Have any of you ever experienced bullying/harassment on Tapas or the Tapas forums?

Oh whoops, I was just quoting your experience of people saying 'hi' for no reason* and people giving short responses when you try talking to them (which ends with the conversation dying) as evidence that people suck at talking (I've experienced this often myself in deviantART and other places :'D) That comment wasn't addressed to you ^^;

Oh, and now that I've actually read your comment I feel compelled to clarify that no-one has actually accused me of being negative - just that hypothetically, if someone feels like I am (without lashing out at me), I think that's completely understandable since I do talk more about negative things than positive :]

Ah alright, thanks for explaining cause I wasn't sure how to interpret what you were saying

I'm really not sure why there's anything bad about an artist relating a topic to their own work? That seems kind of normal. You wouldn't write an essay without citing examples, and when the topic is an artistic technique, it seems perfectly reasonable to both show how it's used in the work of a famous artist and how you use it in your own work. Like... I can't imagine if I went to a talk by Steven King or read or listened to an interview by Brian Lee O'Malley them talking about writing or comics in a totally abstract way without giving examples from their own work.

It's definitely a little gauche to stick your link at the bottom of a post in a non-promo thread, and yeah, I do get bugged by seeing a thread that's like "Promote yourself by [discussing how you handled a really interesting topic your work!]" because I'm there like "I don't really need to be in promo threads... and being in promo threads when you're in 4 digit subs feels a bit uncomfortable... but also this is a really interesting topic I'd like to talk about!"

The problem with the whole promo situation though, much like the subscriber envy, is hardly something the forums themselves can fix. It's partially a problem with how Tapas' UX/UI design includes a progress bar that sets everyone's "acceptable baseline performance" at 250 subs and reminds them every time they go to their dashboard that they haven't hit it, creating an urgent drive to complete the progress bar even if it's with cheesy and unhelpful methods like sub-for-sub.

...And then it's also partially an issue of people not thinking of popular comics as aspirational. Something I see a lot of on the forums and discord is users proudly proclaiming that they don't read any premium or popular series on Tapas... and then saying people ought to read their comic or novel. It screams "I'm an amateur". No professional would expect much if they pitch their work to a publisher who doesn't publish titles similar to what they want to make, and any professional with sense would look primarily for publishers who have had success publishing works similar to what they want to make. People seem to forget that Tapas IS a publisher, it's just that unlike traditional publishers who will be very picky about who or what they'll take up front based on quality and fitting their niche, Tapas will let anyone at all in, but then only promote works that fit the vibe and are up to their quality standards. So basically promotion is the means of selection rather than entry; community comics are effectively a slush pile, and Tapas will promote ones they feel fit their platform as the equivalent of a publisher putting something in print. But people miss that hidden mechanic. They think that since everyone can post, that therefore everyone has an equal chance of success on the platform, or some people even think everyone deserves an equal chance of success, like as though Tapas is a government distributing grants or something, not a publishing business that curates content for an audience.

...And so you get this weird scenario that's totally unlike comics communities I grew up on. On the Sweatdrop forums, I was keen to learn from people like Emma Viecelli and Sonia Leong, because I wanted to be like them. I wanted to make a really polished small press manga with a nice cover and then print it and put it on a table at MCM Expo like them! I wanted to use proper screentones like them and learn to do fancy text effects like them! I wanted to win national manga competitions and get published by real publishers or do freelance jobs and workshops like them too, but I understood that I had to become as good as they were at making polished looking manga to do it; the competitions and publishing and jobs were like exams to gauge my progress. On Tapas, people want to hit the numbers, but they often don't seem to want to be like the people who have hit the numbers; in fact they're often outright derisive of them.

The upshot is this community where some people feel they're owed the attention of an audience and publisher that likes content they have no interest in providing for, and that craves the success of creators it's wilfully ignorant to the value of, so they just sit there talking about themselves, bemoaning the poor taste of the userbase compared to their own, looking for other people like them for mutual support "against the system" to make their number go up, feeling bitter that the platform and its audience aren't interested in what they're selling, but with no desire to sell something they would want because they don't actually like or even appreciate or respect any of the existing popular content.

Oh yeah, I totally get wanting to be popular, but not wanting to be like the popular comics on the platform you're publishing on. Thing is, if you go down that route, you're better off treating Tapas as just a hosting site; nothing more, nothing less. Reach out to people offsite; think of yourself as an old school webcomic creator with your own website, or an indie game developer. Don't look to Tapas to give you that push, and don't measure your success by Tapas metrics like subs, comments and likes. Get people to discuss your work on Reddit, on Youtube, hell, on 4chan if you're willing to go there. Become a cultural phenomenon.

... now that I think about it, I think I've been trying to emulate indie visual novels like Katawa Shoujo and Doki Doki Literature Club. I guess it is good to look up to something; not just to their success but what they are :o

YES. This is the thing. If you have no comp titles on Tapas and don't match the vibe, it's a solid option as either free hosting while you take the weight of promotion on your own shoulders, OR as a mirror site to find those people who do end up browsing Tapas who fall outside the main audience and making them aware of your stuff and perhaps funnelling them into whatever your larger platform is, like say, your print books or a main site or similar (also the case with a lot of NSFW comics, where the heavily censored Tapas version is partially there as an advert for Patreon access to the uncensored one).
But anyone who can't name three premium Tapas comics they like, or even three comics over 10,000 subs they like probably shouldn't be looking at Tapas at their primary platform; it's probably not going to work out.

