We don’t have enough promotion threads

Preventing spam is the likely cause for the app sub threshold, but it still raises the following questions for me:

• I wonder why they're only hidden from the app's fresh section and not the websites? Logically if new series were hidden on both they would have practically no way to gain traction but it's still curious.

• I wonder why it is that a larger platform like Webtoons can afford to not have such a restriction in place then? That may very well just come down to them having more staff to catch problematic content, or maybe more users who consistently report it (thus making it easier to find)?

Either way wish it wasn't in place so newbies had a little better shot at finding their audience I was lucky and managed to pass the threshold with both of my series relatively quickly via forum networking (the first time) and having a previous readership/other social media networking (this time), but Tapas is small enough a platform that getting over 15 can be hard without outside marketing if you're also not getting your chances on Fresh Obviously a lot of creators know that outside marketing and networking is a good idea anyways (hence all of the promotion threads, per this thread's topic), but as this threshold isn't detailed anywhere on the website I would imagine a lot of creators are left scratching their heads as to why it's so hard to grow beyond like 5 or 10 subs lol

For my part, the wide majority of the animosity I partook in, or witnessed, was because of the outdated advice that was repeatedly being offered my first few years here. It didn't reflect any of the changing situations at Tapas at the time...or now.

Being told, over and over, that being active on the forums, doing jam comics, and such was the key to success was no longer working then and it isn't working now. Even the shrinking front page space we're fighting for now isn't as effective as it was a few years ago. These are modern problems for small level creators...and we're not finding modern solutions.

I've known one or two premium creators, and one thing they all have in common besides being really really lovely is that they all worked super hard on publicity at one point or another. But, [anecdotal evidence] I've known people to put in several times the same effort on products of equal value and achieved a fraction of their success, and that upsets me.

...

I anticipated this point:

here:

...just to elaborate a bit, I'm basically suggesting that next to 'Popular', 'Binge', 'Fresh' etc - not even on the front page - an additional tab exists listing comics sorted according to the algorithm I just described, which would only be populated by comics that are clearly putting in a lot of work, but are not getting recognised. An 'Undiscovered' tab.

Would this end up with "Sanic" levels of content as you implied in the post you linked?
Honestly, I don't believe it would. I don't think the shitposters of Tapas put in that much effort relative to the folks who really deserve to be seen, but aren't being.
I get that there are massive massive issues with effectively trying to quantify 'effort' based on someone's update schedule. But, I believe the benefits of this solution would outweigh that:

• At its heart, a high ranking under an 'Undiscovered' tab would be something creators could achieve that did not rely on the 'luck' of attention-seeking. Literally every means of gaining audience relies to some extent on luck. Just one place where this wasn't the case, even if it were hidden away, would be such an improvement.

• If nothing else, the tab would show different comics, that would not be easy to find anywhere other than 'Fresh'.

• The very nature of an 'Undiscovered' tab would have it that the things at the top probably wouldn't stay there very long as they attracted attention.

• Because of this, it wouldn't be a substitute for hard work publicising, it would just be "another chance". I get the impression that all some folks want is "just another chance", and that just having that might lessen the need they feel to promote their work in places some folks would rather they didn't.

• It wouldn't even have to appear on the front page. [anecdotal evidence] People who want 'undiscovered' things are happy to take a few clicks to find them if they know that it can be done. Compare this with my recent exercise writing music as gifts for creators on Tapas for a year where I had to scroll through Fresh for hours on end every time I wanted to find a new comic.

• The very existence of an 'Undiscovered' tab would address this kind of sentiment:

An 'Undiscovered' rating would not have this issue.
I'm no statistician, so feel free to call me out on this... but:
In order to calculate a series' consistency, the metric would need to take into account the rate of change of the average length of time between updates. In order to calculate a statistically useful average (let alone rate of change of the average), a comic would need to have some form of consistency for a significant length of time. As a result, a series' consistency rating would change slowly. So, new series would rise to the top of the tab very slowly, making it very easy to human-moderate them.

