The algorithm on this site is super dumb

@darthmongoose Kate Holden
Tue, 08 Aug 2023 10:38:29 +0000

@darthmongoose wrote:

LostKelp:

I mean, I get that the reason we see all these shit "villainess ceo buzzword buzzword faux anime artstyle" is because korean companies pumped a bunch of money into advertising translations of their already successful webcomics (as opposed to giving their artists more than 20 cents).

Actually it's more like... a massive Korean company bought Tapas, and expects a return on their investment as well as to use Tapas as a platform for promoting their popular content to a primarily North American audience that seems to have plenty of demand to meet their supply. If you're ever on Tapas social media, I recommend looking at the comment responses when they post about these Korean series, and how many people are excited for them and asking for other favourites to be localised. As much as we indies want to believe this content is being forced on an audience that doesn't want it... it's unfortunately the case that actually there's a lot of demand, and we're just outliers. Clearly this strategy is paying off for Tapas, or else these series they promote, which cost money to read, wouldn't get so many subs.

I agree that yes, it would be good if the algorithm for recommendations was improved. For example, people who like Heartstopper should be being recommended stuff like Charity Case; it's just good business. I've suggested before that if we had multi-genre-tag search functionality, this would really help with this. It'd make searching much easier, because you could filter to say "action " AND "comedy" to narrow things down to just what you like. It could then also be applied to recommendations, similar to how netflix works, so if a person tends to like things tagged "BL" and "Horror" it recommends more things with that combination of tags.

The problem is, I don't know how, from a programming perspective, you'd get the algorithm to recommend a person who reads small indie comics more small indie comics. You'd probably need a sophisticated system that takes into account not just genre tags, but community/premium status and size (but discounted works that haven't updated in a long time so it doesn't recommend dead series). It's a lot of work for series Tapas probably views as "low priority" because promoting something already popular that people will pay for is going to be an easier way to make money than using the same advertising space promoting something totally new that might generate a trickle of ad revenue in some cases.

I think it'd be nice if they at least took some steps to make indie comics a bit more discoverable and to help readers discover more similar content, because it would help more breakout hits like Heartstopper to occur organically and ultimately make them money, generate good press, and secure the site's future growth. It would require some investment, but I believe it would be worth the upfront financial cost to make the site just generally more viable for indies to make an income on.

...But that might be difficult it the people who own the business are very set on quarterly profits and pushing licensed content.