I want to open the discussion of shortcomings scribblehub may have. My first concern is word count. Though not inherently bad word count says to new writers that longer means better. This is inherently not true and may lead to lackluster chapters. As the writer does not focus on the main goal of writing.
As many have said, you can just ignore the word count if it is truly bothering you. If you think of any online writing site, guess what feature it is really likely to have? Word count. Word count helps readers. It helps them find out if the author is going to keep at a steady pace or not. It helps to decide on what novel you want to read. This is geared towards the interaction, or, should I say the "non-interaction" between author and reader.
To better explain that "interaction", I mean that just by looking at a story's word count, you can kind of guess what the novel's gonna be like. It can also help you know if the author continues at that same WPC (words per chapter) or not.
When I write on google docs it is a totally different experience. Although I think it was nice for the site to add tools for writing, The main emphasis is on Word count. I would propose that word count be an optional choice. Such as on google docs where it is tedious to continuously check it therefore people are less likely to.
How do I say this... Google Docs is a fundamentally different platform altogether. The development of something "like" it would take a lot of time. The best thing would be to just use the already-made Google Docs to work on your chapters. There just is no use in coding and implementing something that you can already achieve in a pre-made app. What we should be grateful for is the fact that we can even format text at all.
Some other writing sites, ahem, ahem, cough, cough,
Webnovel, cough, cough, have so few formatting options it makes you wanna cry.
My main problem is that it forces you to create and decide the description title and cover before you make any headway into the novel itself. I myself would prefer if we were allowed to start writing and then when we wish publish these drafts in a public critique section before revising and creating a title, description, genre, etc. Therefore those are my glaring dislikes about writing on scribble hub. Although I have no problems with publishing. I have already published a bare-bones short story draft that I used for a course of mine and writing it on google docs helped me enter a zone of focus.
I believe that all writing sites cause you to make up a description. You need some type of blurb to allow readers to understand what you want to write about after all since their time spent reading your story is just as valuable as the time you spent writing it. Even so, you can just make up some short blurb like, "Nothing to see here" and send it for approval as you start writing new drafts for the story.
In that process, SH does
not make you choose a cover. Many writers add their own covers so that they can attract readers, but there is no "force" making you create a cover for your story.
As for critique sections... just go to the Feedback sub-forum and post a link to a chapter or two of your story there.
And, by what I've read so far, you want SH to be more like Google Docs from the Author's perspective. However, we already can make the most out of what we already have and don't really need to. You can literally just go to Google Docs, write your chapters there, and publish them for your story here.
However, if you're writing a short story and looking for feedback, then better to find a different site for that, one that caters to short stories.
