Advantages and Disadvantages of Wattpad

INTRODUCTION

According to Mhariemar Jaguit, Jee-Ar Alamo (2015) ‘Wattpad is a place to discover and share stories: a
social platform that connects people through words. It is a community that spans borders, interests, and
languages. With Wattpad, anyone can read or write on any device such as phones, tablet, or computer.
This online entertainment is getting stronger and wider most of the viewer are teens commonly
students.’ Wattpad is a good application for those teenagers who aim to enhance their writing, reading,
comprehension, and creative skills. But this application could also be a bad application for those teens
who over uses it. Wattpad could either be a good or bad application depends on how a user sees it or
uses it.

Wattpad is one of the world’s largest communities for discovering and sharing stories. It’s a new form of
entertainment connecting readers and writers through storytelling, and best of all, it’s free. Wattpad has
thousands of new stories added by anonymous authors every day. Wattpad is the only place wherein it
offers a social mobile reading experience and interaction between avid readers and aspiring writers.

What most of the students do? Well, reading for most of the part but at the same time writing stories
that inspires them. All stories that were publish under wattpad are free. Readers don’t have to pay to
join the said site nor download the app just to read any of those stories that they’re interested with.
Comments are available at the lower portion of every part and most of all the most famous or well-
known stories have a lot of feedbacks or responses from the readers.

This site is one of the trending sites that most of the students are following because many students can
easily relate their life to those fiction characters. This study aims to know what would be the possible
reasons of the students by why their academic performance at school is getting affected. All sort of
things happen because of the decisions we make and Wattpad is one of this choice. If a student let this
thing take control over him/ her, or they would be the one to control it.

According to the researcher, she does believe that Wattpad does not totally affect the academic
performances of students. The researcher does also believe that Wattpad helps students or teenagers
on their social communication with their favorite author’s.

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

According to Mhariemar Jaguit, Jee-Ar Alamo (2015), Wattpad is a place to discover and share
stories: a social platform that connects people through words. It is a community that spans borders,
interests, and languages. With Wattpad, anyone can read or write on any device such as phones, tablet,
or computer. This online entertainment is getting stronger and wider most of the viewer are teens
commonly students.

According to Michael(2016), if you don’t know what Wattpad is, it’s a system that allows virtually
anyone to publish almost any genre of work for free. Although Wattpad doesn’t pay its authors like a
publishing house does, there are still a wide range of benefits for using it as a new writer. In fact, it’s
where I am going to publish my first novel as soon as it’s done. Why go through the trouble if I’m not
getting paid? Because of what it can offer.

According to Renata(2017)et. al. Juan Luis Suárez, Wattpad doesn’t exactly meet the criteria of
traditional literature. It is accessed on mobile phones; its community has almost global dimensions; it
operates according to the characteristics of a social network; it represents the concepts of transmedia,
intermediality and convergence, which Henry Jenkins and others have theorized about; it has developed
a multichannel network through Wattpad Studios and it channels the stories which show most potential
towards the traditional publishing industry, cinema and TV, respectively. However, all that lies behind all
of this is the human desire to tell and read stories. I would say that Wattpad is not the future of
literature, even though it is a step in the right direction. That is where, in the future, research into
Modern Languages in the digital era should flow in my view. Simply because it is one of the spaces
where stories, writers and readers coincide.

The potential offered by a platform like Wattpad for literary research is immense. The number of
stories published, the vast geographic coverage – quite literally global – of its readers and writers, the
variety of languages used and the evolutionary dynamics of themes, genres and users are some of the
many lines which could be harnessed in the intersection between Modern Languages, digital culture and
data analytics.

But not everything is positive. Wattpad is also a case study of the problems which researchers
come up against in the digital space, and in particular, of the inversely proportional relationship
between the value of data (I’m referring to its academic, rather than its economic, value) and the
probability that they are the property of private enterprise. Personally, I dream of a scenario where we
have free access to such a quantity and variety of data relating to one of the largest global literary
experiences which humanity has experienced up to this moment in time.

According to Ondi Timoner, Wattpad is the world’s largest community for readers and writers,
and to the consternation of traditional publishing — entirely free. To those naysayers who claim reading
is the pastime of a bygone era, the numbers don’t lie — in 2013 alone, users spent 41 billion minutes on
Wattpad with a new chapter uploaded every second. The platform lets users contribute cover art for
their favorite stories and become collaborators alongside their favorite authors.

