Follow for follow isn't the best way to promote your work

[smokesalty]

I keep seeing people doing those 'follow for follow' or 'read for read' promotional things and I can't help but think how it might not be that great for gaining a consistent reader base.

You're likely following each other because you want followers not because you actually care about the work (THIS IS NOT ALWAYS THE CASE.) I feel like it's better to have someone catching up with your comic because they're interested, not because there's something in it for them.

This doesn't mean there aren't people who are genuinely interested in your comic, I just feel like they're less likely to be there out of their own will to read your comic.

I dunno give me your opinions, I'd love to hear them.

[MizzHope]

I agree with you. I don't see it as real support as both parties want something in return. I am always in favor of genuine interest, even if it's just few.

[irresponsiblepics]

You're likely following each other because you want followers not because you actually care about the work (THIS IS NOT ALWAYS THE CASE.) I feel like it's better to have someone catching up with your comic because they're interested, not because there's something in it for them.
This doesn't mean there aren't people who are genuinely interested in your comic, I just feel like they're less likely to be there out of their own will to read your comic.

Agree with you.
When I had my comic here I had low subs but even with that I could tell there was only about 6 genuine active readers (out of around 35 subs).
The others were just sub for sub sake. Sub for sub is only for some faux popularity.
I think letting ones work speak for itself is more important.
One area Tapas could improve is actually provide a ID/stat of who is actually reading your content.
That would kerb this disingenuous behavior to a degree.

[Kaydreamer]

SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK.

Ahem.

But yes. I absolutely agree with you. Not only is sub-for-sub disingenuous, given that it's highly unlikely either person cares at all about the other person's work, it can actually screw up your placement in the algorithms which determine what's popular and trending in each genre.

If you have a small number of subs, but most read each episode you post, they leave likes, and a few of them comment, the algorithm will see that as a comic/novel which people are responding very positively to.

Conversely, if you have a large number of subs, but very few of them even care to read what you post, let alone like and comment on it, the algorithm will see your work as obviously unengaging.

It will rank your work accordingly.

Most of us here recognise this, but there are always a few new creators who fall for the instant gratification of sub-for-sub. Some will listen when you try to turn them off it. Most won't. And some get outright angry at you for suggesting they're making a mistake.

[smokesalty]

yuppp. it's way better to have a small following with high engagement then a big following with barely any interaction. It completely defeats the purpose of gaining fans if most of them don't look at your work.

[fleurravenbooks]

absolutely agree! so far i have few readers that read and comment, and im supper grateful for them, but if i have 69 subs, i would expect at least like 10 active readers lol
However, to be honest i don't regularly read either, when i have time i binge series so i can't really complain

[MK_Wizard]

I agree with you. I don't mind checking out someone's work, but I only sub to what I like and I would only want someone to sub me if they really like my work. I would never be offended if someone didn't like my work. I mean, it's cool for people to have different tastes.

[delladz]

The f4f/s4s format doesn't work for me, in fact, I'd much rather have someone grill me on why they DIDN'T sub rather than give me an empty subscribe and expect another one in return.
It's more effective for me as a creator to understand what about my content makes people tick rather than growing my numbers. In my opinion, it's also way more satisfying to have one person comment something genuine about the latest chapter rather than gaining 10 new subs in a day, even if those subs are genuine subs!

[HGohwell]

So, since the people who are actually doing this tend not to turn up on these topics, lemme lay out the more logical (or at least to them) reasons the non-beginners tend to defend it (because beginners just see everyone doing it and assume it's the done thing):

• Numbers. People just want the numbers, it feels good to have the numbers, it looks better to new readers and feels gratifying, to you and makes other people feel good when you sub to them, which sure if you know the risks and still wanna go for it sure.
• Milestones. They get unlocked at certain numbers, if you can get up to 250 doing sub for subs you can unlock ink without waiting for an event like inksgiving (nevermind that if they're all or mostly dead subs they're unlikely to actually give you ink)
• Promotion. Essentially, if bigger creators with more following do sub for sub people will look into the library of people they enjoy reading to see who else they're reading, and that way you can promote smaller creators without doing anything.

But generally, apart from people who are new here and don't know that sub 4 sub can actively hurt your ratings because of the algorithm, you're not going to convert people. The people who believe in it don't want to be told what to do and will defend their position. However, I sympathise, there's a massive number of threads for it and it also seems to be the same group of people in the all the threads, making it feel like the equivalent of just passing a ball between a group.

That said, read 4 read I don't think is in the same category. If people read your work and give it a go, there's no harm in that. More eyes on your work, even without a sub, isn't going to harm you in anyway and if they're actually reading rather than subbing without thinking, they might actually find something interesting.

