I think one thing to consider is that the daily snack is a tool designed to deliver 5 comics to a wide range of readers - from someone using the app for the first time all the way to someone who uses the app daily. Even then, we have a wide range of use cases, such as readers who only read the first comic of the snack, and readers who straight up don't bother reading the long form comics (or the opposite, readers who only read long form).
Of those 5 comics, maybe not all of them are intended for you specifically, and that's okay, there's another 5 comics that are coming out tomorrow that might be intended for you.
So why do we feature some of the same gag-a-day series over and over again?
Simple: they perform REALLY REALLY well. They get a lot of shares, comments, new subscribes and likes. It'd be silly for us NOT to feature them. But we do try to suppress featuring them as much as possible in favor of spotlighting a new series.
We've featured a TON of different series, in February alone, we featured over 110 different series, of those, many of them had less than 100 subs. To say that we're not using the daily snack as a tool to feature up and coming creators seems kind of unfair to me.
We DO take liberties when featuring though - case in point is the one you've mentioned, I Love You, Bambette. Recently, we featured an episode where they posted a bunch of fan art that they had received. The episode didn't get a lot of engagement initially before the feature, and by our standard algorithms, it wouldn't have made it in. But we loved the fact that they were celebrating what the community had done for them and we wanted to celebrate that despite already having featured their episode earlier in the month.
We experiment a lot with the daily snack, Just today, we posted the longest episode ever to debut at the #1 spot, Jellyvampire's "Like an artist" episode. Then we followed it up with Tryingmomentarily's A Turn for Change (a long form series), and then Kikiowei's Clementation (long form). At number four, Lira Kraunik's Rosette, the Dragonet, and then we rounded it off with Orangeplum's Here it Comes (long form). All three long form series were never featured before that and Lira's comic made a return after being featured earlier in January. Jellyvampire is the only series featured more than twice over the course of January + February. Compare that to yesterday's feature which was 2 long form stories followed by 3 short form stories.
We try to make the selections as dynamic as possible while still considering the reading experience of a wide variety of use cases. I hope that sheds some light on how the daily snack operates and helps you understand that we're not trying to upset you with our selections. Hopefully, while you may not have enjoyed one particular day's selections, that there will be a day when you feel like they were catered just for you.
-michael
