Interesting!
I'm also from Wattpad, and this is my first time in Tapas. I shifted because the wattpad forums are now gone.
I just wanna know if you have an opinion of posting the same story here and on wattpad? Is that a bad thing? Because that's what I was about to do.
It depends on how high your hopes are for Watty 2020 or HQ's attention for Stars/Paid. If you want to see if you have a chance at Watty, you will need to wait until they announce the results and you didn't win. Posting on Tapas disqualifies your book from Watty, and gives you a big disadvantage for Stars/Paid, since Wattpad wants exclusivity.
What i did, I discontinued my book on Wattpd (didn't delete it) and posted links to Tapas in the last chapter. I didn't think the book would be able to win a Watty next year, because it is a romance, and I gave up all hope to become a Star/be invited into Paid a bit earlier this year. I still have 4 book entered into Watty, but I don't expect to win it, so... I kindda cleared my desk before starting on Tapas.
I do regret moving of Wattpad because it used to support a slightly wider variety of genres than Tapas, but right now nothing gets read there.
I'm also from Wattpad. I actually made the move before the forums shutdown and I'm glad i did i because im getting a good response here vs being on wattpad forums! BL is what I mostly write so I gained a lot of viewers on this platform.
I've just deleted everything I'd posted on Wattpad, because it really seems like a useless effort at this point. I'm lucky that I'd only been there for a month in total, so I didn't get in too deep. However, I think that even with the forums gone, people who had been there longer might still do okay, since they'll have made personal connections with people and gotten involved in engaging with certain stories.
I remember how active you were on the Wattpad forums! Read for reads were pretty much the only way to get anything for a story that didn't get extremely lucky, and it also wasn't for the fact that you might gain new readers that way. The entire read for read system honestly grossed me out, where everyone is hinting "please give me lots of stars" and "please continue reading this" but it was against the rules to outwardly say so, so everyone just clicked and vaguely commented as they skimmed each other's chapters. It felt like a postmodern game of chicken.
And the truth that stories simply get no reads outside of read for reads and other promotion... is really aggravating to accept. There was zero discoverability on the site because the tagging algorithms were broken, and continue to be broken it appears. From all the hustle you did, the fact your stories did not ever break out is the biggest evidence of how bad Wattpad was, in my opinion.
It's not like Tapas is a BIG site--for novels, Royal Road and Webnovel.com still outpace it significantly--but stories actually have a chance on here whereas there was just no feasible way to succeed besides accidents and awards.
Ooohhh well, i just started writing a few months ago so my story is far from finished. I have no hope for the wattys hahahaha.
Thank you so much for your insight. It gives me a lot to think about <3
Cripes, I'd never even heard of Webnovel as another option though, having just checked it out, its genre options are hilariously narrow ... esp. for female readers it seems. So that's Mystery writers like me stuffed but, being 2020, naturally they will have polled all female readers and confirmed these are the only things they're interested in ... right? 
Webnovel/Qidan is a Chinese-owned company that follows gender segregation very closely and also has some ridiculously shady business practices. It's not recommended for any authors. But sadly it's the second-biggest web fiction site behind Wattpad and ahead of Royal Road. (According to Alexa, webnovel is rank #12,000ish while Royal Road is 19,000ish. Interestingly, Tapas.io is still only #22,000ish when it's got webcomics too...)
Whoa - what is wrong with these people?? While undoubtedly there are several contributing factors, with attitudes like this it's little wonder we've witnessed such a devaluing of creative content over recent years. Sad
Well, it would be eligible next year, but if you’re not after Watty at all, then no worries.
I am still active on Wattpad, though not to the same degree. I have books I follow there and a club I am in. I do like having a community; I need the immersion and conversation with the other writers to write.
I almost never read what doesn’t look appealing for r4r, but the problem was that in the last few months the algorithm broke to the point when r4r wasn’t enough to circulate the books. Before, doing a bunch of them and getting reading lists add-ons improved the book’s visibility.
Now the attitude on Wattpad is, ‘we are an archive, find your readers on social media, we can’t help you unless we scouted your next YA Masterpiece and invited you into Stars/Paid’
Royal Road has the best interface, but the rating system and extremely narrow range of what they would read there makes it harder to succeed there. If I could write the stuff they love there, I would.
