1 / 99
Jul 2021

Lately I haven't seen a lot of interesting discussions here, mostly just promotions.

So what are some posts you hate/dislike seeing? Or is there any certain posts on a topic that you'd want to see more?

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    Jul '21
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    Jul '21
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There are 98 replies with an estimated read time of 19 minutes.

Sub for sub. It hurts my soul at this point. All these creators shooting themselves in the foot by accumulating audiences who don't care about their work and won't interact with it, thereby killing their chances of their work being rated well by the algorithm. Dead subs are worse than no subs, I can't believe those threads proliferate as much as they do.

Also, anything resembling Looking for ARTIST [Unpaid/Rev Share]
(Bonus points if the writer has atrocious grammar.)

Yeah it's like a race for promoting your stuff and it's kind of suffocating to see. It's like only the number of followers is important and not about people who like your work or not.

I'd like to see more about people's art tips and ways of getting better together (I don't talk about those "collabs" where people look for other people to do stuff for them for free :sweat_smile: )

Sub for Sub, no question

Understand creators want to grow their audience and have people see their work but if those same
people only sub and don't engage in any way with your work did it really even matter in the first place?

It's like 100 people saying they're going to attend your art show and literally nobody shows up.
Or if they do, they are only doing so because of a sort of burden to do so, not really because
they truly like your work.

As a creative, I can't think of anything more depressing than that

Any post in which somebody blames other creators for their own work's comparative lack of popularity. Like, I get that not being as popular as you would like to be sucks, but it's the fault of a bunch of factors like your work being wrong for the audience or current trends, sub-optimal choices in things like cover, title and description, a lack of visibility which may partially be due to how Tapas organises the front page and ranks works, but may also partially be about how you promote yourself on social media... it's all a complex tapestry, but the people who definitely aren't to blame are like... some people who are drawing shiny romance comics about pretty boys. They are not stealing anyone's audience because the audience for those works is completely different from the audience to like... a serious gritty sci-fi or a historical murder mystery. Don't be a dick to more popular creators. Learn from them.

Posts where people say "I NEED 100 subs! Help me!" ....no you don't need 100 subs, you want 100 subs, and you're no more deserving of them than anyone else here. Everyone's working hard and doing their best. 100 subs doesn't even do anything, it just unlocks a trickle of ad revenue that if you only have a handful of subs who are actually reading might amount to a $0.01 per month, meaning if you manage to reach 250 subs, you might be able to withdraw your $25 of earnings in...... about 200 years. If your work literally only gets bookmarks because you need to beg them to subscribe out of pity, or as part of an exchange, it's not a viable business model. You are not going to make money from it. If you really, genuinely need to make money from a work, stop trying to pretend the problem doesn't exist by begging people to subscribe so you can have the illusion of success and make a product people want to buy into just by seeing the product. This might mean improving your English skills. It might mean improving your art. It might mean working in a different style or genre or deciding that actually this platform isn't for you. If you don't want to do these things, your work here will always be a hobby. If you want your work to make money like a business, you have to treat it like a business. Businesspeople don't go up to other businesspeople and say "pweeeeease buy my cars! Everyone's buying Ford's cars, but nobody's buying MY cars! It's unfair!"

Posts where people who have engaged in sub for sub complain about their poor engagement..... I.... well, I don't want to say I told you so but.... wait, no, actually I DO. I told you so. :sip:

Posts about anime anthologies. :smirk:

But really, posts that bring down the work of others - be it style or genre or actually mentioning specific artists or writers.

The writers looking for artist posts get me every time. It's the most undescriptive post made by a young person who wants an artist to do 90% of the work. Maybe 1 out of every 10 posts seems like a decent collaboration.

I've only been posting my work online for maybe a year or less but I've gotten so many offers and artist requests in my dms. And of course it's all for free.

I've also seen a couple collaborations posts where they'll say something like, "Unpaid for now, but if we earn any revenue it'll be 70/30 split." I imagine it'll be hard to split $0.0001.

I'm gonna be disliked for this, but there's just something off-putting about literal strangers running around asking for favor and beg for shit ( sometimes without even contributing anything). We aren't your friends, we're strangers who most likely don't give a shit about you. We act nice because it's what socially acceptable.

I understand if it's in an appropriate thread like when someone offering free criticism, or just a dump link and go promo thread. In this case I'm talking about making new thread, or in some more shameless case doing it as a reply in unrelated threads.

