In an Intro. to Mass Communications class, we students were asked to give our favorite website, what we like about it, and what we wished were improved. I chose Wattpad.
I would have to say that my favorite website (as well as app) is www.wattpad.com. A place where writers of all kinds can assemble on this platform and bring their work all over the world, most for free (recently it has begun implementing some paid stories, though most are still done for free). You can both read and/or write, whatever you would like to do. There's all sorts of genres and ideas that you can find, and you're more than likely to find something or another that you'll like using this platform.'
I myself use Wattpad primarily as a writer. I've used it since I believe since either 2014 or 2015--I can't quite remember. I know for a fact, though, back in middle school when I used it that my works must have been awful and the most agonizing pieces to read, but now that I've gotten more experience in actually writing and planning I believe I have become a much better writer.
Certainly there are a lot of things that I would love to see incorporated and improved within the website's free version (as there is a premium function, though I don't believe many use this). Here are a few:
Filtered Notifications: I get almost a hundred notifications a day sometimes, most of which are utter non-sense and extremely unimportant. They have some filters you can put on so you don't get specific notifications but the ones I am talking about are ones you get when people you follow post updates. There should be ways you can filter out those updates you don't want to get.
Additional Filter Options for Stories: Of course you can type in tags and keywords, title names, author names, Last Updated, Length, and Only Show Completed works, but there needs to be way more than that. There are a lot of amateur writers on Wattpad, stories all over with horrible spelling, grammar, plots, the whole nine yards, and I would really appreciate being able to filter these out and only see advanced works, those that needs to be verified as having few mistakes and actually written well, like I strive to do with my stories. Because there are so many badly-written stories on the site, however, advanced ones are usually buried and very difficult to find, also contributing to potentially amazing stories never being discovered.
Improved Stats: One of the features that the website has that I do not believe the app does, is the Stats section for all stories. An amazing idea it is to be able to see from which countries your book is most read, the rate at which readers flock to it, genders who most like it, age groups who most like, and so on. However, the stats only show you the most recent 30 days, and there is no way to see anywhere before those 30 days, no record.
Reads Number: Whenever you click on a book to read, you'll see a number of how many reads this book has. This number should be how many people have just read the book, but it isn't. This number is comprised of all the reads on every chapter/part of the story. For example, the book has only five people who read it, and there are five chapters. Instead of just saying that the book has five reads, the book shows that it has 25 reads. It is very confusing for us writers, and for readers it almost tricks them into thinking a book is more popular than it actually is, because if those 5 readers read a book with say 50 chapters than the book looks like it's a good one since 250 people have read it.
You can find my Wattpad profile at: https://www.wattpad.com/user/Izzy_Reigne.
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