Toxic people,
Other writers have mentioned it, and I've tended to be a little to sparing about it. Though that has less to do with what I'm about to say not being true, and more that a lot of writers (who choose to leave) that site, fearing retaliation.
A person, if they dislike a website, should never have to fear retaliation when they review the platform. The bizarre thing is, their weapon to get writers to fear retaliation from that platform, is the very thing they would retaliate against against if a writers chose to review their own website. This seems to be a consistent trend among websites that are financed by large companies like Time Warner and Walstreet.
When doing some background research, Wattpad has mentioned a lot of false starts, before becoming their namesake. Even when I was Ink Blazers, it was only about as toxic as deviantart, which is the level of trolling most people can deal with by simply turning off comments.
But here is the rub: Wattpad does not allow you to turn on comments. This could solve many of the problems they experience of "Authors Behaving Badly." I hadn't even heard of the time, before I had joined Wattpad back in 2013. This was a point when I still had in mind to become a web comic artist, rather than (apparently) the "Literary Fiction" writer I was labelled with on there.
I'm now stuck in this situation, where I can even remove my own book from the web page, because I don't know whether this one ambassador page will come back to life or not. So I'm stuck in this limbo of being unsure whether to publish anything else.
I never signed any exclusive contract, but it damn well feels like one sometimes.
Wattpad's only claim to transparency, is that they recently switched to a new forum design, but the same shit heads are re-inhabiting the new board, and engaging in the same old tactics they used to. They don't even give me real answers when I suggest real issues. Most of the issues they have fixed, are basically band aid fixes that cover up the underlying issue: the community.
Tech people already have a bad time trying fight against the stereotype of being labelled as pretentious know it alls. This one guy, I kid you not, asks for help on how to fix his virus problem. When I suggested just switching to Linux, he has the balls to basically just debunk my comment.
Curiously, he then switches to a blank avatar.
This is the kind of toxicity that the technology community is already having to fight against, we don't need fucking little shit heads thinking they know the universe in technology, when they obviously do not.
That's the kind of shit Diaspora does. Wattpad, you're widely popular enough to fucking know better.