Series of Events Leading up to Ban on RoyalRoad from My POV

If you're reading this, please read the previous post in Notices first.

I joined RoyalRoad on 11th of July 2022.

I uploaded my first fiction on 30th of December 2022 - Ceres Chaos.

I performed upwards of 42 review swaps for Ceres Chaos: something I thought necessary to get my fiction name out there and make author friends.

I did not get onto Rising Stars for the first month (January 2023), engagement was low and glacial. 80% because the fiction was badly written, 20% because there was no visibility.

At the time, I watched as Top Reviews were dominated time and time again by big well-known authors. Melas, Zogarth, Actus, Zechamp, Silfer - just to name a few. Their names and fiction would always have a top review within 20 hours of their fiction going live.

Yet these Top Reviews did not matter - what mattered was the amount of shoutouts they were trading. As I read their fictions for research on my next fiction, I realized that shoutouts were extremely important, ontop of ensuring that there was a good review for the book out right from the get-go. I believe if any of you have spent time on RoyalRoad, you've probably seen this a few times on some of the bigger fictions. Reviews from similarly big authors with huge upvote numbers when the fiction is only two days old.

Naturally, I took notice. I realized that review swaps were essentially useless - shoutouts were the real money maker.

Two major author groups at the time were running this show of continuous shoutouts and rising star dominance - Sliver Pen and Council of the Eternal Hiatus.

Sliver Pen is an invite-only server, filled with big authors, publishers and so on. Conditions to get in were unknowable to the outside - I did not even know of such a discord until March.

Council of the Eternal Hiatus were also doing review brigading and shoutout swaps - most notorious of all was Crownfall's fiction, Dressed to Kill, in which there were 12 declared editors, all of which gave a review in the first two days of the fiction and garnered close to fifty upvotes on each.

The fiction destroyed Rising Stars fairly quickly. It slammed many smaller authors I knew from doing review swaps that were shoved aside by this 'nepotism' of upvotes and shoutouts.

Even if I wanted to join in this supposed 'circle' of authors, it was a closed-doors thing: very tightly controlled - only if you had a big following could you then perhaps 'try' to join. How was a small author like me with barely five hundred followers supposed to keep up? Write better?

I decided to write better. Black Market was conceived during this period. However, other smaller authors that I have talked to have begun to form servers in Feburary 2023, deciding to help each other out in a similar way to Sliver Pen and Council of the Eternal Hiatus did, checking each other's fiction out.

We were small. Maybe ten authors at best. We swapped shoutouts, sharing audience. All of us instantly did better than we had been than the last months (for some, two years or more.) all thanks to just a bit of increased visibility. There was even one author who had been writing for three years, instantly jumping from his languishing of 200 followers to a current 3.4k followers.

We immediately knew just how much marketing strength this offered. And if we could not get into Sliver Pen or Council of the Eternal Hiatus to participate in this review brigading, then we could rely on ourselves.

I organized shoutouts (only shoutouts) for BlackMarket upon launch. Any author in the group who reviewed me were appropriately tagged with a review swap icon - the group was already made up of authors I had review swapped with. I did not perform any 'review-chain' that circumvented the review swap icon. Many of blackmarket reviews are authentic reader reviews that were unsolicited. Just the front page alone is enough proof.

Eventually the server grew too large. A splinter happened on a day I was not invited. It was on this day, April 2023 that Secret Mafia was born, without me. I was not involved in the splinter, nor did I really have a say in the matter. I joined both.

The Secret Mafia's main objective was to help the smaller guy first and foremost. Unlike Sliver Pen and Council of the Eternal Hiatus, where their review brigading is contained within bigger authors, the Secret Mafia aimed to provide the visibility necessary to smaller authors.

No matter how many authors approached me for a shoutout - I shouted them out. That's right, I have shouted out authors from Sliver Pen and Council of the Eternal Hiatus, members who are not mafia. I have never discriminated in shoutouts, nor did I reject shoutouts outright on the basis of them being from a rival discord.

