Kuromeru666 Well unfortunately, terrible companies like WebNovel can keep doing these dirty practices that they can keep justifying while we got original authors and translation group affiliated admins defending the system because in the end, who's their employer (lol)?
As long as we spread awareness of how broken and dirty this system is, people will buy less of their products, and Webnovel will have to work based on the Supply and Demand that one of their admins brought up :) Let there be little to no demand, boycott. Let our wallets do the talking (or the lack of).
That's how game devs logic got them to get away with 'lootboxes' and 'dlcs' where they release crap on the same day as the game release date (essentially selling an incomplete product and you have to pay extra premium to get a more wholesome experience). People have to speak up as consumers and not support this kind of crappy practices.
The fact that this privilege thing is a one-month deal, specifically for one book, generalizing pricing for all content, and charging another fee for unlocking individual chapters you paid to see is just insanity. Only people with a lack of foresight would buy into this scheme. Patreon version that they keep claiming to have copied at least GAVE said chapters for the 'privilege fee' that they paid.
How dirty can a company get to put a scheme like this by exploiting those obsessed/passionate about their content, designed so they have to keep paying to continue at their advanced pace or be left to suffer through waiting for normal release rate to catch up to their advanced rate a month before. (i.e. if they paid 50 advanced chapters, then next month they don't renew, they have to wait for 50 chapters to be released publicly before seeing any new content [essentially shot themselves in the foot, now stuck in a situation where they have to pay to even read for that month]).
If they followed a crowd-funding scheme (where people collectively gift/pay) and milestones = higher release rate, it would make more sense (that's how Patreon did it too, guess they omitted this portion of the Patreon deal huh?). Oh but the white knights will say mass releases though--- Let me see if they do a mass release for those "Privilege" enabled books, and I mean from all the translation groups, not just one group lol.
TL;DR - WebNovel is trash, their translators/editors/authors (basically their contractors) has to defend them because more money for them, WebNovel is still shady and their past practices has always shown they're shady. Don't give them a dime until they listen. Only a fool would buy into this scheme (verified by their 'target audience' being ~100 rich people obsessed with their content).