That's true but I definitely see those seeking validation in unhealthy ways more and is why it's the focus in my rant. But it was not my intention to box all artists into this, but it is at least a loud majority
This I think is the most valuable insight. Harsh, but kinda true. ^^; (this is coming from an artist with a very big and very fragile ego)
And in addition to that...artists are usually kind of focused on their own work, especially on the platform they're posting on. I do 90% of my browsing on the platforms where I post the least (i.e. Twitter) and very little on the platforms where I post the most (i.e. DeviantArt).
So...yeah. You really do want to source most of your audience from the people who aren't artists themselves, at least not in the same medium. Sub-for-sub isn't likely to get you that, so if numbers are what you're after, it won't really help much in the long run.
Oho.. what a sensitive topic that I need to stop my drawing time to comment on.
This, I agree. I never knew there's a sub for sub between artists before joining Tapas forum.
As a new creator, What I do when I see this? yup, just follow it. I totally think this is how Tapas work.
Of course, before reading this thread, I never know there's a similar thread ranting about sub for sub.
I think for a senior artist who doesn't like this better to talk to the forum admin.
Since @orbitkatart here just speaks his/her mind and not trying to put down any artist., I, who already did this sub for sub is not feeling down and I hope other artists (especially new like me) who did the same, not feeling down too. I'm sure all newbie just like me, we just follow the seniors, right?
Oh, btw, it's happened too, twice, some seniors, use newbie like me, telling subs for subs, then they unsub after got the sub. How about that?
Next, I see someone said about validation, even I automatically follow this sub for sub thread, I never once think this is validation or trying to lie to myself. I already know this is not a real reader, so I never hope they read my comic after sub nor I celebrate with the numbers or say thank you card for the sub. Is a deal anyway.
I already know, before posting, this gonna be hard( find reader), and I think my real follower is who visits my blog. I don't know about others, but what I always checked first, it's not Tapas/webtoon, but blog.
I believe everyone's goal, in the end, to see the possibility for monetization. Tapas limit to do this is lower than webtoon, so I can understand for people doing this. Make a comic is a labor, so, who doesn't want to get a little bit of a return?
Thus, until now, not change yet, I view Tapas as a platform to connect with other artists, not to sell the comic yet, since I know better than anyone, I still need many things to learn. I still do, learning, and I think making comics is a great practice for an artist, I see my art take a shape during this period of time.
I understand the stress for you who do this for a living or professional, or spend money to make it, but don't make mistakes, even though I'm still learning, my effort is not a joke either. I literally draw every day until morning, I started to eat in front of the computer, never have time to watch tv/movie/Netflix anymore. I only watched random artists' videos on how to draw this, how to draw that. Probably many of you do that.
Conclusions:
I don't mind sub for sub, because:
I saw Tapas as an artist hub (Just be real, no one true reader for me here).
"wow, so many artists here, but I will forget them, no button to add friends." Easy, sub for sub.
Of course, you can always, add each other SosMed for an alternative. I am not really SosMed person, I barely open my Fb account, and I only started making other SosMed specifically because I started a comic.Educated me that art is very broad.
Just a few months ago I was only a reader, and my rule to pick the comic, art looking good then story.
I don't even try to click a comic with the art that not up to my style. I bet most people do this. Even with good art when I found the story boring, I will just stop reading it. I think this is a fact that everybody knows.
But, with 'sub for sub', it's educated me to give changes equally to comic/novel before judging it. I trying to read everyone's comic that I sub, and surprisingly I even found a story that I curious about, even the art not my style.
note: I promised to give it a try not promised to always read it.related number 2, with sub for sub, I indirectly insist people read my comic first, then I can see how much who keep reading. It's like a survey. I like it if they give comments, critic or feedback too, since I have no one to do this in the real-life, I need this at least online. This way, I know which part the reader notices my mistakes.
Disclaimer: This is my state of mind for now. 'Mind' is a very fickle one, so I might change my mind on one or two my statements here in the future, I don't know. I think there's no shame in that. That's a very human thing.
So folks, I just stopped by to share my 2 cents and now off to draw. 
I don't find any of this advice harsh, just true. When you're begging for subs with a promise to sub to others - you gain nothing. I do think a lot of us are guilty of focusing on the numbers. My brother (who is also a writer) pointed this out the other day: When you crave numbers... When you reach your goal? You simply will do nothing but crave an even bigger goal. But what is the real end goal?
