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

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

Yes people definitely unconsciously (and probably even consciously) click on work with higher numbers because the common wisdom is that if a lot of people like something, then its probably something the individual would like too. When all of your pals are watching a show in a genre you like, you're probably going to be inclined to watch that show and enjoy it.

I also think there's a lot value in seeing what pulls in numbers from a creator stand point if that's your goal!

I know a lot of creators who are like this too and I think it says more about the creators than the works. I definitely remember being in that headspace myself!

You're absolutely right. It doesn't matter what platform it is; sub for sub or follow for follow is not a good way to grow your platform. Personally, I'll only really follow someone back (or anyone in general) if I like they're work or find it interesting. I avoid sub for sub posts whenever I scroll through new posts on the forum. It's just not worth it

Sub for sub is so important because creators need a set number of subscribers to unlock donation support, ad revenue, and in the past Premium submission eligibility. I think if these things were lowered a little bit, we would see less egregious examples of sub for sub activity. This is speaking as someone who has zero stake in the game because they long passed those thresholds, but I only passed the final Premium threshold (no longer around) after getting a site feature. It was really hard to get subscribers naturally for my first book.