lol, nice. I think AMZN can revoke your ownership of my work at any point, but your sale is still chalked up towards the total, which seems more like a very expensive library to me except with no incentives (other than user retention) for AMZN to behave like a library.

I never played dark souls… bad attention span. What’s the link? I would just have global highlights as toggleable, personally, with some kind of relative upvote threshold, and ‘crit only’ mode, or something. A link feels hard to discover.

> is it because it's unedited basically? like when does fiction cross from user-generated to commercial? is it curation?

Yeah - though not for subjective quality reasons. I think the lit fic short story ecosystem is most akin to the art world - the gallery and gallerist matter for understanding what you’re getting into with a short story. You’ll know their taste, tone, vibe, editing style, etc. It’s a small world with a low enough barrier to entry - ‘someone who knows how to make a website wants to put it on their website’ - that I think it’d be quite difficult to write an innovative short story and not find an editor in some form.

Subjectively, the lit fic I’m into when I read new work for pure pleasure is such a tiny slice of a tiny genre (‘Gordon Lish-influenced outsider artist maximalism’?) that I think the writer would end up emailing me or someone I knew, and I’d discover their work that way if they were unable to find an editor to work with. Maybe not everyone has that privilege, but I guess the websites people make to solve that problem are already called lit mags.