by Ducky » Tue Jun 14, 2011 12:49 am
ETA: This is TL;DR and I know it. But I'm drunk and sometimes I like to actually think about things, which I am not afforded the opportunity to do at DMS. Plus, this would be my biggest wet dream if it actually happened.
I absolutely agree. Most of the writers who got such a position would fight tooth and nail to keep it, I would think. I hate DMS, I hate writing in general for the most part now and I don't give a fuck about my articles because I know half the CEs or more will just fuck them up anyway.
If this were put into place, I would honestly take the extra 5-10 minutes or even more to really read my articles and carefully edit them before I submitted them because after a taste of that sweet, sweet freedom the threat of going back to CE hell would be enough to keep me toeing the line.
I actually don't think Manning it up would be much of an issue. Sure, maybe a couple people would pull it, but as we've seen, even the current system isn't immune to that. Give writers who have consistently shown that they can produce what DMS deems quality work, in spite of all the CE bullshit, control over their own articles, and most of them will actually produce good content and more of it.
Think about it. Spending that extra time or doing that little extra bit of work would save you the stress of the CE bullshit and allow you to really be in control of your income since you wouldn't be worrying about review times or abandoned articles.
Some of the DMS writers actually have decently successful blogs and websites even though they're just one person. Okay, all of their stuff may not be perfect if they're self-editing, but they're making money. And they're doing it without posting their shit on sites like eHow that monopolize the Web. Obviously these people know something that works.
Everybody wins. Except the CEs. And there's the problem. Demand is never going to remove the CEs' cocks from their mouths to even consider the possibilities of something like this.
Even if they did, the only way I could see it working would be for them to implement it out of the blue, automatically adding all writers that met the requirements to the senior writer program and then doing something to truly audit the scores CEs gave afterwards to allow writers a fair chance to raise their scores. We all know the zombies who have been sitting at 3.5 for months and months will never make it in, but it's only fair to offer a new writer a chance to raise his scores as he gets used to the system without CEs shitting all over him for nothing to mark their territories.
And it's not that I think their leads couldn't spot the scoring bullshit that would happen in the aftermath. It's that I don't think they would bother to check. Did you see the discussion that got closed down today because Sam pissed everyone off by basically saying the CEs are acting like asshats with scoring since WDP? A ton of CEs rushed in there to proclaim how they'd NEVER heard a peep about how they should/shouldn't be scoring in their reviews. Yeah, GG CEs. You all just admitted that DMS does absolutely NOTHING to even spot check the scores that fucked at least a few decent writers.
Only other option I think would be to do away with CE scoring completely after the program was instituted and instead have a staff member or editors with actual experience in a new freelance position -- that they actually verify credentials for and test heavily for to make sure they're not complete morons -- assign scores to a random selection of each writer's articles on a bi-monthly or monthly basis, kind of like what is (not really) done with the CE reviews. With that system, you could still get fucked since it would be random, but you stand a better chance than a CE scoring you while trying to protect his income stream.