I don't want to linger on this thread long. I can become a negative pot very quickly if I let myself. I do think it's important to acknowledge the sadness once and a while.
(Also let me clarify that I've had a bad day so far, so this is coming out of an already irate person.)
While I do admit that Tapas is doing better for me with active looking views compared to any other site I've been on, I find that I can still get stuck in the stats-game. It's something that really irritates me. You "have" to acknowledge it, while people who say they don't are lying through their teeth because that just means they're SO far successful that losing 2 or 3 readers doesn't effect their numbers short-term or long-term.
It's something that makes me bitter at fellow creators who complain about "I only have 3k subs!" Good lord, go away. Like yes you feel like you have such a tiny number. I may have "40" subs, little above, and am proud of that, but in the last week or two that number's jumped from 40 to 46 back to 41 currently. You 3k-er's who lose 6 subs doesn't do anything to your overall numbers. I also measure things largely in "views" so see how far some readers are actually reading. I expect the taper off and the people who binge, or binge and quit cause they're just consumption addicts (yes they exist, I know them personally, they just read everything and anything like junkfood and never return).
Yes, I'm happy I have at least 1 or 2 regular readers on NTN and 1 on a weird story I'm doing on the side. But honestly I'd rather if I had 40 actually active readers. Getting more than 1 or 2 likes on a new update, and at least a comment - comments are worth more to me than hearts/likes/kudos/whatever word you want to call them. It tells me if someone's actually reading the content.
This whole practice of just typing out this complaint reminds me exactly why I need to stop looking habitually at the stats page and how many reads have I gotten today? In the last hour? Since the update went live? I hate that feeling of feeling like I'm sitting on a dock fishing with no bait. (And if anyone comes at me with promote your stuff on FB, tumblr, twitter, insta, or some other social media dump hole, I will flat out ignore you because no matter how much I try to "play the game" on those sites, it doesn't pan out for me. Just hasn't. I'm in that group that finds bad luck everywhere on those sites no matter what tags and practices I do. Part of it is just the plague of being online - no one wants to sit down to read a chapter that's 5k words. No one wants to read a chapter that's 10k words. No one wants to read anything that's original.)
This is why the fact of being on tapas, a site that actually has a minority of fanfic, my story is actually doing "well". Well being, omg I have more than 15 views after 3 years, all of which were gained at the start and it's never changed since on other sites. Tapas, by comparison, is just smacking my preconceived notions in the face but I'm still left making my chapters shorter because word cap.
You people who have the 3k and fret over losing 6 subs. I feel you. I just often wonder if any of you've suffered with "just 15 views" for as many years as I have continually and still continued making your story of choice. The fact that I'm still going is just evidence that I create for myself because that idea that "no one cares" has been strongly proven to me for years. (And don't tell me to share with friends and family. Family won't read it cause they want to edit it, and friends I have are literally too lazy to read anything past a 2min article about shoes.)
ANYWAY that's enough negativity out of me.