Tapas and Webtoon are both, as platforms, pushing an agenda to read as much content as you can as quickly as you can. The rapidity of the cycled-out "new" sections, the constant new "originals", the endless deluge of content - fuck, even the endless scroll. YES, the endless scroll instead of pagination is a marketing scheme that's intended to make you read faster. These companies have years of research and trained psychologists on their marketing teams to try and turn their websites into a people-machine intended to churn out the most amount of clicks in the shortest time possible.
Artist engagement? Doesn't matter - hence things like view-counters and the rating system. Leaving artists a comment doesn't matter for ad revenue and appearing at the top of a Google search. All that matters is page hits. And a lot of them.
Because these websites are set up this way from the get-go, artists and authors are encouraged to make what we refer to as pulp. Pulp refers to a sub-genre that requires no mental effort from the reader.
Pulp:
- Relies heavily on tropes
- Makes minimal use of imagery
- Makes minimal use of subversion of genres/tropes/expectations
- Has a fairly linear story start-to-end
- Appeals to younger audiences, and to busier audiences who have less time to read in a day
- Is often a romance genre
This means that the overall quality, because of how Webtoon and Tapas are inherently constructed, takes a plunge. There are fewer stories that require critical engagement (and are thus easier misinterpreted), and the audience becomes younger. Whereas websites like AO3 (if you're underage and don't know what that is... don't go there, it's a lot of smutty fanfic) run solely on user-donations instead of ad revenue, the site isn't designed to make you read as fast as possible, and a lot of really incredible gems are found on those sites and go on to become published authors.
The websites are predatory for both author and reader, but have a monopoly over webcomics that no other site can claim to have, and have changed webcomic culture drastically. I remember as a child waiting for comics like Off-White and Skin Deep to update with one page a week... and we were happy to wait - that was the standard. Now, platforms like Webtoon expect large scrolling-format updates, sometimes several times a week, only to be consumed in a matter of minutes to even seconds.
Webtoon and Tapas are killing the literary elements of visual format storytelling, and they know it.