All About You: A Book of Interviews

Interview #1 | steels12

Hello everyone! This is my very first interview for this project. Some of you may know @steels12 from around the club discussions or his petitions and threads. Although fairly new to Wattpad, he has already gotten involved as an active advocator for Wattpad change. But he doesn't only hover around the clubs; he also has a very eery story called "The Lesser Evil". If you're interested in the apocalypse, it is a must-read. Please read on, for @steels12 has lots to say.

How did you find Wattpad?

It was a bit of a weird coincidence I suppose.

The long story is that I had been having trouble with Youtube. Namely, I couldn't play youtube videos unless they were directly on youtube, else safe-mode would automatically kick in for some reason and disable the video. I had tried to find an answer to my problem on Yahoo! Answers (Google didn't help very much, and I STILL don't have an answer 3: ). While waiting for my answer I got bored and decided to help answer peoples' questions, when all of a sudden I saw a question about writing, and someone had specifically mentioned Wattpad.

I went to the address, liked what I saw, and just stuck with it I guess.

What do you think of the site in general?

It's the best at what it provides, but that's not saying much. The site has a lot of potential, but it seems happy to shackle itself down to mediocrity simply because they can more or less claim the title of being the best writing site.

The community isn't bad by any means. The issue is that Wattpad recognizes there's diversity, but separates that diversity with small boxes conforming to writing styles, rather than trying to organize the very different sub-communities by common interest. It leaves a lot to be desired.

What do you think of the people on the site?

The majority of them are teenage girls. It's a nice change of pace as most sites don't have such a heavy female presence save for Tumblr, and you don't have to dig very deep to figure out that Tumblr is the female version of 4Chan (at best).

They're good people for the most part, though a good deal of them seem very closed-minded when it comes to actual writing. The active members of the community are usually much more open to intellectual conversations or just joking around, but they always provide a sense of acceptance, whereas many others seem to have the very bigoted frame of mind that "if it's good in the short term it must be good forever". There's a lot of very poorly written and planned writing with very defensive and offensive writers behind them.

It takes some wading to find the right people, but the anonymity of the internet keeps it from feeling TOO much like high school.

Do you think that the ambassadors are communicating with users enough?

I can't speak for all of Wattpad, given that I primarily roam in the Café, but no.

"Communicating" implies that they work with users, that they enhance the community by providing it with structure and nurturing. It implies that they act as a person to seek guidance from, but who can equally be made friends with.

Ambassadors in the Café (or should I say ambassador, as I've never seen anyone there besides KatherineArlene) do a good job at enforcing, not communicating. That has a lot of negative connotation, but I assure you they enforce on rules that have been explicitly broken, which is a part of their job and they are by no means in the wrong there.

The issue is that issues such as advertising a story (which apparently means posting a link to a story in any place other than the "advertise your story" section, even if you had no intention of making the story link you provided look good or bad) are handled immediately and with no questions. Matters such as duplicating threads, which also directly infringes on the rules, are ignored entirely.