Can We Please Stop

I dunno. I don’t feel on the novel side Romance is front and center.

For Novels, tapas opens on Fantasy, bringing up The Beginning After the End.

I also find the system where I just pick genre, then go to fresh easy. Sure, I can see that anime style prevails on the top page, but tbh, it doesn’t make me feel unwelcome, because I like bright fantasy, adventure and romance.

I would have been put off far more if the front page showed a lot of grimy horror covers or other dark or scary/unpleasant stuff.

I do greatly miss sci-fi, but I just came to live with the fact that sci-fi that I like (I.e. corny space opera vs dystopian) is not a popular genre on the Internet, and I know where I will find it.

What are these spicy discords everyone's talking about??? The ones I'm on are very low key with a few comments every week or are just a bunch of 12 year olds throwing memes and promos at eachother. And I follow quite a few.

A lot of what you said applies to why I stop streaming as well. Other content creators became so toxic toward eachother.

Everyone has said some really potent things but yeah, I agree that hating on other creators for being successful is getting really old. Certain things are popular on Tapas and elsewhere for a reason. It's ok not to like those things and even criticize them, but saying creators don't deserve success is a sign of jealousy. Even among us smaller creators, if you're toxic towards others for gaining traction - you won't win many friends that way!

I'm new here but I agreed. We shouldn't complain about popular creator. They work hard to get there where their at.

I did a bunch of creative writing courses in uni (I majored in science, but writing was more of my interest) and I remember this one particular class where EVERYTHING circled back to "Twilight bad". Now, don't get me wrong, there's some harmful messaging in Twilight that should be deconstructed, and there's definitely writing and narrative flaws that could be discussed, but EVERY. SINGLE. LECTURE. could not pass by without at least one mention of "lol Twilight" from either the prof (a published author) or the other students. And you could SEE each and every person on the "Twilight bad" train doing the mental calculation - I'm better at this than the author, I'm better at that, why does she get published and paid? And at some point in time, I was just like, man... Jealousy over financial success is an ugly thing.

I realized a long time ago that the quality of your work has almost nothing to do with financial success. There's absolute DOGSH-- stuff raking in millions every day, and then there's absolute lovingly-crafted gems of mental brilliance that nobody's ever heard of. Why? Because your average consumer doesn't care about quality. They don't care about subtle subtext or cleverly placed clues or brilliant existential treatise, they just want to read the same story over and over and over again that will make them forget a long day at a job/school they hate.

Sometimes the stuff that catches on happens to strike the right level of quality vs. mass appeal and it blows up. Sometimes it's just luck. Either way, the person who made it undoubtedly, at the very least, approached this project with a whole lot of perseverance and discipline, even if academically-speaking, the end product was mediocre at best (and sometimes it's actually pretty good! But that is not why it was wildly successful). The sooner your divorce popularity from quality (and by extension, a way to evaluate the quality of your own work), the happier you'll be.

that brings an interesting point for any creative work......About accesibility and depth. I mean, accesibility more in terms of appealing to "casual" readers and depth to.....well, a meaningful story of good quality.

A really old example that aimed their story to the masses and the most educated circles was Don Quijote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes......On one side, it was a parody/deconstruction of chilvalry novels, but on the other side, it has loss of physical comedy and silly situations anyone could get a laugh of, which made it an iconic work that is referenced frequently.

Is that why there aren't many 'big' creators here on the forums? I figured it was just because they were busy, or focusing their social attention on, for example, their Patreon discords and such. (Which is perfectly reasonable, there are only so many hours in a day.)

But to hear that there used to be more on these forums, and that they were deterred from posting due to jealousy... well. Damn. What a wellspring of knowledge, advice, and potential friendship we've lost.

Jealousy impoverishes everything it touches.

There was some jealousy as well as them just leaving the site in general. Tapas changed a lot in 10 years, and so for some people (especially those who were able to get more success on their own sites or on Tapas and hiveworks) that was kind of the last straw and so when Tapas was no longer their moneymaker, they bounced. (and tbh as far as forums go, neither side is innocent in this case, I've been here like a year and I've seen some spicy fights that developed because people just could not read a room.)

But while the forums have been here a while, they are only recently being moderated more, since we got a lot more people on here from the downfall of both SmackJeeves and other writing forums. That extra moderation really helped get rid of a lot of that bickering nonsense (although there's still nonsense occasionally).

