NaNoWriMo, a 25-year-old on-line writing community-turned-nonprofit, introduced on Monday night that it’s shutting down.
NaNoWriMo — an abbreviation of Nationwide Novel Writing Month — is an annual problem for writers to finish a tough draft of a novel throughout the month of November. After beginning as a Yahoo! mailing checklist in 1999, the undertaking grew right into a self-described “internet-famous” writing problem with a whole lot of 1000’s of individuals over greater than 20 years.
The group says it has had longstanding monetary points which have made it tough to function, however its different issues grew to become extra public final yr.
NaNoWriMo misplaced important neighborhood assist when it took a stand in favor of using synthetic intelligence in artistic writing.
New York Instances bestselling authors Maureen Johnson and Daniel José Older resigned from the nonprofit’s board in response, reflecting a rising concern amongst writers about how their work is being stolen to coach the very AI fashions that threaten their livelihoods.
Across the similar time, the nonprofit was additionally lambasted for inconsistent moderation on its all-ages boards, which created an unsafe setting for teenage writers, neighborhood members claimed.
In keeping with NaNoWriMo, these controversies over content material moderation and AI didn’t straight result in the group’s demise. However they actually didn’t assist.
“Guilty NaNoWriMo’s demise on the occasions of the final yr does a disservice to all struggling nonprofits,” a NaNoWriMo spokesperson, Kilby, said in a YouTube video. “Too many members of a really giant, very engaged neighborhood let themselves imagine the service to be supplied was free.”
