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

[darthmongoose]

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!

[TheLemmaLlama]

I mostly use Tapas as place to dump some of my writing. I usually never thought of any of my work as marketable friendly. So I guess a good advice for people is to find a market who would like your work rather than trying to get broad audience.

Yeah same; it's just a dumping ground for me atm and I plan to only ratchet up the marketing once I've accumulated a solid backlog Though I guess my advise would be more along the lines of "actually do broaden your audience and look beyond the market of the platform you're posting on. Just because you're posting on Tapas where people like shiny romance comics, doesn't mean you have to stick to marketing your work to the Tapas crowd" :]

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relevant video wrt the Tapas interface and how it emphasized engagement metrics:

[smokesalty]

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's wild to me that people don't look to other people who are successful in the work they want to do. They're successful for a reason, and looking at how they achieved this through observation is such a good learning tool! Tapas doesn't just promote people randomly- they need the stuff they promote to be polished, good looking and interesting to people on the site. There's a certain standard set for comics which are promoted.

I feel like when looking at your own work for so long, it can be hard to see how a random person stumbling upon the comic will see it, which is why I think looking to other people's work can be so helpful as a guide to what readers engage in. Ignoring these series is really hindering these people more than anything in my opinion

[TheLemmaLlama]

It's wild to me that people don't look to other people who are successful in the work they want to do.

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 :]

[Enthriex]

Yesss, those numbers are really jarring loool, I majorly ignore them since I even find it funny in like it says "it was 2 yersterday" and I'm like oh shut upp who cares xDD or like, so what I have 30 today and yesterday was 35, at least it's getting views in someway or another hahah

I wish you could toggle it indeed.

But yess, it does a disservice to people u_u

[Enthriex]

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

[TheLemmaLlama]

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

[Enthriex]

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

[system]

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