I'm just on a little rant right now because of the stories that are on wattpad. I have been a member on wattpad for almost 4 years come this April and I am getting so disappointed and frustrated with this site. When I first started here, I was obsessed with the stories; they were interesting, they were different, they were exciting and captivating. Uploads were frequent with all the authors on this site and wattpad was more flexible. As the years go on, wattpad has become more discriminatory with what stories they deem appropriate and allowed to have their own category and has turned this from being a site for authors of all ages (although it use to be a bigger majority of authors who were over the age of 18) to turning to a kids site for young teenagers and crappy stories. I have nothing against young people writing, some really do have talent and potential and everyone deserves the chance to express themselves with words but what I am against is wattpad basically forcing more mature people and creative people to leave the site because of wattpad now wanting to keep this site for very young readers and authors. For crying out loud wattpad doesn't even do much about plagiarism when it happens which has led to so many great authors who gave everyone the joy of reading such a good story for free on this site to leave to other sites or even just start selling their stories and not even bothering to write on any site for free. The part that gets me so sad is that I don't even know where all of these authors have gone off too and some have just closed their accounts without giving a way to follow them thus leaving the reader without a captivating author with their books any more. If I could even get past all this (which I do try by continuing to search for stories to read regardless of the age of an author), I'm stuck with trying to find a good story. It seems like there are hundreds of stories that are exactly the same with just minor differences with a bad plot, bad writing, bad ending, lack of creativity, and lack of inducing the reader so far into the story that you forgot everything around you until you finish the story; you don't want to put down whatever device you're reading from until you read every last word and you stay hooked on the author with wanting to just read one more word the author writes on any story regardless of what it is about. I have read thousands of stories on this site over the past 4 years and I find that I can no longer find a good story and when I miraculously land up on one, the writer rarely uploads or worse, they keep the story from ever ending by having a continuous amount of books in the series when it is obvious it is only dragging and should have ended with a bang in the first book. I think sequels and especially series are the worse because the story and plot just seems too fake and dragged on and just tedious and boring. There are few stories on here and books published by well known authors that have been so good and held so much interest that I felt a second book was needed or at the very least accepted with open arms. Many writers here are getting tons of reads for stories that don't even flow well together and it just baffles me. I am a person that likes reading stories on werewolves, vampires, occasionally other supernatural creatures, mature stories, girlxgirl and BoyxBoy, and romance stories. I like stories that have happy endings and I'm not too big on love triangles unless all three of them end up together but I have found myself having to lower my expectations and just try to read stories from any genre just to see if I find anything good on this. I went from being a fan (which is now called following which I highly dislike the name of it) to hundreds and hundreds of writers on this site to following less than 50 because of the quality on here. I try to read completed stories only because I get to find out if there is a sequel/series by going to the author's page thus making me think hard if I want to delve into actually reading it, testing out a few chapters to see how the story is, or just abandoning it altogether without bothering to read any of it. Don't get me wrong, I look for stories that are still a working progress but I check how frequent their uploads are (at least once evey couple of weeks) and I test them out by reading a completed story first and/or by reading the first 5 chapters or so to get a feel of the writing style and captivity. Another thing I have noticed here is that this site scarcely has male writers whereas just a couple of years ago it was more frequent, granted there were still more female than male writers but, it was more tied together than the 100 or 1000 to 1 ratio now. I just really want to find a few good stories on here at the minimum or at the very least find out where I can read free stories online other than on this site that has better quality. I do still encourage people to try to write no matte what their talent is because most likely you will have at least one loyal reader and even if you don't, you will enjoy doing it for yourself (as long as you don't become one of those authors that require a certain amount of votes and/or comments on their chapters for them to upload the next one which I find completely unnecessary) but I do wish wattpad will become less strict and rigid and instead be more flexible and inviting like it was before and allow all genres on this site and all ages but have like a warning or block users from being able to access mature stories unless they are 18 years of age or more. This site keeps on "upgrading" and changing things around and adding more things but instead of making this better, I feel like everything is turning out worse. The last thing I will say now is that I know writers have lives outside of wattpad and things do come up out of nowhere and can't write for weeks to months at a time, but at the very least they should write a status on their page letting people know that something came up or they're very busy right now and won't be able to write for a certain period of time (giving the readers a rough amount of time at least) just to let them be aware and not just wondering for months what is going on that the writer isn't on. There are few people that give that courtesy out to their readers on wattpad. I also find it unfair that wattpad let's "writers" go on years without posting an upload to an unfinished story or even a status about why and wattpad just keeps the story up like nothing; it's rude and unfair to the readers. I'm done with my rant which turned out to not be so little in the end. I'm sure there has to be at least a few people on this site that agree with me at least to a certain extent but if not, then that's fine, I'm just expressing myself here.
