I don’t know, maybe it’s because I come from a professional writing background (in very, very different genres…I use an alias here for a reason) but I think that any time an author or a small group of authors takes advantage of a platform to silence or hide the work of others, they’re acting in bad faith. If these were all stories they’d clearly slaved over and just happened to post all at once, that would be one thing (but you can “schedule” publications, so they could have easily trickled out 1-2/day over the period of a week), but based on the actual content I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. This feels a lot more like the folks in my grad program who ALWAYS NEEDED TO BE HEARD over everyone else—the ones who would hand in essays or short stories that were more than twice the required length, go on long tirades during workshops that were ultimately more about themselves than the writer being critiqued, etc. You see these people on panels at literary conferences, too. And on Twitter, etc.
All of which is to say, my own personal experience makes me disinclined to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
