I can't believe it’s been nearly four years since I came here. I don’t know if many have become aware yet, but it was officially announced on Thursday that Paramount and Wattpad will be partnering to basically glean and steal original work from this site to use as series fodder. A dream come true packaged in an uncredited nightmare.
I’ve loved writing for a long time. I thought Wattpad would be a nice place to start networking. It was fun for a while, posting everything from art, to fanfic, to poetry, to roleplays. Some of you I know from those days. My work, and the amazing work of others, was so fun to see come alive in a privately public little place. Yes, there were informal children but there were also titan novelists, professional or self-made, originalists or fic-ers.
Wattpad gave me the confidence to improve my writing and make my relationships bloom at a very hard time in my life. And now this. I could foresee that Wattpad was slowly becoming too corporate for itself, with the dumb guest author promotions and tokens for certain stories. (I understand some great authors were functioning with these.) I hoped to hold on, delete my work and stay there for my DM friends.
Now, CBS, who has a history of killing fanmade projects, (see the Axanar Star Trek fan film), is going after original creators to fish for their ideas. The copyright seals in the Wattpad tags were all for nothing. Merely formalities. This is the last straw.
I’m gonna leave. I kindly ask DM pals to stay in touch on Insta or Discord. I’m gonna wipe everything off my page. I won’t let them take me. I’ll rewrite better works and take them to actually sealed sites like AO3 and FFN. You cannot do this to the artist community, Paramount. To those of you that have verbally heard me say something akin to I love you, that still stands. None of this is you. It’s Wattpad. May the Force be with you, Live long and prosper, Till the end of the line, and Day shall come again.