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!
Hence, 'likely'. I don't think my expected lifespan is enough to see any of my books to hit 100K reads on Wattpad, I gave up even on 50K I coveted so much. Fingers crossed you get a lot of engagement here and on the Wattpad.
I won't lie, only reason I hit that 100k threshold over there is luck. Lots and lots of luck LOL When I first started I was doing the same shameful read for read and getting little results until I finally gave up on them after getting screwed big time doing a massive read and getting nothing in return. I met a like-minded friend on the forums and at some point I must've said something about my book that peaked her interest because she decided to read it after being very adamant it wouldn't be her cup of tea. Well she apparently fell in love with it and submitted it to be featured (back when that was still allowed and getting featured actually did something for a person. Now it seems like it's a mixed bag there) and that's how the first book exploded.
I really don't think I'd have the fan base I have today without her. But each newer book did get fewer and fewer reads, especially if I branched outside of my usual fantasy genre.
I have been on Wattpad for a while but never used it much until now.
So I never got to the experience the Wattpad forums other than I lurked over there. I just posted my story over there while ago. It's a shame I never got the full experience.
Don't feel bad. I did get the opportunity to befriend some great people who were tons of help with my work, but over time it became a popularity contest. A lot of good writers got their stuff buried or had to barter with know-it-alls to only get a handful of reads and some not so helpful comments.
I second that @cherrystark. I've been on Wattpad for years and the increasing competition between writers isn't looking good. Instead of helping one another up like they did more before, it's more a popularity contest. And only after you break a certain threshold you can consider yourself having a stable reader base.
It's rough -- one of the reasons I decided to move platforms.