A rant book of things that Wattpad writers do that I find annoying and pointless. Plus topics that need to be spoken about and brought to people's attention.
I have very very little filter, so if you're someone easily offended, my rant book isn't f...
This isn't so much calling out anything. It's mostly me waffling because I'm very very tired of wattpad so don't expect this one to be that organized or formatted. And yes I talk about the platform failing all the time it's just getting worse.
Wattpad is constantly changing the platform, but not in the places needed. It's why everyone says the platform is dying when it's still pretty alive. Every app has it's issues but I don't think many have the amount Wattpad does. Wattpad is a big company but has the development of a shitty mobile game.
Wanna know what I go through to use it? Here's a list of bullshit I and others deal with:
Get comfy cause it's gonna be long.
1. Every time I update a book, Wattpad gives me a notification that I've updated, but it doesn't load it, it'll still say draft and show me an old revision. Or if it's a new part and not something created in the past, it doesn't load it period, clicking the notification just takes me to whatever was the last part I read. To make it load, every single time I update, I have to log out of my account and log back in, or else I can't see my updates. It's been like this for well over a year.
2. When I'm working on a draft and I click the exit arrow, it takes me all the back to the homepage instead of the table of contents like it's supposed to. This means I have to go all the way back and click into whichever book I was working on. It may not sound that bad but it's annoying being put back on the homepage every single time you need to exit for something.
3. The reads counter says 0 a lot of times when I know I don't have 0 reads, so I have to log out and log back in to fix it.
4. The app and website never sync up (again with having to log out).
5. I add a book to my library and even if I read some of it afterward, the book still appears all the way at the bottom of my library. That's probably not an issue for some people but when you have almost 200 books in your library... it's a bit tiresome to scroll through a bunch of shit trying to find a book you just read that's buried with books you haven't opened in literal years.
6. I never get inbox notifications, maybe on a rare occasion if Wattpad's feeling special that day I guess.
7. The bar to type messages in DM just doesn't load sometimes, so I can't reply to people until it appears which usually takes a few rounds of opening and closing the app.
8. Doesn't matter if I use scrolling or paging, how big or small I have the text, trying to scroll/swipe through a book is super fucking glitchy. I have to enlarge text and then reduce it again as I read through because it literally crops out paragraphs of text. There have been countless times I read somebody's book, and get confused because it suddenly doesn't make sense, and why is that? Because the app cropped out text so I missed an entire paragraph and that's why I have no clue what's now happening. And if a story part has images inserted? Trying to scroll/swipe is 3x worse.
9. Sometimes it won't even show the navigation to adjust text sizes in the first place, or it won't load the bottom bar, so I have to exit out of the story and reopen it in hopes shit will work a little bit this time.
This stuff alone makes reading impossible. I barely read books on here anymore. I don't even bother unless it's something I really want to read, cause fiddling with glitches the whole time takes away the enjoyment.
I don't know how many others have these issues. I use both Wattpad and Wattpad Beta but I have issues on both.
And before someone says "just read on laptop", I have a pretty big laptop so reading on it for a couple of hours isn't that comfortable, and I can only read from my laptop at home.
Ads. Let's talk about ads.
Yes, wattpad needs to make money, and using ads in some places isn't a big issue. But when you add a 3-second timer between story parts when reading? It's kinda annoying but whatever. The timer is for ads that they have placed there now. Sure, 3 seconds isn't long but still, it's obvious they're trying to get view time on the ads.
When you put ads literally on top of my phone's navigation bar at the bottom of stories? Now you're pushing it.
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Really? Fucking really? Almost every time I went to click my phone's buttons, I clicked the ad, which took me to the website. And if you're unaware, every time they get clicks on ads, that gives them money. According to Google, the average earnings are $2.32 per click. So they probably made 2 bucks every time I accidentally clicked it while trying to exit.
Let's not even talk about how distracting it is to have ads playing at the bottom while you're trying to read.
The ads are to the point I modify the app for myself to remove them cause lord knows I'm not paying them even more money for premium.
This place becomes less and less enjoyable with every update I find. They changed the layout when nobody at all asked for it. Ads. They've removed their community forum. There's no way to get good engagement. They used "womxn" despite it being transphobic, radical feminist bullshit cause they did no research and just wanted to slap a woke buzzword on their Black History month. And their website and app constantly glitches.
A lot of communities/genres on here have become garbage. It's flooded with random bullshit, (no offense but some of ya'll forget wattpad is a reading and writing site, not a Tumblr blog or Twitter. Why do you need an aesthetic account with thousands of followers in a place you don't even use for what it's supposed to be used for? So you can feel popular? Why do you need to post a book of memes or Harry Styles images you got off of other platforms?). And their employee reviews of the headquarters are horrible.
Speaking of reviews, I checked back on glassdoor to see if they had any new reviews and they didn't but one from September last year mentioned how they paid "weird, unqualified, unknowledgeable consultants to talk about 'social issues' which ends up being the consultants ranting informally for half a day". So take that how you want I guess... personally it sounds like they hired average Twitter users to come and educate their employees.
As I said in the beginning, Wattpad isn't dying, but, it is at the same time because they neglect the platform in the most basic, obvious areas when it comes to technical issues AND adding basic features that should have been added a long time ago.
They're focused on the wrong shit. There's only so long people will put up with glitches and not being able to do stuff they can do in other places. If it keeps up that way (it most likely will), more users are going to start leaving. And fuck do I think they deserve it. Wattpad deserves to lose shit and users deserve a functioning platform.