I personally am subbed to a lot of creators because I like to show my support, however small that may be. That's just how I am - what other creators are doing fascinates me because of the immense diversity in genres and subjects people tackle. I don't expect any of them to sub me back nor do I ever ask. And most of them don't check me out. Which is fine! They don't owe me anything and my stuff is pretty niche anyways. I have been lucky, however, to gain friends here on the forums who are genuinely interested in my stuff. That's enough to make me personally happy. Even if it was just one person, for me, that'd be enough. I decided awhile ago I didn't want to get corrupted in the race for popularity like I've seen happen to others.
Someone said it!
Have you ever read Dead Souls by Gogol? I feel like it's a great example of what's going on.
You'll have so much subscribers, but does that number matter when your reads are significantly less than the number that it presumably should be?
If you feel like you want to do sub for sub, do it, I am not discouraging you. You do what you want and feel like.
When I first started publishing my novel I did it too. Because I wanted to find some good works I could read and support and because I hoped someone would feel the same for my novel. But with time I felt like it did me no good. Because I felt like my goal for people to get the message of my novel wasn't happening. Like your stuck in libmo. You want to continue with your work, but your voice is a voice in a desert.
Sub for sub in terms of gaining readership is basically useless. I do think making connections with other creators on here is very good, but it's better to join a discord server or something.
Pretty much the only creator connections I've made from promotional threads were threads for really hyperspecific content (like, post your gay werewolf medieval fantasy comics!) where there was already going to be an automatic connection.
I actually disagree, true you gain in numbers, and not so much on readers, but a small percentage turn out actually to be readers. and it helps your work to be trendy or popular where actual readers can find you easier. Numbers are useless for your satisfaction as an author, but they help you to reach your end game.
I agree. The whole pointlessness of it aside, I don't want dead subs, and I don't want people who don't enjoy my work to some degree. I can understand that sub for sub is tempting, especially when you're starting out and have very few followers, but it's a temptation that I believe writers and artists should avoid.
I'm sort of for read-for-read though, because when I do it (rarely), I make sure to make it clear that no one owes the other person a sub or a follow. Read-for-read for the purpose of critique is okay, and if they want to continue reading because they like it, that's cool.
I want to start with: I get why people sub for sub. I've said it a lot of times before and I'll say it again, I am NOT a fan of that progress bar on the Tapas dashboard, and that's as somebody who climbed past it within my first few months. I think it's horrible to place a big burden of expectation of what is "succeeding" onto developing artists who should be working on having fun, keeping going to build their stamina for outputting pages and making friends. My first ever webcomic had like... maybe 30 readers tops (probably less) and I'd have felt really demoralised if that was shown as less than a third of the progress bar permanently stuck mostly unfilled. I hate that bar and I can see why it would push anyone to want to gather subs, because hell, I was definitely not immune to it.
I'm friends with a number of people whose comics have thousands of subs, so I completely get what it's like to look at the numbers and to feel like you're underperforming, and game-ifying that feeling is really kinda thoughtless on Tapas' part, especially now the site has removed or reduced the effectiveness of many of the means for works to get discovered (like pretty much removing Trending, moving Staff Picks halfway down the app, changing the Popular algorithm to focus on recent likes....).
The reason I will always, always say "don't do sub for sub" is that it undermines your ability to see if your marketing is working. If you can't drop a picture of your comic, or the cover and blurb for your novel in a place and see an uptick in people checking out and subbing to your series, it could mean one of three things:
You need to choose better marketing material, make a better banner, thumbnail, cover and/or blurb. Maybe this one doesn't read well at a distance because it's not high contrast enough or too busy, Maybe the image itself doesn't look interesting enough and needs to focus on something more visually interesting. For example, my banner used to be just the logotype title of the series on a white background. It had low clicks when I posted it around. I changed the banner to also include the characters from the cover and the clicks and subs from posting it went up, because it was more visually interesting and made it clearer what the comic contains in terms of art style and tone.
You're posting your marketing material in the wrong place for the audience you want. Some comics do great on twitter, others better on insta and some do best on Reddit. Just overall we know from interviews that Tapas' readerbase skews heavily female aged 18-24, so if your work is aimed outside of that bracket, you'll naturally have to lower your expectations for what "performing well" looks like and see if there are better places to host your work. Some comics do better on webtoon, for example.
This is the unpleasant one... Your work might... actually... still have some room for improvement (owch). Try the first two bulletpoints first, please! But if a work is really struggling, it might be that there are issues with things like readability or pacing.
The key thing to look for here, whether your readers came from sub-for-sub or organically, is actually comments. Are people reliably commenting on your episodes about what the characters are doing and what's happening in the plot? Are they speculating about what will happen next? If your comments are like that, you know the readers you do have are engaged, so it's probably more the case that you need to look into how and where you're advertising so you can find more engaged readers.
