by AI, or someone unable to resolve security issues created by AI-generated code. Though in those cases, it’s less the technology and more the human over-relying on the technology.

However, I agree that gratuitous moralizing for any reason isn’t good.

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Describing my reaction to this as “distraught” is an understatement. WTH…

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I agree so much! I still seriously can’t believe the fact that someone thought there needed to be a whole nonprofit for “writing a novel in one month”. Heavily agree as well that all of the moralizing about AI, as if it’s some inherently evil thing, is pointless.

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