The Secret Mafia grew in size. Channels like #reviews, #getting-a-w or #taking-an-l were frequented with authors either celebrating a new review or comment or lamenting being hit by violent commenters or unjustified 0.5-star reviews.  This is where the main accusations of review brigading stems from.

It was around this point in May 2023 that I first became aware of a long standing dispute between one of our moderators, Jack, and the leader of the Council of the Eternal Hiatus, Crownfall.

Crownfall had previously accused Jack of writing rape assault in his fictions, something which is categorically untrue and also disproven by moderators. Despite the numerous reports made by Council of the Eternal Hiatus, Jack's fiction was not taken down.

This led to a wave of 0.5 stars brigading, with Jack attempting to appeal. I played no part in this drama, but it created a sense of enmity between the Secret Mafia and Council of the Eternal Hiatus.

Many members who were also part of the Council of the Eternal Hiatus were welcomed to join us. Many of them also still remain in the Council of the Eternal Hiatus after the crackdown.

The enmity died down in June and July, in which I did not give any review save for three fictions - two of which are non-mafia members. It was also during this period that review-chains were organically sprouting in the server. I did not and have not participated in any review chains, period. I had more than enough on my hand that time dealing with the satellite.

On July 2023, a forum thread sparking a heated debate between Crownfall and Jack began, which was instantly deleted within three hours. It was from this point on that the real events began.

On 5th August 2023, a hit list was publicly announced by a moderator on Council of the Eternal Hiatus, inciting a witchhunt against any and all mafia members indicted in the hit list. I currently hold a screenshot of the same moderator on the Council of the Eternal Hiatus performing a review brigade himself, though I will withhold until no recourse can be found with the RoyalRoad Admin.

A wave of downvotes and 0.5 stars hit us immediately (that's right, we got brigaded by Council of the Eternal Hiatus - as far as I know, no one who participated or advocated for this got banned.) I did not report any of the 0.5 star ratings. Not even one.

We did not retaliate. We did not post any screenshots of the Council of the Eternal Hiatus's wrongdoing. We did not downvote nor hate raid any of their fictions.

On 7th August 2023, a permanent ban was announced for four members, with the rest being temporarily banned for two weeks and the rest being flagged. I have already stated my replies to the accusations, so no need to go through that any longer.

I would like to emphasis that the main appeal of the Secret Mafia was not review manipulation nor was it rating manipulation. It was shoutout swaps. For many smaller authors, having a five thousand follower fiction shout you out is like a dream come true. I know exactly how that felt. I never denied a single shoutout swap, and if they asked me for more than one I would always comply.

Shoutout swaps are not against nor covered in RoyalRoad Terms and Services.

The ban against me may have some validity, but I believe both the duration and the scale of the ban is hardly warranted. Right now, the top review on Top Reviews is MelasD's review of his fellow author's fiction - a advanced 5 star review on chapter 1 with 35 upvotes within two hours. That's something not even our mafia can do.

I'm glad they are removing top reviews, and I know none of the bigger authors will ever take any hit, because if the mods banned them, they lose a lot. Most likely the mods themselves were brigaded to ask for blood.

The last person to do rating manipulation on such a scale was only banned for a month, for reference. I was given no warning and no chance to defend myself against a one-sided vigilante hit list with screenshots taken out of context.

The hit list is still public and circulating - Council of the Eternal Hiatus claims no wrongdoing for 'whistleblowing', except they do exactly the same thing. If we are to be permanently banned and flagged, the whole of COTEH should be too.

I will note that this makes Secret Mafia sound like some big author cabal, but its not. At the peak, there were maybe only 5 or 6 authors with 5k followers or more. Maybe even less. The large majority were smaller authors that we were helping out, providing feedback, critique and shoutouts for no payment in return. Completely free.

Is the ban justified? To a certain extent, yes. Three months, six months, a year. To the extent of a permanent ban lasting fifty years? No.

As for Sliver Pen and Council of the Eternal Hiatus? The business continues as usual.

The next post will explain what happens moving forward.