[WLHcomics]

I definitely agree with you, I get people want their series to have lots of subscribers and be popular, but that's not really going to happen if you do sub for sub. I'd rather have genuine readers for my comics, then just a bunch shallow subs who don't really care about what they subscribed to.

[crowstories]

I don't participate in sub for sub because I feel like it creates a weird environment within the creators community. With that said, most of my subscribers at this point are NOT creators, and despite not having collected them via sub for sub, most of them don't engage with my work on a regular basis.

I'm not sure where the theory that having a lot of inactive subscribers will hurt you algorithmically came from, but from what I've observed, I don't think there's actually much to it. It was harder to see when I was making a comic, because there is SO MUCH competition that it's difficult to observe exactly what affects your ranking. There are fewer novels, so I've found it's easier to get a feel for how the rankings work as a novelist.

As an example, the "likes" for the episode I published last week amount to a little over 1/8th of my subscribers, which is a fairly small percentage in my opinion. However, I peaked at #4 for popular free fantasy novels, and my lowest rank (that I saw) was around #40. I don't think that my rank is exactly being tanked by the 7/8th of my subscribers who didn't read the episode.

Of course, I did have some engagement on earlier episodes as well, but I really think that the popular sections are much more influenced by "likes" than what percentage of your subscribers are active.

With that said, there's really no point to sub for sub, because unlocking ad revenue does nothing if you don't have A LOT of people actually reading your chapters.

[Kelheor]

You know the worst part? It's really hard to abandon a comic with bigger numbers if it doesn't doing too great, it's hard to accept all those people don't read it. I have never did sub for sub, but my comic got a pretty big following on WT thanks to front page featuring. Except most of subscribers haven't read it. They subbed, but either stopped reading or just never did, I don't know.
So I spent a lot of time and nerves when thinking about a revamp. "What if I never ever get this amount of subs again?" "But 90% of them are not even reading you!" "Yes, BUT WHAT if I never ever ever get this amount of subs again??"
In the end I did revamped it on a new page and most of the people that read it resubscribed, but it was not an easy decision thanks to the numbers that actually didn't meant anything to my comic.

[snailienz]

The issue resides in the concept that a lot of subs that aren't even viewing the content can make the algorithm see you poorly. 1/8th is actually pretty good, because you have to remember that the reader has to click the update on time, read it all as soon as the update happens, see the like button (at the bottom of the episode) , and click it. That seems simple but likes only do things for OUR side, and even I forget the button exists sometimes when engrossed in a cool story.

The problem comes when a lot of people sub with no intention of ever reading it for the free sub in return. Subs dont boost you at all. Views, comments, and likes do. A sub is really only important for getting eyes on the material to like and comment. Thus, a lot of empty subs will make your stats go from 1/8th to like 1/64th. That doesnt look good and also im pretty sure its set up so that people cant fake subs.

[HGohwell]

I'm not sure where the theory that having a lot of inactive subscribers will hurt you algorithmically came from

A lot of observation of trends over years. Since Tapas isn't going to release the actual algorithm we can't know for sure, but a lot of us have been watching for years and have put together theories. Specifically to do with Trending, it seems to be to do with percentage of interaction over a short period (about 24 hours). So if you have 10 subs and they all read, like and comment that's 100% engagement vs 100 subs and 10 reads, comments and likes in the same period is only 10% engagement, so looks worse to the algorithm. Of course, that's only basics and if you've got 100% engagement on 100subs vs 10subs, the larger one is likely to be higher up the rankings. But I've been Trending before with less than 50 subs.

Popular is more strictly to do with numbers overall. Trending is a lot easier to reach than Popular.

And as a general rule (I don't remember who said it first, but it's been a general "set your expectations here" sort of standard around here for a long time) only roughly 10% of reader will ever interact and even less will ever do things like financially support you.

[crowstories]

Ah, okay that makes sense -- I don't really look at trending since I realized it doesn't exist on the app.

[LadyLily]

Milestones. They get unlocked at certain numbers, if you can get up to 250 doing sub for subs you can unlock ink without waiting for an event like inksgiving (nevermind that if they're all or mostly dead subs they're unlikely to actually give you ink)

And that's what gets us newbies. When we start posting, we see this box at the bottom with a list of milestones. "25 subscribers" is the final one, so of course, we want to reach it to see what we get as a prize. After that, we have to reach a milestone of 100 subs for .. ad revenue, I think? Those of us participating in the S4S posts are usually, from what I've seen, are helping each other get those milestones. No one ever told us it would wreck an algorithm.

In my experience, we have checked each other out. I have a lot of subs that I keep as bookmarks because although I'm busy writing at the moment, I need a break sometimes and will want to rest for a while when this project is over. I'll go back and read those I've subbed.