But I am a more bookish writer and I love stronger women & more intellectual men characters than they prefer
Writing communities are good. I usually do that kind of chatting on Discord these days, though Wattpad was nice sometimes for meeting other authors.
And I noticed about R4R. I got at least a thousand views on one of my short stories in 2018 through maybe 3 or 4 of them, but then when I had longer series start in 2019, no matter what I did, the stories couldn't break in anywhere and couldn't gain even a single reader or addition to a reading list. It drove me crazy, especially for the final story a few months ago.
Wattpad actually said that? They're using AO3-style "archive" philosophy as an excuse for their broken search system they haven't fixed? Actually, AO3 is a very good archive because its search options are so wide you can find pretty much anything you are looking for. Wattpad... does not.
Royal Road is a VERY narrow site and the readership is often, um, negative, but I've actually found some really OK success on there with stories that don't fit into the niche at all. My fantasy romance story has 32,000 views and most readers love it. Granted, it has 423 views per chapter which is like 1/4 of what "successful" stories do on there, but seeing as it's not even remotely close to an action adventure story with an angsty young male protagonist, I was very satisfied. I've been trying, basically begging, the staff of the site to do efforts to expand its readership past its mostly-teenage-boy demographic, but it hasn't worked so far lol
Tapas seems like the best mix, though it's still smaller than all the others. Another small but very new site is neoread1. I don't post there myself but it has a good design for readers, and importantly an app.
I'm not gonna demonize Wattpad since ya'll did it for me. But as it stands, it was the second platform where I posted my original stories which generated lots of views. I have to credit WP since I've got readers there whom I managed to convince to join me in Tapas. So there is no leaving for now for the sake of my readers.
What I currently do is to give my Tapas readers the privelage to read new chapters ahead of WP. This is to give due advantage to my readers who followed me from WP.
I didn't use the WP forums until this year. Knowing that it was taken down recently, I do not have any opinion about their forums.
I prefer an open nature of the forums to the closed nature of Discord, but yes, I stayed with my Wattpad-based writing groups on Discord.
For RoyalRoad, I apparently overdid it with angst/noir for the audience there. But it got some subs/comments on its own & I was pantsying it, so can't complain. One day I might rewrite it with a better plot structure and streamline the worldbuilding. I liked the protagonist and the mythology.
Hey, I am also from Wattpad and also writing a M/M romantic fantasy! https://tapas.io/series/The-Claimed-A-Clash-of-Copper-and-Gold4
Totally agree with all of your assessments there. And I personally love reading M/M romantic fantasy (in addition to writing it), so I'm going to subscribe to your story. 
I can say that's not entirely true for some books. I have several books over 100K on Wattpad. A couple did continue to do well after hitting the 100k threshold, others died. Especially after they changed to the tag ranking system. That basically killed my reads over there. Before the tag system I was fairly consistently ranking in the smaller genres and getting a good amount of steady reads. Nothing amazingly spectacular, but steady. Then they switched to that system and everything went mostly poof. I probably have no right to really complain since I still had a small but loyal fanbase, but it really was night and day between the ranking systems for me.
The trick I think is in the engagement. I've never been the writer that gets a ton of comments, in fact my readers are typically silent readers but I did notice a difference in the books that had decent engagement vs the ones that had nothing. The ones that had nothing were the ones that died a lot faster upon completion regardless of them making it to 100K reads. I had one that hit 100K reads 2 years ago and it was only at 106k with no comments when I removed the chapters from Wattpad earlier this year while I try to decide if I'm going to stay there or leave completely.
It's hard to decide to leave there because I do have a fan base. They're just not a fan base who will follow me off Wattpad LOL so with a series still pending a third book, I do kinda want to hang on so I don't leave those readers hanging if/when I finally write it.
I don't see why it's a bad thing. The 2 books I have on here are both on Wattpad. Granted they're doing much better on Wattpad, but I'm also more established there and haven't really done what I need to do to get a steady fan base over here. But there's really nothing wrong with cross promoting. Unless like Domi said you wanted to enter the Watty's, but since it appears you don't then go wild!
Plenty in there for me to digest I think ...