  • The "I need 250 subs by this month's end, please help me!" (Never interact except for begging sub and self promo. Sometimes doesn't even link their series or it's on Webtoon)
  • The "I need critique of my series" (Doesn't specify what to critique or even link their series)
  • The "Help me to decide an important plot point in my series!" (With long ass super specific paragraphs about their story nobody in the forum has read nor care about, but acting like we should already be familiar with it )
  • The "Please draw my character!" (As this forum is mostly artists I won't explain this).
  • The "Please collaborate with me!" (explain nothing but vague idea, and not presenting themselves as someone pleasant to collaborate with).
  • The "What story should I write? What do you think should be the plot? Where is the setting better be? What do you think about the characters? Can you teach me about English history?" (a.k.a please co-write this series because I'm a lazy fuck who can't even put effort into thinking about what to create)

Oof, I get where you're coming from but as someone who enjoys geeking out and giving advice and feedback when it's asked for, I kinda enjoy those threads sometimes...

I personally don't have a huge problem with any kind of thread because I guess I just... Don't interact if a thread is not for me. Sometimes it's a bit annoying to scroll past a lot of promo threads with no theme to find something interesting to discuss, but I don't think the existence of this kind of thread is the problem here, it's the amount of pretty much identical threads (again, I'm talking about the uncreative ones with no theme). Same goes for sub 4 sub. I have my own opinions on sub 4 sub, it's not for me, but I'm not here to police what other people do. But again, the amount can be a bit overwhelming.
It's nothing more than a mild annoyance though. Like, scrolling won't kill me and it's very easy to just not click on those threads.

Just thought of another: the same person uploading a promotion post announcing every single update to their comic or novel, thus creating more "link dump" threads filled with the same group of people (those looking to reach milestones, sub4sub, and general self-promo)

At this point I should just mute all promotions since I don't even bother to click on most of them.

Posts that are unspecific shouts to get attention. It usually goes along these lines:
- I can't believe this happened!
- So...this is weird.
- I have an important question!

But, it's the internet, this type of stuff is expected. Also, if too many promo posts are showing up, I just search a specific category to avoid promo posts.

See what you mean but gonna say this; Not all people are secretively negative to their core and the niceness seen isn't always a sort of act to be "socially acceptable". That's just who they are; while yeah, some people do it as a act for sure, that's not always the case for all people in general.

Can somewhat understand how it can be seen as off putting for people begging for favors to strangers without anything in return, but on my end its never a super negative "What in the bloody damn hell is this lazy f doing wtf..." ; its more so I see the thread and bypass it to find something a little more engaging for me.

I mostly look into Collaborations category.
There's so much bad unpaid collaborations thread, asking way too much of artists, and not offering a single penny (rev share is out of question). They ask artists to do 90% of the work, long term, for a story that the artist have no say in. The writer could at least take some load off the artists by helping in storyboards. Storyboarding doesn't need good art. Heck they could storyboard with a mouse and ms paint.

Well, the fact that I've got the whole "Promotions" category muted speaks for itself, I guess... :joy:

Though I also check the forums from my phone (which won't let me log in no matter what I do), so I still get to see promotion threads from there... and man, the amount of spam/sub4sub is unbearable ._.' as many others mentioned, the problem with those threads is that pretty much everyone just drops a link and never ever bothers to check what the others posted, so it's literally useless. I've gained more readers from simply posting my art here on the forums than I did from dropping my link, tbh.

Also:
-"Hey so I recently got an interest in writing and even though I never even wrote anything before there's this super vague story idea I have which I think could become the next big thing. I don't have an outline, characters are still to be decided, the plot consists roughly of three lines. I'm gonna need an artist who draws in the same exact style of [insert pro manga artist who's been in the industry for 20+ years]. 400+ episodes, one episode a week. [UNPAID]"
-"WHY ISN'T MY COMIC MAKING ME RICH ALREADY????!!!" (I mean... look, I get it, we'd all love to make money with comics. But if you think that posting a comic online is gonna make you filthy rich after two weeks... I'm afraid I have bad news for you °°)

Well posts that go like:

성인용 및 성인용 콘텐츠를 보려면 video.org에 가입하고 모든 친구를 초대하세요.

헐 이거 번역해주시면 감사하겠습니다

((Disclaimer, this is not an actual link, it's just a text I translated to Korean as an example xD

As a prideful writer, I am disheartened whenever I see misguided so-called 'writers' type up collaboration posts. Yes, producing comics can just be for the fun of it, but there are many artists that really put a lot of their heart and soul into their work and really don't deserve to deal with half the crap that is out there. I understand, many of them may just be young, inexperienced, or not so good at English. But people really need to take a hard look at themselves and their abilities out of self-respect. I'm only saying this, because most of the 'writers' don't even take the proper time to concoct a reasonably structured post and yet have a guts to request help from hard working artists.

But yea, I also don't like those purely sub-for-sub posts either. People need quality subs and a loyal fan base that appreciates their work, not an army of rocks.

As you mentioned, it would be refreshing to see more off-topic posts, or any other kind of discussions not solely related to promoting our stuff.