Additionally, can Tapas not just require users to declare a comic as a fan comic upon creating their series, so that ads can be prevented from displaying alongside them? I used to help moderate an old writing platform that implemented that change in that vein while I was there - it seemed to convince several grumpy copyright-demons to back off.

I considered the lying problem.
I don't think users have any incentive to lie.
If Tapas made it possible to filter any tab/search result to 'fan works only', and replace 'genre' with 'fandom' when publishing fan works, it would make fan works significantly easier to find. It would be within the interests of fan creators to tag their works properly, as then the people looking for them could find them much more easily.
As such, it would not be unreasonable to make incorrectly labelling fan content against Tapas' Ts+Cs.
It would also be easier for copyright holders to locate fan works of their IPs and request their removal. By 'burying' them as it does presently, Tapas succeeds in both doing a disservice to fan creators by displaying their work in places it isn't entirely welcome, and looking very shifty to IP holders.

I have coded some algorithms in my time, and I have developed apps for almost two years now. But I'd still consider myself mostly a novice.
By my knowledge an Undiscovered tab could be hard-coded, unlike a popular or trending tab, which is likely to make use of some machine learning. I'm not sure if Tapas' popularity algorithms rely on AI - they don't particularly need to since relatively speaking there isn't that much content compared with say, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, tumblr etc. But, most algorithms of that sort do, making them all massive resource-hogs. An 'Undiscovered' algorithm would not need that.

An 'Undiscovered' tab would rely purely on metrics that would all be computationally very simple to calculate like (for example) the rate of change of the average length of time between updates, or how quickly a creator replies to comments, the average length of those replies etc. - data Tapas already has, smooshed together with some elementary maths.

Things like likes and subs all write into the database in as close to real time as possible. When I click like and reload the page, the like is there. The metrics that made up a consistency score wouldn't be like this, because:

• It would be possible to calculate some of the score/estimate the score in advance when a user schedules updates in advance. This would make it possible to predict the Undiscovered tab in advance. As one moderator to another... being able to predict problems ahead of time... that's the dream, right?
• It would change extremely slowly on account of relying on the trends in the changes of averages over the course of many weeks, meaning Tapas' servers could run many of the calculations as a weekly background job during their least active hours, as opposed to running them in as close to real time as possible like how they handle uploads and payments etc.
• It would only be necessary to calculate the score for series that are 'active' and have been active for a predetermined length of time, that fall within the least popular quartile of series, meaning that only a very small number of series would need have a full consistency score calculated at all each week. In fact, this score need only be calculated for some 100-200 series each week.

Overall we're talking a scheduled job in the back end consisting of a few thousand good, old fashioned database queries and some elementary mathematics. To design the new creator dashboard will have taken orders of magnitude more developer time. The servers cope with more in a couple of minutes than calculating this metric would take in a month.
The biggest challenges would come in fine-tuning it, which would take time, but then that's true for every new feature in a piece of code.

Championing indie comics is in Tapas' brand image (even if some folks in this thread feel y'all haven't lived up to that), so Undiscovered would look very good indeed from that perspective, and no other platform offers it, so even better. A decent developer could get a version of this feature up and running in a week - a reasonable price to pay considering everything it could offer.

What could it offer?
I've already hinted at the consistency score's ability to be predicted in advance because of Tapas' episode scheduling functionality. Additionally, it would directly cause attention to go towards good things without much attention.The 'undiscovered' tab then would surely draw a certain allure to it.

In the UK in the 80s and 90s there was a radio presenter called John Peel, who was notorious for playing unsolicited submissions. He became so influential that record labels offered deals to artists who were played by him. As such, listening to the 'Peel Sessions' became a tool for predicting who the music industry was about to discover, and so became extremely fashionable.

... I just want to put it out there that maybe having not only the only Undiscovered tab in the business but the episode release schedules that allow you to predict what it will come up with next might be very useful indeed.