Then, they roll out the original version of the feature, the one they wanted initially, and treat it as a moment of them listening to the community.
I can't even remember the last time WN took a step back and apologized. They just keep silent and people will still use it because the stories they want to read are there. The webnovel app has over 10 Million download - not all active readers of course, but with estimated 20 million visits a month to their desktop version, the app should have long become the more active feature.
Especially the majority of paying readers use the app and that's what important for webnovel. What a non-paying reader screams about "no more free chapters" or "using ads to unlock stuff" or whatever isn't really important to a business. Webnovel is just doing fine. In fact, it was growing over the last months. While SH was staying more or less constant according to estimates, webnovel's monthly activity on the desktop version grew by half of SH activity.
And yeah, there are a ton of bots and double accounts and trolls and whatnot. But webnovel is doing fine. There is no need to listen to a relatively small part of the community that
(a) won't use the app
(b) won't spend massive amounts of money
(c) often are authors with rather slow releases.
I mean, we'll see how it goes but according to us who dislike their ideas, webnovel was dead for years now...
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As for On-Topic: I don't believe we'll see a lot of problems.
A lot of the problems are created by webnovel itself and people behave like they do because of it. And they'll run into a brickwall if they try that behavior here. A lot of their stories won't find success here or on RR due to the different systems/target audience. If they can't delete reviews to push their story from a 3 to a 4, most readers won't even touch such stories with a stick. And I mean, it's not like SH didn't have spam-writing and mindless stories before. We already had a lot of low-effort stuff that got forgotten just as fast.
There might be a short time where people will try to leave mass bad ratings or shit reviews or just spam negative stuff. But in most cases, that is just one message to Tony and it's over. And at some point, the users will stop because they won't get what they want/don't find what they look for.
To be completely honest: one of the biggest problems could be a ton of new forum threads titled "I got my first 0.5 ratings from a webnovel troll". So we just added another feature to the usual...
That said: there might be trolls and toxic stuff coming over and every step against that would be a welcome one.
But I think, SH has more pressing points Tony should work on...