Yeah main reason why I stopped Wattpad was because of the security breach. Thank heavens its not my most important email, but still. sorry to hear that, i logged off from Wattpad for a writing hiatus in 2019 since I kind of was pretty stressed and was studying. Didn't know how it became so toxic.
One other thing I hated before the security breach though was that there were literally ads for pills and sex toys and there were bot accounts. They would friend you but then when you see their account, you will see that the story they have created was literally an advertisement. I think there was one even for strip club or not I don't remember. I reported it. For a place that's has a lot of teen readers, they don't really do much to curb all these inappropriate ads that shouldn't even be there in the face place. Like seriously? Reported dozen of times but there are limited options on how to report the story and it didn't really feel like it helped at all. I wonder if that was how they found out they got security breach - someone once said those spam accounts were just all those old emails and accounts people don't use on Wattpad anymore.
My guess is that Wattpad grew too big to manage. there are so many stories created every moment I think. so it'd be hard to manage damage control. for a site like theirs I'd imagine a thousand or hundreds of stories created a day and they will have to sort that out every day, not to mention in a year, which was inappropriate and that would be a nightmare. Also it didn't help that they didn't seem to have done management of the big issues until it got too big to handle.
Also weird was that they sent that security breach email but a friend or two didn't get it - at least one of them. got me so paranoid, luckily I don't keep same passwords for everything cause that would be stupid.
It really sucks though. someone suggested me on a poetry social app to take story to Wattpad and I thought Wattpad was really diverse. Cliché romance stories that are really popular aside, there were all kinds of stories and genre it seems like and it really allowed a lot of potential to grow too and get noticed by readers. Still hard to find something replace Wattpad completely. i may still go back to it someday...but not soon..
I honestly could not say any of this any better myself. Before the breach, inappropriate ads. You’re also right that they do not care even though Teens are there. One of the major contradictions is that, the site is for 13+. The App Store rated it 17+. I doubt anything could have been done about it, since wattpad is a private company, also it was governed by Canadian laws. So, two problems there. In order for something to be done, the owners would have to buckle down and enforce more strict measures. I forgot how they found out about the security breach, though I still remember how pissed off everyone was.
You’re also right, that it grew too big to manage. Their team was small from what I could gather. Also, from what others have told me. Based on the information they got from the owners. That the people there weren’t too good with programming, so complications happened with the site all the time. With the amount of stories being created, they got into this problem, by not having a vetting system in place. With something like this early on, they could have helped minimize the amount of workload on themselves. Then the report button, when someone reports a violation, they should have taken it more seriously. There are a number of issues that eventually led to being unable to manage the site.
All of my information is fake, so what I did was simply just change my passwords afterwards for an extra measure. When online, do not have anything real about yourself.
To be honest, it does look like wattpad is slowly getting better since the new owners came. The site does look a bit cleaner in terms of stories there. The site also functions much more efficiently as well. Though, you are right, there are all sorts of genres available. Maybe when things are solid, it will be nice to see how wattpad is holding up. For now, I am not doing anything much on that site. Just a place to hold my works.
