That is one possible way to approach this situation, but it has some problems:
* It's a well-established social norm (at least in the SF world) that money should always flow from publishers to writers, never the other way around. That's one of the signals that distinguishes reputable journals and publishers from vanity presses. (Google "Yog's Law".)
* As Neil Clarke points out on Twitter, Clarkesworld aims to accept submissions from all over the world. Not everyone can easily make international payments to the US, and not everybody can easily afford what would be a "token fee" in developed countries.
* I'm guessing payment processors wouldn't look too kindly on a business where virtually all of the payments are either refunded to real users, or falsely reported as fraudulent by spammers.
It's a well-established social norm (at least in the SF world) that money should always flow from publishers to writers, never the other way around.
And that norm worked 25 years ago, barely, when publishers of science fiction magazines had working business models thanks to paid subscribers, newsstand sales, library customers, and advertisers.
Now it's down to paid subscribers, of which there are few, and partnerships with online platforms, which are dwindling (he says Amazon recently discontinued a program that generated revenue for Clarkesworld). Something's got to give. He's dealing with it by shutting off the submissions pipeline, but this publication is truly at risk of going under, which would be a great loss to the SFF community.
Making AI side hustle scams pay for wasting his time is not an ethical lapse if legit authors pay nothing. If he's worried about international submissions or poor writers unable to afford a token fee, set up a scholarship funded by the scammers. An alternative if the pain continues is the publication going under or selling out in a far worse way.
I've often thought an authenticated proof of donation to a global charity could be a solution to these types of problems, scaled in price to the senders locale.
Not refundable, but at least a donation to UNICEF allows the receiver to impose a submission cost without the implication they are doing so out of greed.
> money should always flow from publishers to writers, never the other way around.
An interesting workaround is to still require money (or effort) to be spent by authors, but not have it go to the publishers. Only require that the publishers can get some proof that money has been spent. This way, the flood of AI junk submissions is halted, and writers can still be assured that publishers still have no incentive to solicit submissions in order to get money.
> Not everyone can easily make international payments to the US
this has been a real problem in the past, but it's really just a problem with the banking system; bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies solve it pretty comprehensively
there's still the issue that, unless you're using lightning or something, you need to be able to pay the transaction fees, but those are almost always under US$1, and most people in the world can pay US$1
Crypto is far from frictionless. You need to set up a wallet, find an exchange that will take your local currency, take that currency to some kind of bank Bitcoin ATM or other digitizing service, find the destination wallet address, avoid being scammed or having your money stolen, make the transaction covering any additional fees, and be sure you have enough extra to cover any fluctuations in price. Many people won't be technical enough to do that and it isn't easy everywhere.
Also one US dollar can be a relatively big fee, depending on your circumstances, unfortunately.
most of the people who buy and sell cryptocoins here in argentina aren't very technical
the reason the transaction fee matters is that it puts a floor on how small a submission fee you can reasonably charge; 1¢ wouldn't work, but US$1 or US$10 could
* It's a well-established social norm (at least in the SF world) that money should always flow from publishers to writers, never the other way around. That's one of the signals that distinguishes reputable journals and publishers from vanity presses. (Google "Yog's Law".)
* As Neil Clarke points out on Twitter, Clarkesworld aims to accept submissions from all over the world. Not everyone can easily make international payments to the US, and not everybody can easily afford what would be a "token fee" in developed countries.
* I'm guessing payment processors wouldn't look too kindly on a business where virtually all of the payments are either refunded to real users, or falsely reported as fraudulent by spammers.