Why Your Story SUCKS | Writer's rants & discussions

Wattpad Is Censoring Other Platforms

So a couple months ago I tried to post a link to my Inkitt profile to my message board like you used to be able to do in the past. But now, no matter what, the post would not go through. I tried from my laptop, phone, both Wattpad and Wattpad beta apps, posting it on someone else's account, etc. I thought it was a glitch since this site barely runs and is that aunt who shows up to the family barbecue already drunk and has extreme mood swings then starts talking very loudly about her dead sex life and scares the children.

While you can post Inkitt links in the description of your bio from laptop, if you then go and try to edit your bio on your phone, you'll get an error about the link and can't save your bio changes until you remove it.

Through this I discovered Wattpad has Inkitt links blocked from their site. 

Just now I tried making a post asking my followers if any of them write on Webnovel and how it is in comparison to Wattpad and Inkitt. This post also wouldn't go through. So I went to my backup account and just posted the message "Inkitt" on my message board, it went through but when I went to post the name "Webnovel", blocked.

So are other platform names like Readict, iReader, GoodNovel, and Bravonovel. I only tried ones with over a million downloads, so I don't know if smaller platforms are blocked or not too. I don't think these are blocked from story comments but I haven't tried. (Titles with two separated words can't be blocked so no platform with those names are blocked.)

But why is wattpad so childish they're censoring other platforms? What's the point in blocking the names of other platforms if not because you're so petty you don't want authors trying to grow to promote their other profiles? 

Censoring these names to prevent bots from spamming them and such doesn't make sense either if that's what you're thinking it may be for. Other sites do not do this to deal with bots nor have I ever heard of bots being dealt with in this way. Wattpad is the biggest, easiest to use, and most diverse of all these apps yet they're afraid of smaller platforms taking all 94+ million of their users and money or something?

I try to give Wattpad credit where credit is due even though there's a lot of things I dislike about the platform. But it's become harder and harder over the years to do that, they're constantly changing things when nobody asks for it, adding more ads, shitty deals when it comes to coins and premium, terrible employee reviews, favoritism, being diverse only to look inclusive, changing middle-grade novel age range to fit their app full of mature content so they can have more child users, removing their forums, horrible site maintenance and constant glitches, inconsistent site moderation, the list goes on. And now blocking the names of other online reading apps.

Wattpad was sold early this year for 600 million to a tech company based in South Korea that also owns WEBTOON (Of course, webtoon isn't blocked). It's still headed in Toronto Canada and under the leadership of the founders, but if the new company is suggesting or making these types of changes then I can't fuckin' wait to see what other bullshit they add in the future.

That's all I have to say, I just wanted to point this out real quick.