It can be frustrating that 5 of my 31 subs actually read my work, but I have no right to complain because I'm only actively reading about 5 of the ones I sub.

Bottom line for me, personally, S4S doesn't bother me and neither do the posts. I think there are too many of those posts, but I just skim passed them now. I would love more subs, but I'm afraid of the milestone that will follow 100 LOL.

I would rather Read4Read at this point.

[JeanGuillet]

I’m sorry for the rant, but I think this is relevant to this whole discussion of getting your subs up so the algos recognize you. I’m AGAINST recommender algorithms that promote engagement as their primary success metric. I think it’s damaging to us as artists here, but in the broader sense it’s damaging to the culture as a whole, with mega platforms like Facebook and Twitter and all of tech shaping how people view the world with these recommender algorithms. I was just at a conference for developers of these algorithms, and I was absolutely stunned to see that not only is engagement the only analyzed success metric, but that ‘accurately predicting engagement’ is becoming the way a company rates the success of their algorithms.

Let’s do a bit of a thought experiment. Pavlov’s dogs. If you’re not familiar with the experiment, it showed that a dog could be trained to salivate on command with the ringing of a bell by using food as a conditioning medium. Eventually, the dog would consistently salivate with the bell ringing even when no food was involved, over and over. Pavlov won a Nobel Prize for his work. Now imagine that Pavlov is a Robot, an AI, a machine, with the goal of getting you to engage with content online. How would a machine accomplish this? It’ll look at your patterns of engagement, what ‘food’ do you like, what makes you do the required behavior? Then it will feed you more of this in order to train your responses until it can reliably predict your behavior that it has trained you to do. What does that mean? Sharing content that you like and agree with, obviously, for one. But that’s not the only way to generate engagement. It’ll share content that is outrageous to you to provoke an emotional response and thus engagement as well. I think this is causing a lot of political polarization, and it’s entirely machine driven. Remember, as long as the machine can train you to the point that it will predict your behavior, it’s satisfied its goal condition of ‘engagement’. What about non-polarizing content, maybe things that make you think? Well you’re not as likely to state an opinion and ‘engage’ with something like that, it requires thought, it takes time. Educational content is like this, thinking deeply and critically is like this. It’s not going to have the same high engagement metrics as clickbait. Obviously. Or clickbait wouldn’t be clickbait.

The recommender algorithms actively de-rank content that is thought-provoking rather than response-provoking! What are the implications for society when you have a machine that’s goal condition is fulfilled by training the humans using it to fulfill a conditioned response? The implications are absolutely staggering.

As a different metric I propose using time spent on a page as a better goal than engagement. I don’t know, would this have the same problems? AI keeps trying to make you stay online all day? (They already do that)

Fight the system, go screw with a recommender algorithm today by liking a bunch of content that you don’t actually like. Add some noise. You might actually find something you didn’t expect. Stop the spread of the singularity.

[samvv000]

As a different metric I propose using time spent on a page as a better goal than engagement. I don’t know, would this have the same problems? AI keeps trying to make you stay online all day? (They already do that)

That'd kill short-form works. And there's the fact that people read at different speeds.

The simple fact is that there's no easy solution for the algorithm. Tapas doesn't benefit by pushing lesser-known works on the front page since they'd be taking a gamble on whether or not the work is actually on the level of polish the readers would expect. And hand-picked curation on a larger scope would cost a lot more money. And eliminating algorithms altogether doesn't change the fact there's thousands of us competing for attention either way.

The only thing that comes to mind is to maybe hide the amount of likes when browsing works? Instinctively, people are less likely to click on a less-liked work, I guess.

[queen_of_spades]

Hi... I understand what you mean... I do sub people and read them... and I would like to add this situation: I found novels and comics that I really like and wouldn't find them if it wasn't for the "sub for sub" threads. I know that some of my readers started following and reading me, even commenting, because of this type of thread - they wouldn't read/find me other way. Do I really, reeeeally like everything I read? well... not exactly... but do many... and I do like their episodes and sometimes comment...

[Scarlet_Cryptid]

The only thing that comes to mind is to maybe hide the amount of likes when browsing works? Instinctively, people are less likely to click on a less-liked work, I guess.

Do people actually pay attention to this when looking for a story/comic to read? Genuine question. Because I actually never even notice the likes or subscribers before I start reading something. I'm certainly not looking for stuff with more likes/subscribers. I literally only care if the art and storytelling are good, and if they are, and I'm interested, I keep reading.

I'm sometimes actually turned off by very popular things BECAUSE they're popular... am I weird or does that happen to anyone else?