Carrie Callahan

The "Powered By Amazon" writing community, WriteOn announced today that it will be closing as of March 22nd--a little over two years after initially opening to writers. The platform opened on March 11, 2014 and was meant to be Amazon's answer to Wattpad. I think it's easy to get caught up in feeling that Amazon is unfair or cruel for taking away the community it had only started to build--and maybe it is, on some level. But I also think that those posting in the forums in anger about the news miss a vital fact about this and every other free online community: they don't owe you anything. This was a free experiment open to writers, and now that experiment is over. We may never get an explanation as to why it's ending so abruptly--but neither do we deserve one. Shops, cafes, and restaurants close all the time when the customer base cannot support their rent--and online spaces are no different. In the past, online communities have simply withered as the ne...