coaltide | Coalway to Hell

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2020

Coalway to Hell

Yuletide Weather Forecast:

Temperatures are estimated to fluctuate between active panic and total apathy into the next weekend. Main assignments will have a minimum temperature of regret and a complete climate change once editing is complete. Expect treat writing to continue at all free hours unless the dangerous front of procrastination cropping up in the Northeast successful moves into the area, effectively killing the treat storm conditions for the season.

Yuletide Discord for Hippos. Google Group for PHs. F_F wiki for history.

yulefairy for treats you can't find a recip for.

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Does it disconcert anyone else how many people on coal admit to having socks? Like they just casually say, oh yeah, I’m doing XYZ on main, and ABC on my sock... it unnerves me to think that their socks might be well-established accounts with identities separate from main, and that I might have interacted with both of them without realizing it.

Sorry to galaxy brain this but...welcome to the internet? Everybody here is operating under a username. A lot of the “BNFs” for Yuletide are people with only a dw who have have no other social media or who (smartly) keep whatever real online or irl friends they have separate from the exchange scene. No twitter, no tumblr, no discord, no wallet name. There is no functional difference between them and a sock.

Someone like rosefox, who puts all their business online, could still be someone’s elaborate sock puppet or catfish project.

I would much rather interact with a sock of someone who puts care into making a letter, writing a fic, and commenting than I would with an actual Nazi like ars_belli or some weird asshole on Discord that’s always causing wank. It’s not even a question to me.

Behind every account is a real person, even if sometimes they wear a moustache and clip on a different name, so how that person acts is all that matters to me, regardless of the name. One person being average or great across five accounts >>>>>>>>> One person being awful with their walletname and social security number for all to see.

+100
If you’re well-behaved on sock and main, I don’t care if sock and main are the same person.

Wait until it clicks for you that the coalie you said “I hope I’m treating you ♥” might also be the same person who goes “kill urself cunt </3” when they’re bored!

+1 Or that a beloved participant with zero socks is the wanker that told you on coal/FFA to get raped, that trans people don’t deserve rights, that Trump’s Muslim ban is smart, etc.

Socks are the least of anybody’s problem online.

Me irl: I like posting on coal because it's anonymous and I can post anything I want with no repercussions

Me on coal: What a lovely time I'm having writing the best story I can for my recip. I hope everyone is doing well. Here's a recipe for stollen and an uncontroversial opinion.

is the recipe for stollen stolen? is that how it becomes problematique?

Re: So many socks

(Anonymous) - 2020-12-21 17:54 (UTC) - Expand

Same, for the most part. It's just nice to remove the pressure of having/getting a reputation. On the flip side, I also like that on here I don't stay mad at people I otherwise might stay mad at.

Sincerely, no. Why would that concern me? Unless they're using their socks in a way that would also be concerning if they weren't socks, this is highly irrelevant to me.

To me it's just like established authors having more than one pen name. Mary Westmacott, T. Kingfisher, Richard Bachman, Robert Galbraith, Rosamond Smith, Lauren Kelly, Paul French, A. N. Roquelaure, Anne Rampling...I could go on.

I know people act like it's some shameful thing to have more than one account, but to me it's just pen names in different genres/fandoms. If I have the energy and creative drive to use more than one, I don't feel bad about it.

Maybe if I was secretly befriending people with more than one pen name I would feel a little psycho though.

No.

It occasionally annoys me to realize that the person whose late pinch hit I've been working my ass off to get written and polished may be someone who already has gifts under other identities, but then I have a cookie and get over myself.

It annoys me that breaking one of the base rules of the exchange is so taken for granted. If the socks aren't hurting anything, make (up to a certain number of) socks legal! If they are, actually attempt to enforce the rule! It can be annoying as a writer too because it can be hard to tell if someone is a low-effort sock for a very active fan or is a real inactive, yuletide-only fan (or is a sock of an inactive, yuletide-only fan), and that can change the ways you interpret the signup, but making socks legal would make that less of a thing too. Right now we've got a situation where a certain subset of people can follow a set of unspoken rules that directly contradict the written ones, and that setup always sucks.

But in terms of "this person I'm talking to could be someone else" - you're on coal. You're actually talking to fifteen different anons who are all the same person, OP.

The way I understand it, there's no easy way to identify well-behaved socks in an event the scale of Yuletide. On the other hand, the mods do boot badly-behaved socks, and socks they discover one year through bad or even borderline behavior will probably be booted the next, because of the no-sock rule. I suspect the ~5 participants that the exchange always loses between sign-ups and assignments are generally due to this. (Kind of like getting gangsters for tax evasion - a minor rule that isn't always enforced is used to bring down the hammer on people for other issues which are harder to prove.)

Yeah, well, we should be auditing all rich people for tax evasion too, not just gangsters and the poor. Not going to get into US politics here, but that's exactly the sort of reason I don't like unenforceable rules.