If you're almost never getting comments and the ones you get (especially ones that aren't from your BFFs who you regularly talk to about your characters on discord or similar, their comments can draw on external elaboration of details you might be omitting in your actual comic or novel) are vague and reference surface elements like a particular panel... that's where you should start to ask the question: "Are people actually struggling to follow and get engaged with this comic? Are there problems with the art or text readability, or maybe I didn't establish the characters clearly enough, or maybe the pacing is dragging and there isn't enough for readers to talk about?"
on a sub to sub I actually find little masterpieces. Is a good way of the promo. The community of tapas is awesome. And I might not read your work right away but eventually, I will. Plus I do Collab works, and sometimes, I check who would have interest in my sub to participate such as (Tapas)bits.
On one of the tread I discover this masterpiece:
That I can't stress enough how good it is.
I would never find it, if the author was not just trying to how its number
I said it before and I'll say it again. Sub for sub is a toxic way to build your story and audience... Because, well let's be honest, there's nobody there to support you with that.
IF that's all you do. From a marketing standpoint however, and when you have a plan, it can work. Think major companies who buy followers. Is it scummy? Yeah, i don't think buying followers is a good thing, neither am I forgiving them for it, but it does work. In a sense, sub for sub is a much more innocent version of that. It's just us petty creators inflating our numbers somewhat in the smallest way possible.
Sub for sub is bad for you when that's all you do, BUT if you can balance it with healthy read for reads in the beginning, and exchanging feedback, promotion, etc... Sub for sub is really just a small exchange in it all. Is a reader going to mind that a writer did a big "no-no" sub for sub with another creator? No. The sub number is always false because even readers who subscribes are very likely to ignore your story for a huge chunk of time until they forget or unsub themselves.
But from a psychological stand point, having an inflated number of subscribers helps, because then a new reader is more likely to subscribe if there is already a big group there. It's the mob mentality. This is why it is also smart to do read for reads/feedback for feedback with other creators because they can leave comments on your story. That encourages a reader to leave a comment too, because again, they won't feel like they are stepping on territory nobody else did. They wanna feel hidden but be supportive too.
I disagree with the toxic because you always end up checking who you subbed, and numbers go up and down and up again.I think is a good way to help each other, to get a better ranking, and actually get readers.
I call it toxic in the beginning to point out that yes it can be, and usually is toxic. However, when done right, it can be helpful... Most of my comment is actually saying the opposite of it being toxic... Just read the full comment...
The only reason sub-for-sub happens on these forums is because people are aiming for that 250 milestone so they can make some money (ink) on their novels/comics. THAT is honestly the only reason it keeps on happening.
I am highly amused one might think it is the quality of the art or novel, while more often than not it's about competing with the algorithm, who updates the fastest so they can be seen in trending. It's dance of numbers, rarely true interest.
I should know, my novel hit high numbers but I cannot for the life of me understand why (or how haha!) that happened. Why did y'all sub if you're never going to read my work? I'm still trying to solve that mystery.
I do agree that some of those subs will never touch your work, but others eventually will. For example when I did the project (tapas)bits I read works that are far away from my personnel taste, and followed the same back. I was following since it was easier to bookmark what and how i read it. btw submissions are still open if anyone wants to join XD
Well in that case I can say that I disagree with your point. Always checking numbers is actually the part that I would call toxic. And actual sub for sub doesn't help in rankings unless you get like a really big amount really fast. In this sense, likes, comments, reads are much more important than the superficial sub count. My point was to say that sub count helps for the uninitiated to subscribe too, but in a sense, that doesn't help in itself with engagement. It's a combination of all these factors that are necessary... And man, am i starting to feel like I sound like my marketing teacher from high school 
Anyways, Tl:Dr, if you're doing sub for sub, don't let that be the only thing you are doing. Balance it and don't overdo it. Reads>likes>subscribers>comments, but even more important are cover>writing>story for a good base to promote. It's tiring but it's best to keep all of these in mind and not be focused on one thing only. Well, all of this, IF your goal is to have big numbers. Writing just for the fun of it is also a very valid way to express yourself on these platforms. In my case, I would say it's a combination of the two. I love writing but I'm also a freak into marketing, so I like to see what I can do with my story, while also engaging with my second favorite hobby and helping it reach more people.
That is not what i said. Check about (Tapas)bits and you better have a notion why I follow everyone whiteout discrimination
Views matter more than subs for me.
Sub means you have to be an already established user of the platform. And people CBA with that, making a new account learning how to navigate etc. People might only want to see what you have and for that, making an account is too much of a hassle.
Talk to your audience on social media.