In our latest episode of A TOTAL DISRUPTION, we sat down with Wattpad to discuss how their
platform is radically disrupting the publishing business. We also talk with two authors - a teenager who
left Facebook behind for Wattpad (the first book she wrote at thirteen had over 1 million reads) and
another who has secured a book publishing deal due to her popularity on Wattpad. With this
technology, teenagers are sneaking their mobile devices into school, not just to watch videos, but to
read and write. If you’ve ever had a dream of becoming an author watch this new FUTURE IS NOW
episode for a look into how pulling the veil back on your process and sharing as you go, can help you
accomplish that goal.

A lot has been said about generation Y & Z. Depending on who’s doing the talking, it’s probably a
comment along the lines of, “self-obsessed youth addicted to their phones.” Candice Faktor, General
Manager of Wattpad, argues those phones are the very reason “this is going to be the most literate
generation, because they are used to writing, and they’re used to creating.”

Founders Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen are looking far beyond just American teenagers. “We don’t
believe people are reading and writing less, we just have to make sure reading and writing can adapt to
the current culture,” say Lau. With attention spans becoming shorter, and a growing desire to follow
stories as they unfold, Wattpad is ideally positioned as Lau notes, “making long form content bite size is
more digestible in today’s culture.”

“Storytelling is universal, across different cultures, different countries,” continues Lau, and Wattpad’s
analytics bear this out. With users in almost every country, Wattpad stories are available in more than
50 languages. But perhaps the most striking statistic of all: 85 percent of all activity on Wattpad is
mobile.

Global estimates say about 3 billion people worldwide can read or write, but Wattpad is
approaching the market from a technological angle. “There will be five billion phones, all internet
enabled, in the next two, three years,” says Lau, with a grin on his face. “The addressable market is
billions of people. We’re at barely one percent of where we want to be.”

In 1837, Charles Dickens rose to fame, by publishing serial installments of THE PICKWICK PAPERS.
Readers could hardly wait to read the next chapter, and now Wattpad not only offers this ability for any
writer, but the social reading component allows fans to communicate with the authors directly. If you
watched our last episode with CEA Austin Kleon, you know just how powerful this relationship can be,
both in distributing work, and also in creating it.

Scrolling through the news feed and messages on Wattpad, I’m reminded of one of Dicken’s most
famous characters Oliver Twist, eager and hungry, waiting for another helping. It seems every user on
Wattpad echoes some version of one of Oliver’s most famous lines, “Please, Sir, can I have some more?”

CONCLUSION

Therefore, we conclude that Wattpad is a good effect on the students because it helps them improve
their grammars and learn new words. Wattpad is a good place to discover and share stories for teens
like us. Wattpad is considered as a social platform that connects people through words wherein
teenagers could express what they truly feel through writing stories. Therefore, wattpad does not really
affects the academic performances of students at school, but wattpad really helps students to improve
themselves specially on their vocabulary and comprehension responses.
The following are the advantages and disadvantages of wattpad:

ADVANTAGES

· You can express yourself through writing a story on Wattpad

· You could make some friends

· You can prevent boredom

· You learn new words and correct grammars

· You could make this as your stress reliever

· You get to show off your work to other writer who might give you suggestions and help you along
the way.

· You publish a chapter and not a whole book.

· You get experience

· You can make great friends.

· Loads of competitions to enter at no cost.

DISADVANTAGES

· Some readers may comment in a way that may hurt the feeling of a writer

· There is a comparison with other author's works

· Slow updates that can make the readers upset

· The writers may be pressured in updating their stories because of their reader's comment to make
an update. This can result to a lame story update.

· Difficulty in creating a new scene in a way that can attract the readers

· If a reader doesn't like your story, he/she will tell it to his/her friends which will cause them not to
read it.
· Some people, especially the students, have becoming a habit in reading Wattpad stories. Thus, it
may affect their academic preparation or studies

And that are some of the advantages and disadvantages that occur in the application
Wattpad.

· Not everybody on Wattpad is friendly

· Reading bad grammar or not well punctuated books can have a bad impact on your writing skills.

· People can easily steal your idea and get rewarded because of this.

Not all books is child friendly