I know they couldn't catch everybody, but it would be nice if the mods at least attempted to be publicly (and privately) disapproving of it, tried to change the culture a bit. Or, you know, change the rule! Anything that gets an illegal sock booted for bad behavior oughta get any participant booted. There's clearly a demand among good exchange participants for a way to double-participate, maybe we should brainstorm ways to let that happen other than flouting the rules.

Re: So many socks

(Anonymous) - 2020-12-21 17:51 (UTC) - Expand

Re: So many socks

(Anonymous) - 2020-12-21 18:16 (UTC) - Expand

Re: So many socks

(Anonymous) - 2020-12-21 20:52 (UTC) - Expand

Re: So many socks

(Anonymous) - 2020-12-21 22:01 (UTC) - Expand

Re: So many socks

(Anonymous) - 2020-12-23 03:09 (UTC) - Expand

I dont care if you publish different genres under different pseuds, or move your assignment from one account to another during the anon period.

I do judge people who sign up twice knowing they can complete 2+ gifts and wanting to be guaranteed 2+ gifts. Because of the nature of matching algorithms, defaults, etc, hundreds of people are going to have at least one more assignment than they're "owed" gifts. So socking during signups leads to some "what if everyone thought that way" implications that aren't really fair to PHers (and/or treaters).

And yet, the last time we didn't have enough PHers was before YT got big.

+ 1

Also how many single-account participants wouldn’t have anyone to match to without someone socking to ask for all 50 fandoms of their heart or whatever.

I mean, it depends. If someone socks up 3 times that’s 3 assignments and 3 gifts, but someone who socks up 3 times is more likely to be a PHer and treater than a NovaMist. So really with treating odds it’s 3 gifts (maybe 5, if we assume one of their accounts gets lucky) and something like 10 fics written. Since the whole fandom benefits from the 3-5 gifts they get, it isn’t exactly selfish* since their gift is public.

* if all they want is babyfucking vore that us intentionally OOC and idk written in Italian then yes, at that point their gifts are likely only relevant to their interests and the socking making more of that pop up is worse than them only signing up once.

someone who socks up 3 times is more likely to be a PHer and treater than a NovaMist. So really with treating odds it’s 3 gifts (maybe 5, if we assume one of their accounts gets lucky) and something like 10 fics written.

That has not been my experience. Most people who write lots of treats only sign up on one account and people who have been caught socking like NovaMist or the socktopus only write their assignments, if that.

Re: So many socks

(Anonymous) - 2020-12-22 02:39 (UTC) - Expand

Re: So many socks

(Anonymous) - 2020-12-22 04:07 (UTC) - Expand

What makes you assume this?

I sock up because my main has a consistent brand in terms.of the kind of pairings I like and I don't want to bore or put off my subscribers with my less characteristic offers. I use my sock less, but so put just as much effort into requests, assignments and comments when I do use it.

I started the sock for non exchange reasons because I was curious if people actually did like my work or if they commented for social purposes. (A bit of both, it seems.)

People have so many reasons.

Re: So many socks

(Anonymous) - 2020-12-22 07:52 (UTC) - Expand

I do judge people who sign up twice knowing they can complete 2+ gifts and wanting to be guaranteed 2+ gifts. Because of the nature of matching algorithms, defaults, etc, hundreds of people are going to have at least one more assignment than they're "owed" gifts. So socking during signups leads to some "what if everyone thought that way" implications that aren't really fair to PHers (and/or treaters).

I don't understand how this isn't fair, or rather, how this is any more unfair than it would be if no one socked up. Because treaters and pinch hitters would still not get a guaranteed (extra)b gift, so "hundreds of people are going to have at least one more assignment than they're "owed" gifts" would still be true.

I think your assumption is 'if all people who know they can complete 2+ gifts absolutely weren't allowed to sign up twice, they would treat or pinch hit instead' and that's just not true. If only one sign-up was possible, a lot of them would simply post only a single fic.

Yeah, I have absolutely no idea where they get the "people who sock get more gifts than they're entitled to"

like ... no? it's not cake?

Because treaters and pinch hitters would still not get a guaranteed (extra)b gift, so "hundreds of people are going to have at least one more assignment than they're "owed" gifts" would still be true. Yes, that's true, sorry for misleading phrasing.

A better way of describing my assumption is that, if socking were explicitly allowed and welcomed, i think there would be a lot more people who sign up several times but write the same amount they would have written otherwise. When some of those accounts go out to ph, that would potentially create a larger load on the ph pool and cause problems (but that scale load/problems doesnt currently exist).

+1

Most of my assignments don't end up being "fics I would've come up with spontaneously and finished by deadline anyway." Maybe they take extra research, maybe they need a bunch of canon review, maybe the idea only came together because I had to really sit with the letter instead of just browsing past it while looking for treat inspiration, maybe I wouldn't have made the writing a priority without the sense of obligation to put the pressure on...

I'm always happy with the results! (Recip comments are always positive, too.) And sometimes treats happen on top of the assignments. Still doesn't mean the assignment fics themselves would've happened as treats.

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