The Dragon's Den

[Randomness] News Feed

For those of you who have not noticed, Wattpad has removed the News Feed feature on many Android devices.  I was informed that I should send in a support ticket if I wished to explain why I thought the trial should not lead to the permanent removal from all of Wattpad, and this is the reasoning they present on why they are getting rid of it.  I will say my piece on why I think it is needed, but as this is an email they were okay sending out, I though it okay to share:

Originally, we'd implemented the Newsfeed with the purpose of trying to foster a connection between readers and writers, helping us achieve our vision of connecting the world through stories. However, upon reassessing the feature, we've found that it doesn't appear to be necessarily solving for what it was supposed to. With low usage across all devices, the Newsfeed appears to act more of a barrier of privacy, as it broadcasts all voting/commenting activity, than for creating community.

We're running this removal experiment on the Android app to gauge if the data accurately reflects the app experience, with the goal of removing the Newsfeed to better allocate our resources towards creating features that are better solutions for fostering community, without compromising privacy and safety. All announcements will still appear in your follower's notifications as well as any story updates if they have your story in their libraries.

We're currently collecting all feedback on this feature, so if there's anything you haven't mentioned that the Newsfeed uniquely added to your Wattpad experience and what it was solving for you that hasn't been mentioned, please let me know and I'll pass this on to our product team.

If you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to let me know.

Now, I wanted to let you guys know this in part because of the last part, and because if we want to keep News Feed... We may have to send in why it makes the Wattpad experience better.  below you will find the reasoning I sent in.  If you agree with me and believe we should keep the News Feed function, I strongly encourage submitting a ticket.

So far, Wattpad has not made it overly apparent what is going on.  They may in the coming days, but I wanted to be sure people who wanted to keep it knew to send in a report with their reasoning.

My Reasoning:

Hello, Wattpad, and welcome to my essay on why the news feed is a very important part of the Wattpad experience.

I will admit to having a decent amount of friends who do not use the newsfeed. I have mentioned it and they have told me they forget it's a thing. I have also, in the past couple of days, seen people thinking that a lack of newsfeed would be freeing. So, your feelings toward removing it are not unfounded.

However, I have also been on Wattpad for six years now. I remember what it was like to be a starting user despite this, and over that time I have also interacted with a lot of smaller users. Among these is a community full of people who fight to get what readers they can.

And how does this connect to the news feed? Because the news feed is one of the best promotion devices on Wattpad. A community account adds your book to their library? All of their followers see. A huge writer follows you? All of their followers see. You leave a ton of comments on a book you absolutely love? Your followers see.

I even ask people how they found my account when I thank them for following me. A good amount of them noticed someone on their newsfeed interacting with me in some way, and they checked me out.

I know that I like looking at books that look interesting that my friends are reading.

Wattpad is a large place, and it can be very hard to find gems on the site. The news feed allows people to aid each other in finding those gems through the features such as seeing who just got followed by or a reading list add by or their story commented on by a Wattpader they follow.

The news feed is an amazing feature to help people get out there, as I have explained, but I do understand to some it feels like a breach of privacy. To remedy this, I suggest looking at what other places do when they have any sort of activity feed. Perhaps have the option for some to turn it private. Or, maybe, create a separate feature called friends, and people can select for only their friends to see. Whatever you choose to do, I implore you to make it something optional, because although some may feel their privacy breached, many unknowingly rely on the news feed to help get their book recognition.

Unrelated to all of the above, the July report probably isn't coming because it has taken me way too long to do, and all I read was the sequel books to Legend by Marie Lu, so... xD