Facebook Writing Groups Suck: Where Writers Go to Get Torn Apart

Facebook writing groups suck, and they’ve sucked for a long time. I’ve written about enough of their threads in the Dogpile series that the pattern stopped looking like bad luck a while ago.

On a Monday night, somebody in a Facebook group for people self-publishing on Amazon asked a simple question: why does anybody care if another author uses AI to write a book? Well over a hundred answers came back, and a lot of them were insults. One writer said he’d been accused of using AI every time he posted a book in that group, and now he felt self-conscious telling anybody he’d written one at all. He said AI had destroyed the authenticity of writing, and so had the people in that group.

In another group like it, a mother asked how to publish her daughter’s bedtime story. She got a brawl. In another writing group, an author posted three possible covers, labeled A, B and C, and asked which worked best. He got a stoning.

Then there was the woman putting together a book for her child, so the child would have something to remember her by. It was going to be printed for one person, maybe two. She made the cover with AI. That thread went on for something like 300 comments, people ripping her apart: how dare she, she’s putting artists out of business, she’s stealing. She was printing two copies. Of course she wasn’t going to hire a cover designer. What were those people protecting?

Why are Facebook writing groups so hostile?

They were hostile before anybody had heard of ChatGPT. As I said on The Impossible Puzzles Show, I have never seen groups so filled with trolls in my life as the writing groups. From the first one I joined, they were full of vitriol. It made me wonder why some of those people call themselves writers at all.

I’ve taken plenty of hits myself, over nothing. Post a question somebody considers beneath them and you’ll hear “Other people have already answered this” or “Go look in the FAQ.” Sometimes it’s just “Why do you ask such stupid questions?” The question was never stupid. The person answering wanted somebody to look down on.

Part of it is size. A group with 50,000 members has no shared standards and no memory. Nobody knows you, so nobody owes you courtesy, and the member who posts the cruelest reply gets the most reactions. The moderators are volunteers who can’t read everything, and a few of them are the loudest voices in the room.

And when moderation does show up, it can get things backwards. One author posted a guessing game in a book promotion group, asking people to spot which of her pieces were made with AI, and it turned into a hundred-comment brawl. People called her a thief, called her work slop and called her dumb. All of that stayed open. The next day she posted that she was embarrassed by how a room full of writers had behaved, and an admin shut that one down.

So the pile-on stayed up and the complaint about it came down. That’s a rotten way to run a group.

One commenter pointed out that the group’s only admin hadn’t posted since 2017, so the closure was probably automatic. That’s worse. A group nobody’s running is a group the loudest people run.

Part of it is Facebook itself. The platform rewards whatever gets people commenting, and nothing gets people commenting like a fight. A thoughtful answer to a beginner’s question gets three likes. A takedown gets a hundred replies, and Facebook shows it to more people. Would you design a place for writers to help each other that way? Nobody would, and writers use it anyway. I’m a designer, and Facebook’s developer tools are the stupidest I’ve seen, worse than Amazon’s or Google’s. I wanted a routine to post to Facebook automatically, and the setup is so convoluted that even Claude barfed on it.

Watch: The Writing World is Toxic, Story Grid

Why does AI start fights in Facebook writing groups?

Because it hands the trolls a target that feels righteous. Right now the fight is about AI, and in some groups, if anybody even admits to using it, the crowd acts like that person can go straight to hell and burn there forever.

AI is only the newest target. Writing groups have always been extraordinarily hostile. Before AI, the crowd went after people over self-publishing, adverbs, “show don’t tell” and amateur covers, and the same week I watched that AI thread, a fiction group tore into a man over a post about writing rules, with no AI anywhere in sight. The anti-AI crowd is just the latest anti-crowd. The topic changes. The hostility doesn’t.

Breathe a word that you use AI, or that you like it, and you’ll get jumped. It hardly matters what you say. Say something slightly counter to the groupthink and a lot of people jump on you, and the further you stray, the bigger the pile gets. Post one little thing and bam, you’ve got 50 people jumping down your ass. If you want to get killed outright, say you love AI and think every writer should use it. That’s poking the bear. The bear has a name: AI Derangement Syndrome.

I use AI every day as a digital assistant that helps me write, and I still do the writing. The only groups where I can say that without a brawl are a couple of pro-AI groups that are very careful about who they let in. Those I contribute to.

When I sorted all 83 top-level answers in one writing-group thread about how much AI is too much, 69 percent of the people who described their habits used some AI. Not one of them said they let it write their prose. They drew the same line in the same place and spent the afternoon calling each other thieves anyway.

The damage lands on the wrong people. In the thread that asked why writers care if you use AI, a man who plots his own action scenes got told he’s not an author because software fixes his commas. When a screenshot about an essay pulled for using AI reached Facebook, the crowd went after a named man with “loser,” “thieving” and a run of sexual insults, after the essay had already come down. Who did any of that protect?

There are real problems with AI and books, and I’ve written about them plenty. None of them gets solved by piling on a beginner who asked an honest question. It’s disgraceful to watch people who claim to love writing drive new writers away from it. What kind of writer does that to another writer?

Do Facebook writing groups help sell books?

Almost never. Scroll through most of them and you’ll see the same post a hundred times: here’s my book, here’s the cover, here’s the link. Everybody’s posting and nobody’s buying, because the room is full of other authors doing the exact same thing. I’ve told podcast audiences not to dump their book into 50,000 Facebook groups, and I’ll repeat it here. It feels like marketing. It’s shouting into a room full of people shouting.

The link dumps also train the room to ignore you. When every third post is a cover and a buy button, members scroll past all of them, including the one book in fifty that deserved a look. Some groups ban promotion entirely, and then members fight about the ban in the comments. Nobody in that room is shopping.

Your posts don’t stay in that room either. In June 2026 Meta launched AI Mode in Facebook search. It builds answers out of what people post publicly, including in public groups. Meta’s announcement didn’t explain how members could keep their posts out of it. So the question you asked in a public group, and the insults you got back, can end up as raw material for somebody else’s AI answer.

If you want readers, go where readers are and give them a reason to come to you. I’ve covered that in the publishing and marketing hub, and in why social media sucks in general.

Are there better writing groups than Facebook groups?

Yes, and they’re smaller. A real critique group has five or ten people, rules everybody agreed to, and members who read your pages because they want you to get better. I started a science fiction critique group through Meetup, and it ran on exactly that. Members read each other’s pages and gave honest critique, and once we were meeting regularly I dropped the Meetup subscription because the group ran itself.

That’s the difference that matters. A critique group has rules and members who are trying to help you. A big Facebook group has an audience, and an audience wants a show. I wrote a whole guide to finding and running a critique group if you want the kind that works.

If you stay in the big groups, protect yourself. Read more than you post. Don’t announce your process to a room that’s hunting for a reason to be angry. Block the people who show up only to punish, and leave any group where the moderators join in. You don’t owe a crowd of strangers an explanation for how you write.

I’ve quit the hostile writing groups, and I don’t miss them. I don’t have time for the hostility, and neither do you. Good feedback comes from a handful of people who know your name. The worst comes from thousands who don’t. The social media hub has the rest of this series, including why Reddit sucks. If your book deserves better than a comment thread, coaching or a small group will serve you far better than a stadium full of critics who never read past your first line.

From the author

Sins of the Internet
Big groups turn into pile-ons because the platform pays for anger. Sins of the Internet explains how the platforms amplified fury over empathy, and why a small critique group feels so different.

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