- Edited
I am annoyed by the rapid release of translations because it causes certain problems with the experience of this app.
1) It’s frustrating to read something, or rather, multiple stories, just to find out they are dropped after 20 or 40 chapters. so who is this system trying to reach? most ppl tend to vote blindly to just get the fp, so even if there are users taking it seriously, they will always be a minority and people with not enough time/will will constitute the majority. If that‘s fine or wanted, why even bother to do anything besides trial read, which is based on summaries and fulfills exactly this usecase, mirroring interest based on basic preferences? What I‘m getting at is: most users disregard reading and are annoyed to even be forced to vote, some users get invested and are then frustrated that their stories don‘t get translations, and the users who read and get lucky don’t need a high frequency. They can‘t get into new stories every cycle, neither can they be lucky forever, so they will end up in one of the earlier groups at one point. Even the chill group that just enjoys exploring regardless of the outcome, once enough books piled up in their lists, the daily voting forces them into group one, unless they never want to actually read anything they found. It‘s a weird lose lose situation and never a sign of a good ux design. I seriously don‘t understand why we have to get fp through voting like this, it‘s just a repetitive, bad system.
2) if you do take the system seriously and put books from the voting system in your reading list, not knowing whether they will be picked or not, you have to constantly monitor and delete the dropped ones manually. otherwise you will risk your recommendation algorithm to get messed up (see point 6). It’s probably not possible to auto delete out of user folders, but this means the app puts a high maintenance function into play and leaves it on the users‘ side which is also never good design.
3) I feel there are great chinese novels out there and they literally drown in the numbers. The more random translations are added, the less likely it becomes your users will be able to filter out the outstanding ones. And since the current voting system doesn’t really highlight anything and has the problem mentioned in 1), you could never actually pick exceptional works out from the rest at that stage. At the same time webnovel begins to feel like a fleamarket, a platform that shows me all these novels that are unrelated to me, on top of that probably won‘t even get a translation. To much content, too many summaries that read almost the same, daily confrontation with personally irrelevant stuff. At least let us pick a category first, and then decide on stories in that category, so we can actually compare stuff that is relevant to our reading preferences. Just because there is one story in the list that might fit my preferred genre, it doesn’t mean I am gonna be into it.
4) It is really bad that being loyal to webnovel/logging in every day, means to be confronted with bitter feelings as you have to do stuff that you don’t want to do (vote randomly, knowing that you won‘t ever read anything of the stuff you voted for). And who wins? Someday Webnovel will be a graveyard of dropped translations, the library full of novels that end on ch40 and users trying to navigate around all these. Again, please think about automatically deleting translations which stem from the voting system and get dropped after ch40 - if they‘ll never get picked up, the app truly doesn‘t need them to stay.
5) Even if your fav stories are picked and are fully releasing, nobody has enough money to spend to unlock all of the rapid releases with hundreds if not thousands of chapters. Thus, even if the system worked out for a user, over time it leads to less interest in translations in general, so again, why push them to such a high frequency.
6) Users get confusing recommendations - translations which seem to be dropped already get mixed in there and it‘s unclear why they are even recommended. Ppl will read the recommendation, then, once they land on the about page of the book, find that the story they just got into has 20/20 or 40/40 chapters and an update speed of 0 ch/week. What is up with that? It leaves the reader very insecure and anxious - Which content is dead and which isn’t?
(What happened to me was that a recommended story which was uploaded recently has exactly 20/20 chapters and stopped uploading after I found it. so does it mean I walked into a trap and this will never be continued? because it damn much looks like every other dropped translation from the voting system? Will the next rec be like that, too? it’s a really annoying feeling that I don‘t like when getting into new content at all, and I don‘t think anyone does. I unlocked some chapters of this recommendation so I wasted money? because the app directed me into a dead end, what kind of business mentality is that?)
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All in all, it would be better to curate unique plots in the first place, then wait a longer period to collect fans.
As it is, the system really makes the whole webnovel experience feel like I am supposed to support countless copies of the same stories, picked completely at random just to fill the library and create an illusion of plentiful content. It ultimately reduces the enjoyment of the app after you are already a longterm user. After a couple of weeks, as a girl, you have read so many titles with pampered, ceo and marriage in it that you don‘t even know if you should give up on this app altogether.
Please don‘t spam this app until it is not useable anymore. Please take translations more seriously and let us enjoy a few good ones instead of a massive amount of mediocre ones!
