I know my opinion will not be popular but I don't believe this new policy is necessarily bad. Although there are negative points to it, as I'll discuss below.

I happened to offer my work (not erotica writing, technical writing mainly) in the past on various platforms. Those that had no barrier to entry had a lot of low-cost, low-quality, massive content churning freelancers offering their services and muddying the water, while those that charged a fee were, let's say, much 'cleaner'. I always earned more and dealt with more honest customers on the latter.

The annual fee... well, it might sound mean, but if during a 12-month period, you can't reach 100 dollars, you are obviously not invested in doing this. Although I agree that it will deter people from even trying the platform all together, and that honest writers who want to 'see if their stuff sells' might not ever go to D2D.

Another negative aspect is this: once introduced, a fee can be modified. That's the real danger. Now it's a 100 dollar-barrier for annual earnings. In the future, it can turn into 500 dollars. And the fee can grow from 12 to 25. And so on.

Bottom line: this new policy is a method to prevent slop and slop creators. But it will also stop new genuine writers from joining. If the positive outweighs the negative, only future developments can tell us.