#but i am generally leaning towards 'no please don't make this what horrific ideas am i releasing upon the world'

[yellowmagicalgirl]

I had an odd dream the other night, in which there was a fanfic website that was dedicated to taking the concept of the gift economy way too far.

So, at first glance, the site looked fairly normal. It took the open-source code from AO3 and based itself off of that, though the default site skin was dark pink comic sans on a light yellow background. The difference was that there was an in-site way of commissioning authors. Not for money - the site was as against monetizing fanfic as the average (reasonable) fanfiction website is.

Instead it had something called either CommentBux or FicBux (I'll use the latter from now on bc that's shorter). You'd earn one FicBux if you left a kudo on the author's work, and another FicBux for every 10 words you left in a comment. There was a plagiarism checker so you couldn't just quote the fic when commenting, emojis didn't count, and I'm not sure if words rolled over from one comment to the next. FicBux were separated by each author, because they were used for commissions.

10 FicBux = 100 words that you could commission from the authors. Authors couldn't turn commission requests off, but they could

Change "prices" from the default.

Report harassing commissioners.

Reject commissions.

Accept requests and refund them later (but not after publishing!), but there was a 3-day wait time between doing so.

Set it so that readers couldn't request fandoms, characters, ratings (not rated wasn't an option on the website), relationships, archive warnings, or additional tags beyond what you had already written.

Readers, on the other hand, could report authors for not writing what was requested (within reason, which is to say the staff/volunteer got to decide what they wanted). They could also cancel the commission any time before the author finished, but they then couldn't request from that author for another 7 days.

Authors wouldn't be able to publish a commissioned fic until they reached the word count, but they could offer a partial refund. However, the commissioner would have to accept this before the author could publish. If an author went more than 33% over the paid word count, a warning would pop up, and if they went more than 66% of the paid word count they couldn't publish the fic.

Due to the way the site was putting the economy into the gift economy, they got rid of prompt memes and gift exchanges as well as regular old gifts for non-"paying customers". Sure, you could write in your author's note that this was a fic written for your friend Alice's birthday without actually gifting it to her because she didn't pay you, but it was frowned upon.