I've heard the news that tapas has just fully acquired by kakao, well... not really surprising ever since hit kakao titles like Positively Yours, Business Proposal, and even Solo Leveling is published here. Chinese comics platforma are crazy putting comics, many of them kinda shares the same formula and uhhh....well... what's with "fake beauty". Line/Naver Webtoon is feeling the pressure and these days they are pushing their originals and daily pass series more and more and more. Graphite comics, Globalcomix never really taken off and Bayday, while promising, is messed up after it's revealed they require official ID. Most Japanese big players still kinda stuck on their bubble and have yet to show how they play the game. Meanwhile, Google and Apple still taking 30% cut by doing nothing, which in effect affects independent creators revenue who are depended on platforms(apps) like this who are absolutely depended on lord google/apple. In addition they are imposing rules that all apps must be family friendly, because some governments are very conservative and blends religions and morals into law, which forced tapas to make mature section website exclusive, and webtoon hammering all the mature contents in 2018, and having double standards of what is mature what not til today. I don't know whether kakao has interest in keeping the mature section, but well.

Competition up there is heating up, but down here on independent creators level are not any better. Line/Naver Webtoon is getting overcrowded, but google still yields the same result that that platform offers "nice growth" which in reality is not (which in fact coming from people bragging on tapas forums). Tapas redesigns makes discovering indie titles like talking butt requires user to jump through more hoops. The power of defaults say  that 96% users will only use the defaults, which roughly translates to 96% users only reading what's displayed on the front page, which translates to only very few people wants to see five different screens to read my comic. Chinese platforms.... oh well currently they are bombarded with tons of chinese titles which kinda makes me skeptical of discoverabililty there either. And let's not talk about self-hosting websites; it's too easy to be getting banned by lord Google these days. Or at least deranked.

Talking about deranking (or shadowbanning to some extent), I have a strong feeling that some of my comics, or even my pen name that I'm using currently, is put into some kind of derank list. Searching for "talking" doesn't yield my comic on tapas mobile version. Everytime I put new titles on webtoon canvas, it's always skipped and never put on "Fresh List" or something similiar. Tagging them in social medias don't make any difference either. Webco is never really recommend my comic either, and even worse they (claimed incidentally) use the wrong format for my comic which makes it looked the ugliest. And both MTBWBL and YAMN are raking in 1 stars, last I check it's at least 15 1-star out of 44 ratings submitted for MTBWBL, and it's getting worse after each updates for both of them. Even a spongebob trace doesn't get that bad there. But well, you know, the only thing really separating your cat and webtoon rating button is just a login popup.  But what's impressive is people keep discovering MTBWBL here despite I'm not updating it and it not showing easily on tapas mobile version. Hrmmmmmm......

Honestly I feel sad and unsecure about using this name. Maybe I should've played safe and not trying to not to be different too much. Maybe I shouldn't put a proof that one webtoon original caught tracing a photograph on tapas forums, which might make some people offended. Or maybe I shouldn't be too vocal anywhere, uh... Idk. I have several more stories to tell, but if my name is really in that list, then no matter what I do, I won't go anywhere. And in the long run, I'm pretty much doomed. That means, I'm probably going to put this name, "sekabead", into a peaceful rest for eternity, and moving on and open a new blank page.... which means I'm restarting all from zero, probably. I haven't really decided yet....