@michaelson Do I understand it right that NSFW comics are not going to show up in any category like Trending, Genres etc?
because Tapas is a business and they don't want us to know that the entry level readers and creators who work for free are the currency ¯\(ツ)/¯
Since I don't have any specific titles I know to be on the look out for, I can only assume the new site layout works on the same algorithm as the app to display works in 'popular', 'trending', and 'fresh'. So that definitely could cut out some series that I may by unaware of.
This would definitely hinder smaller creators' visibility.
@michaelson ? (and sorry for the tag, didn't realize 2 others pinged you ahead of this post)
Ha! Good point!
Well, let's see how much they grow when new creators avoid Tapas because they'll get no visibility.
That's why I left Smack Jeeves, no visibility.
To be honest, I feel the best course of action right now is to simply roll back to the previous design. Because there's only two ways this'll get resolved, and one to me, at least at on the surface, makes a lot more sense then the other.
First is taking the new design, and fixing it. But if only it were that simple. You'd have to re-implement many features completely missing now, like the sorting system, banners, creator ad's, just to name the some of the big omissions.
You'd have to fix things like the longer load times, the unresponsive search, glitched and unreadable novels...just to name a few issues.
Make many changes to the layout in general, making the website less confusing to navigate.
All this work and trouble...for essentially patched up WebToon. With features like the sidebar and autoscroll still missing, I still feel the community will still be very disappointed. And some may simply not bother waiting for change, and simply up and leave for WebToon or other webcomic sites. Websites they know at least will work reliably.
And that's kind of what's happening with Smackjeeves. The December update brought a Webtoon-like redesign that stripped it of many of it's unique features (namely custom sites) and made it significantly harder to find comics (having removed many search options). So many have simply left.
So I feel the best option is to simply revert to the previous design if possible. That way, we have a website that we know at least works, and is well regarded by the community. We won't have to fix the issues like the novels not loading properly. We won't have to hope the community learns to like the new layout.
Simply put: All of this just works!
Now, with a reliable platform in hand, all that's left to do is add new features the community wants or will probably like, such as dark mode. With prior testing and community input/warning, there really shouldn't be any issues from here on out.
We apologize for the bug that has caused this issue - the reformatting issue that has been affecting novels is one of our top priorities right now.
This wasn't part of my patch notes - I will look into this. NSFW content is perfectly fine to be promoted on the web.
We continually promote series within the staff picks to help bring more awareness to a diverse range of stories - we've featured over 100 series with less than 100 subs in this section this year alone. We also have the New & Noteworthy section which updates at a more rapid rate. Please relax with this narrative - we are and have always been supporters of up and coming creators.
I'll definitely look into it - that shouldn't be happening. Can you link me to your series so I can take a closer look?
Yes, but correct me if I'm wrong, that's mostly good for new comics and those that catch the eye of staff.
what about other comics which have been around for a while and got overlooked?
How are they getting visibility?
I'd like to add that the 24/h rule has been removed from free comics too. This makes it hard for new/small comics to even have a chance at ever reaching the popular page I imagine?
Actually there is a lot of platform that have a bifurcated experience. They just aim for parity in core functionality not in design or device specific functionality.
You don't treat desktop and mobile the same way. I can understand that the website backend was getting hard for you to update, but for us user the frontend was doing great.
Maybe on your end you gain a lot in term of ease of dev, maintenance etc, but on our end we have lot a whole lot. and unfortunately right now you are giving us a school case of "devs have strictly no idea what user need and implement things they think user need".
From where I am it looks like you've put all your egg in the same basket (mobile) and try to adapt your website around that.
If I'm not on webtoon and have actively tried to discourage creator to leave tapas for webtoon there was a good reason. And now I'm not anymore on tapas I'm on webtoon bis.
I've been here since you guys were named Tapastic before you even launched the Tapas mobile app. I've not always agreed with you guys but overall the experience was always good and I could acomodate to the change. But this time I'm sorry I'm seriously considering leaving tapas because this time most of the functionalities I stayed for are gone.
What is preventing a rollback to the old design? That's not done often with websites, but with how unpopular and problematic this update is, fixing all its issues just seems like upgrading a Ford Pinto to being fully electric: At the end of the day, you're still left with a lemon.
^this.
At least roll back until you fixed the current problems? I think we've given plenty feedback for you guys to work on ^^;
With over 70,000 stories on platform, the amount of visual space on the homepage simply cannot accommodate everyone. So, we need to figure out more intuitive ways for readers to proactively discover series that relate to their interests, or level the playing field with better algorithms.
We introduced a filtering system on the apps that allows for readers to sort by series type (comics/novels), genre based, and then a third level of granularity (popular, binge worthy, fresh, etc). We've found that series type -> genre type -> fresh has led to a wider diversity of reader subscription, and on average more readers are subscribing to more series.
The Staff Picks section in particular also samples from a wider range of stories which are supplied both through human curation and automated curation which doesn't place any bias on the recency of the series only the recency of their updates.
Creators are also encouraged to engage with their existing readership in order to qualify for the trending and popular sections. We're still fine-tuning these algorithms to better include a wider variety of stories (i.e. new series, long time publishing series, popular series, trending series, and series that have proportional engagement).
**Edit: I readily acknowledge that there can definitely be more that can be done for more creators.
I do think that simplifying programing and featuring are definitely beneficial for us, but that wasn't the primary driver of these decisions. Again, we were seeing a great deal of success with the mobile app features that we launched and saw a lot of creators benefitting from these reader experience updates. So, in order to try and translate those over to the web, we tried changing some of the user interface and user experience elements. We acknowledge that we missed the mark on some things and are aiming to improve them and make them more intuitive for the web experience.
I can't comment on that currently.
To add on the mobile vs. desktop discussion. YES, I totally agree with this.
I'm using desktop for a reason. I want all the features available to me at a click! It's like comparing using Photoshop on desktop to Procreate on an ipad. Sure they ultimately can accomplish the same thing, but I need a full on program to do what I want to do with keyboard shortcuts and text tool and windows in an interface that presents them right there, instead having to click through a bunch of tabs and lists to find what I want.
Mobile is fine for what it is, great for on-the-go! But when I'm sitting at home at my desk, I expect to be able to accomplish a lot more and quicker.
Yes, totally agree. We are hoping to address these with further iterations of the changes we've implemented.
This is reassuring, because it gives us a reason the changes were made. I think people can accept things when they’re explained to them. Not necessarily like what they’re told, but definitely accept and understand the changes.
What about completed series? How do these factor in or how will they in future?