Something else I'd point out about Tapas's UI that probably makes smaller creators more number hungry is the section with views, likes, and subscriber growth.

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Yeah... I've been saying for literal years now that this UI is really unhelpful and creator-unfriendly. Your performance tracked across individual days is barely even useful if you're in the top 1% of performers. For everyone else, it really does just make you feel bad a lot of the time.

That said, if I could change a single feature, my energy would be focused on that progress bar counting up to 25/100/250. I am not a fan of that progress bar; I think it encourages an unhealthy mindset. I'd replace it with achievements for things like:

Added a cover! Added a banner! Published ten episodes! Published an episode a week for 4 weeks running! Published 50 episodes! 1 Year anniversary! etc.

That kind of thing would actually be helpful. Making people feel inadequate for not having unlocked the ability to withdraw money when they're at a sub count where they probably won't earn money unless it's inksgiving and they're active in the community is unhelpful. The focus should be on teaching people things that will actually help them grow into effective webcomics and webnovel creators: Presenting their work in a nice, finished way and updating regularly. If they hit the 100 subs and 250 subs milestones without knowing what they do by having looked it up, let that be a nice surprise!

I think the key here is that the archetypal 'successful on Tapas'-style comic is not the work they want to do, and that's why they can't look up to it. What they really want is 'to be a successful webcomic', not 'be a successful Tapas webcomic' - but their engagement metrics on Tapas is the only way they're measuring their success so they conflate those two goals.

I suspect most aspiring webcomickers do have successful works they look up to, but it's in another medium - film, anime, games, print comics, old school webcomics with their own site etc - so they cannot emulate their idols' methods one-to-one. They just gotta reflect on what they actually want - and if their interests doesn't line up with the interests of the platform they're publishing on, that's absolutely fine, but it means you have to pave your own path instead of relying on Tapas to promote you. That's what it means to be a pioneer :]

Wanted to add in this thread that all the opinions here are really insightful I even realized I'm guilty of some stuff people are pointing out like the linking the story after asking about something lol

To the person that said it's disingenuous, you see, there can be people like me that are so not used to using the forum that you just copy what others do

I like talking to others a lot, but I was imitating other threads where people did that, I didn't know it was something that was 'bad' xD I thought that's what people did just like how on instagram people use the I believe 30 tags on the pictures cause it's encouraged so... I think I'd only tell you and whoever reads this, that, before pointing to someone and assuming they're disingenuous, they could only be guilty of not knowing proper etiquette lol

So, I'd say give them the benefit of the doubt before just assuming they aren't sincere I mean, I'm guilty of those things and only reading this thread did I find out it was distasteful x'D sounds dumb but I really didn't use the forums until like some days ago so, since I know this was my mistake, I know others can do the same mistake as well, haha

I'm not saying there's not disingenuous people cause they really are those, but like, just consider there can be clueless people that don't know what they're doing isn't okay I feel kinda stupid now but I can't do much about what I already did but not do it again x'D

Soo, like, it'd be wise to give them a chance and form an opinion based on their answers XD

Being hard on others or judging them is assuming they know the same things you do and assume they do it on purpose lol. But I get where you're coming from, and I'm actually thankful I read your opinion and others with like-minded comments to learn better etiquette

Honestly I think a lot of things people consider 'tacky', 'self-absorbed' or 'disingenuous' are perfectly harmless and unobstructive. For instance, posting a link to your story at the end of unrelated comments reminds me of forums I used to hang out on where we'd have these things called 'signatures'; just a little space where you can put whatever you want and it'll appear at the end of every comment you make. Lots of people used it for self-promotion, and it didn't hinder the forum experience at all (for me, at least). But here it stands out since not everyone does it, so it's considered 'tacky'.

Something that would be genuinely obnoxious imo would be to verbally ask people to check out your comic as a run-on sentence at the end of a piece of relevant discussion. Because at first glance, our brains register it as more text and thus potentially more relevant discussion, so we'll actually read it instead of just scrolling past it like we would a link, which is visually distinctive from normal text. So this tricks us into using our mental energy in a way that plugging a link doesn't, and that's what makes it obnoxious :'D

It is good to know what's considered proper etiquette though even if some like me don't agree with the usefulness of some of the etiquette 'rules'; I completely understand being scared of people thinking we're disingenuous and disliking us :'D And yeah, totally agree that people should assume ignorance before disingenuous intent. Hanlon's Razor and all that

Yesss, I find it inoffensive as well, more so since I've been on deviantart and there was this line of text like the one you're speaking of XD but if it's going to make me seem disingenuous I rather not keep doing it, haha, I'm making an effort to engage with others so I really wouldn't like that hindering me ú_ù

I think I'm only going to promote on the promote threads about dunno, share your last page or if you just updated then promote yourself XD and keep other threads without a link so people don't misunderstand me.

I'm actually glad I found out about this just a few days after using the forums or it would have been embarrassing in the long run XD