When the struggle of completing an episode is not enough.
Imagine you are on the board of executives having a meeting to launch a new product.
Manager A : "So.... we need to crank up user engagement. In order to do so, we need contents. How do we fill our product with contents?"
Manager B : "Just let people upload their content onto our product!!"
Manager A : "Good idea!! But we need to put an indicator to determine the quality of contents, afterall we don't want out product to be filled up with garbage content"
Manager C : "What about assigning stars for every contents people upload?? The more stars, the better"
Manager D : "But who do that?"
Manager C : "Everybody, duh."
Manager A : "SOUNDS GREAT!! TELL THE ENGINEERING TEAM TO IMPLEMENT THEM FAST!!"
Sounds logical right? More people will give good contents with good rates, and people will rate bad contents with bad rating. Then contents with good rating will bubble up and those with bad rating will drowned.
And there you go. You get the perfect condition for fraudulent practices to come up. It already happens to all system wth rating system. App stores, Yelp, Amazon, Ecommerce, Spotify, Youtube (before 2011-ish), .....
In those platforms, there are increasing number of stories of people buying fake ratings. So that their apps/games/restaurants/books/musics can bubble up. Even there are factories to satisfy this demand! The converse is also happening: people buying bad ratings to plummel their competitors. And there are also factories to satisfy this demand!
Oh, it's guarded by IP? Sorry, IP is not a magic bullet; you can
rotate
IP and get hundreds of different IPs each day for some small amount
of bucks. Email? There are thousands of email provider out there outside
gmail, or you can set them up on your own. Browser fingerprinting?
There's a way to make user agent (i.e. your internet browser) appear
similiar to what configs most people use. Captcha?? Ha, even google
recaptcha has shown can be defeated. For determined people with ill intention, it's easier than you think to bypass those kind of "protection".
I'm glad that newer comic platforms like tapas and webcomics don't adopt this kind of model.
But that dinosaur does, and unfortunately it's the most popular platform currently.
In case of that dinosaur (why dinosaur? because it's big and ancient), there is really nothing separating you from that big "RATE" button other than an account. You know, ones can make an account, and from there they got a handle, and... just do whatever they wish. That's why every now and then there are bots polluting comments section. If they can do that, clicking anything (like, rate) is trivial thing to do.
Other than that, for comics, people give bad rating to some silly reason actually, like:
"It hazz atrociouzz artzz" (actually bad ones, and godly art more western style, or art with more rendered or other unpopular style will usually fall under this bracket, even though the art is good. Not mine of course)
"I ship X with Y why you make X paired with Z aggghhhh" (happens more often in romance genre. Not mine)
"YOU TRACED/COPIED/STEAL FROM {insert well-known title here}" (the only good reason that I can think of)
"r u triggered hahah u prankd!!" (usually from kiddies or immature person)
"ugh, lgbt. 1 star" (usually coming from culture that still largely homophobic)
"what is this?! I don't remember subbed to this comic before..." (and then become mad) (happens often when the author suddenly changes the series into another series benefitting the popularity )
And the list goes on.
So that means if there are people trying to do XKCD style, you know what will happen next.
Or maybe with appalling title like "talking butt", you know what will happen next.
You see, most of them coming from people enraged for some reasons to vent their anger. And casual readers usually will just continue scrolling and don't even bother to support with some mere clicks (I know it's not you, amirite ?). The problem doesn't stop there, as how the rating works is only known by, like, 5% of total audience, mainly coming from the creator circle, and the veteran readers group. The rest 95% still assume that rating is determined with "some kind of algorithm" and will reflect the quality of content when the reality it has this pretty sophisticated formula:
rating = round (sum of rating / count rating)
Superstars, of course, will have good rating because they can direct their fans to do so.
A humiliating method to measure quality. In the end, it'll only benefit the platform, not the creators. But eh, creators are product, right?? Because creators aren't paying. And when the platform has enough superstars, they won't really care probably.
So yeah. This is an observation after I spammed 10 comics, looking at other smaller creators, having discussion with other creators, etc. I need to take a reasonable action to respond to this, but... I don't know. Because that dinosaur looks like it is grooming BL content, maybe I will pull all my BLs out of there. And spread them through other platform. And just put other comics that satisfies the mighty dinosaur demand there. And maybe, as a consequence, put another pause hammer on some of my ongoing comic. sigh...
I'm actually planning to do POSSE approach (Post on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere) with some other innovations (because hey, doing plain comics on a website won't cut it these days). I even already parked the domain name for myself. But, cloudflare and servers are quite.... costly. And I will need to satisfy the other mega dinosaur (sigh). But well, nobody can escape this mega ultra dinosaur anyway. So, I'll do that later, and then dump this chapter, and the previous one, as blog articles. Maybe.
Oh right. I forgot to say this. If you're reading this far from the beginning, I must say that you are awesome and lovely ❤❤
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