Tales of a young Stepah
I've been eying this thread for a while so I think it's finally time I share my thoughts. As a person whose recently joined these forums and barely started uploading on Tapas maybe my opinion doesn't hold as much weight but forums isn't what I expected. I knew coming in that most people here weren't going to be readers so I mainly had the intention to build a name in a community of artist and share art rather than spam promoting like it seems like other people spend a lot of time doing here.
Even in this thread it seems like a lot of people didn't get the message and started promoting here.
My Experience Today
I opened forums hoping to share an experience or share some art but the first 15 threads were all "like for like" or "sub for sub". I enjoy using these forums and looking over what people share, its a less toxic reddit/twitter space so as a new user it is kind of unfortunate that I came in when this all became essentially a spam promotion slop, it probably won't get fixed and from reading comments the discord is kind of the same.
Solution
My one and only solution (its not a good one) is if Tapas deletes the promotion category and blocks off any links that lead to your webcomic/novel or any other webcomic sites. Now, say you try to promote on the off topic threads or art threads, then your post won't go through (I know people will try to find other ways to promote but it's a small solution).
Now, if people truly want to promote their work, there should be channels divided in genres for every story theme and there's two different sections (1 for Comics/ 1 for novels). Action will have their channel, fantasy will have their own, etc. You're only allowed to post there about once a week on a Sunday and everyday throughout the week peoples stories get rotated that way no one person "is at the top"(it will still be user friendly and people can still leave things like comments).
After the end of the week the channel gets wiped and new stories will be able to be promoted. (You would only be able to post on the channel 1-2 times a month) I really think that they should make it so if you do want to promote in these channels you need to have some sort of activity on the forums site (Maybe add leveled roles like in discord where every time you level up it unlocks a new feature) that way it stays alive and active amongst creators and people don't flood here to just spam promote and leave.
Final thoughts
I'm thankful to @axelruler for bringing this up and starting this discussion. I really do hope things change or I find the small circles of people who really care about this space and use it for community purposes. I work and draw a lot so I'm not able to be here long and it seems like there are a lot of awesome and supportive people here who have a lot of talent. I hope everyone has a good stay and stay blessed!