That and, being real, most of the threads on this forum are how-to's and beginning stuff. And I came here because I needed to learn how webcomics work in 2020, not necessarily to draw (I still feel a little shaky doing scroll format.) But if you are someone who can draw, and don't need to hear about what people want in modern webcomics...eh these forums might be boring for you.

Fair point. I can see how polished creators may become bored over time, especially if the threads began to get repetitive.

That said, while I'm not a beginner, I like it here because I've always enjoyed forums in general, this one has a really nice community, and it's active. I've been starved for this kind of online interaction. Twitter just doesn't cut it.

Since I'm at a more intermediate level as an artist, I suppose I've taken the approach of "what can I offer". (Which seems commonplace here, and is partly why I like this community so much! It's very reciprocal.) Maybe it's the teacher in me. I like helping. But that's also what I'm lamenting. To have dozens of established creators floating around doing that means better advice, well beyond what I can provide. (I could also stand to benefit from it. I can draw, but I'm a complete dunce at comic layouts.)

It's a shame, because once those people are gone, it's hard to get them back.

Good to know about the recently increased moderation, though! I'm glad I joined when I did, because unmoderated bickering would have put me off.

Agreed. I enjoy sharing what I've learned whenever I can too. The more we help each other, the better artists we'll all be, and that means more quality content. When we help each other out, we all win.

I think we should all be just a bit more tactful tbh regardless of what we think. I mean we are all creators here so I bet each of us is just beating ourselves down each moment we spot a mistake. Let's just chill a bit and be British about our likes and dislikes, I guess.

Vengeance, naked vengeance, is the greatest engine of man's progress. It is only when a man has been willfully slighted, totally debased and stripped of his illusions of 'goodwill between men', that he can begin to create the extraordinary. From the young writer called a poet-aster who rises to great heights in his maturity to the beaten servant boy that comes to be the master of a vast merchant empire, nothing stokes a man's fire hotter than to see others proven wrong and to acquire the power to lay them low.
Further, vengeance is the only universal urge. Every nation's myths share it, and there is nothing else that can turn a meek clerk into a magnate and a wan governess into a poisoner with equal swiftness. Only certain souls can kill for their nation or their god, more can kill for their family, more still if driven by circumstance, but every living person can kill, kill without remorse, kill again and again in the name of vengeance. It is the spirit that primes every duelist's pistol and draws the lines on every revanchist's map. It is the soul of nationalism, Marxism, and anarchism alike.
We stand on the precipice of a time in which every motivation that can be called 'good' will fall away. All those couched in love. Love of one's country, one's god, one's family, even oneself will die off. Avarice may replace them for a time but it will breed vengeance and vengeance, vengeance alone, will endure forever as new and ancient slights render every man and every people nothing more than agents of vengeance and death shall reign.

-V. Ivanonovich Sokolov, Tsarist Russian officer, philosopher of warfare, and occasional poet writing in 1917, mere days before he was killed defending his family home from Bolsheviks.

It won't end, it will never end. Until the end of time, until the bustle of civlisation fades away, until the very last man on this fire-scorched Earth lifts his fists to the sky, cursing God under his dying breath, this chaos will ever end. With our right hand we will write, paint, caress our loved ones under the pretense of kindness, and on the left we will whip the people around us in blind fits of madness.
We will yell profanities at our neighbours, and throw rocks at their houses--we will tear their fences apart, destroy their crops and slaughter their animals, cursing them to the deepest depths of hell, all while unwittingly possessed by demons. And as we curse them, our own crops will die, our animals will starve, our children will wither away, and the boards of our own houses will fall apart of their own accord. But we will turn a blind eye to our properties, and we will point to our other neighbours who too neglect their own estates, and we will yell, "look at people such as these, who let their houses fall apart, and leave their own children to die; what good are people such as these? Let us protest, rally against them, and set them aflame, for they are not of God's children, but the sons and daughters of the Devil himself!" We will blind ourselves in this way, and by our very own hands we will strangle goodness itself, and in its absence we will shed more and more blood, all still under the pretense of justice. Justice, justice we will act upon: pure, wretched justice!

You can dislike the work but don’t hate the author

I agree, if you don't want to read their work no one can force you. But they are human like us. Even if they are lazy and don't care ( i doubt it) it isn't our place to say so.

Am I the only one who haven't seen these kinda topics here??
I really haven't..?
I agree with not blaming and treating the popular creators bad but.. what topics are you talking about??

i didn't see topic's either, but people tend to get mad when they can't get popular , just like you see unoriginal untalented people on tiktok hating popular tiktokers because they are untalented ( i don't use it anymore, and i really don't like calling someone untalented..)