It gives a false impression of the site by making it seem better than it really is. I am now 95% certain that LINE uses bots to help bolster its appearance. Several things overall have pointed to an indication that LINE's vastly superior readership is rather off.
1.) According to traffic information, LINE's traffic is only around 8x higher than Tapas, but people notice an influx of readership anywhere from 10-50x+ what they get here. Despite such a massive difference in subs though, many people notice that the actual interaction of readers is often lower than it is on Tapas.
2.) Because LINE doesn't give information on its readers, unlike Tapas, there's no way to tell how much of the interaction you get it real and how much is created by bots.
3.) There's a questionable motive too. LINE holds such a vast superiority of readers yet its overall design is remarkably inferior. There's literally no way for creators to have any real control of their series. There's no forum to discuss things with other people. The notification system is pretty much non-existent. Severe limits have been placed on updating comics such as only being .JPEG and being extremely stingy with its page sizes. A creator has no way to deal with readers beyond a report button. Overall, for a site boasting some of the biggest readerships of a comic hosting site, it is surprisingly lacking in even some of the most fundamental aspects.
And then something happened to me that only enhanced my views that LINE is using bots to bolster its appearance. Around February I decided to delete most of my work from LINE, leaving only a single post saying people could come to Tapas. Around this point I had about 320 subs, though very, very, very few actual interactive readers.
I returned 2 weeks later to check up on things and saw the sub count drop to 310. Already I began to question something. If these were all "real" readers, then why were so many still on? Why didn't any of them unsub, or if they truly were reading my work, leave a message.
I returned another 2 weeks later, ready to full delete the series and what I saw baffled me. Without making a single post. Without making a single update. I had jumped from 310 subs to 360 subs. That's right, I jumped up 50 subs in the span of about 2 weeks. Once again, no interaction though. I thought to myself, what is this joke? 50 some people actually went up to my work and looked at a post basically saying "Screw LINE, go to Tapas" and said.
Yeah, I want to sub to that.
I have no direct proof, but after all that's happened, I again really question the legitimacy of LINE's readership and while Tapas may have some guilt too, it feels nowhere near as bad as it does with LINE.
