It's been a scolding hot minute since I've posted anything and you may have noticed I changed my username as well as my penname. Ah, a fresh start to a stale-ass environment.

Anyway, during my silence, I've been watching this tragedy from afar and I felt compelled to yeet my opinions out there once again.

If you are unaware, Wattpad had a security breach back in June, yes June, affecting 270 million users. I'm not going to talk a whole lot about the actual breach, I'm here to mostly discuss how Wattpad has handled the situation and some things about their team. 

If you want more information, check out Wattpad Strategies No One Told You About by walkingecho, she posted about it and she's been giving more in-depth information on the situation and what you should do to protect your account and email.

*Fat sigh like a Youtuber in an apology video*

Anyhoo,

Wattpad is a multi-million dollar corporation with social media accounts such as Instagram and Twitter, and of course their own website. So explain to me why they failed to warn users about this issue until now? Wattpad had been radio silent on their social media about it and posting  Q&As on Instagram stories with paid authors nobody gives a fuck about. They didn't post anything on Twitter until 2 days ago and their Instagram post just went up yesterday when the hacking initially occurred last month.

(They posted something on their Support webpage from what I've heard but nobody is out here hawk watching their support page soooooo.)

It wasn't until today when I received an email about the breach for my damn sock account I created with friends as a joke, and I still never received an email for this account, my backup, or the community account I'm a part of. So they're not even emailing everyone.

Now I'm a dumb bitch so I know nothing about running a company, but is it that complex to post a forum post saying you've been hacked? Damn, figuring out what to say in their posts must've been really hard for their PR team guys :((

Given that this shit ties into the claims of past employees saying HQ is a fuckin' mess, I'm not surprised by how it's been handled.

While on the topic of past employees aka the real meat of this rant, I got bored and decided to check up on Wattpad's Glassdoor reviews. I checked it in the past a few years ago, there were some good reviews but quite a few bad ones. There are a few reviews I'd like to repost here so more people can get a look at what goes on in HQ. I think it's important for people to see how Wattpad operates behind its mask. Behind that mask is poor management, abuse of power, shitty salaries, carelessness, and even some racism. allegedly. 

I might get in trouble for this but at this point, I dare an Ambassador to delete my account for spreading shit around. If I go down it'll only prove my point about them even more. Wouldn't have much to lose anyway, all of my friends are leaving this dump because of how bad it is.

These reviews are quite long but it's important you read all of the info provided to truly understand why Wattpad is a problematic mess.  

December 24th, 2019:

"I worked at Wattpad full-time for more than 3 years

Pros

1. LOCATION - In front of union station with access to transit and good restaurants.

2. OFFICE - Pleasant office with snacks and plenty of office lunches.

3. CANADIAN - Amongst the few successful big companies to exist in Canada

Cons

Here is what you MUST know if you are thinking of joining Wattpad: 

 1. Inexperienced & political leadership (from mid-level to GMs) - They are interested in making themselves look good, defending their "numbers", playing politics, and justifying their role. This results in poor agile work and top-down orders for engineers and products.

2. Lagging Company Outlook - Wattpad has gone through enough rounds of funding. With its recent funding, Tencent (a Chinese company), becoming its biggest shareholder. This means the company is struggling to carve its position amongst the big-name competitors - kindle, kobo, etc. It is struggling to monetize its users (who are all younger teens with little to no money).

3. Lack of Talent and Resources - the turnover of talent has been high (check LinkedIn). Furthermore, the company doesn't have resources to properly staff up teams - resulting in a pessimistic outlook. Furthermore, jobs remain open for many months before someone wants to work for Wattpad.

4. Poor Salaries - competitively, wattpad has low salaries. This results in talent not coming to wattpad or leaving shortly afterward.

5. Chasing PR/News press - somehow the company has been good at promoting itself in the news. I wonder how much they could have accomplished if they put that effort to resolve some critical issues within the company.

6. Moral/Ethical Dilemma - it is an elephant in the room that rarely anyone at wattpad talks about. The users of wattpad are exposed to erotica, sexual fantasies, kinks, and soft porn. Surprisingly, wattpad does little to anything to prevent the spread of such content. 

Case in point, it got blocked by Google (AdSense) for not doing enough to block illegal content. Why would they if they make money "engaging" users and earning from ads? As an employee, be ready to grapple with this reality.

Advice to Management

Be more present, listen to your employees vs speaking to them, and trust your front-line employees (engineers, designers, and product). Stop adding layers of reporting lines which result in inexperienced leadership playing politics and driving away strong talent."

****

January 22, 2020:

"I worked at Wattpad full-time for more than a year

Pros

- Good office space and location

- A lot of talented employees

- New branding looks better than old

Cons

- Disparity between wages across departments 

- Exploiting contractors and volunteers

- Think they're the "best" and anyone who criticized is automatically wrong

- Egotistic management with an idealistic view of the product and practices

- Questionable faith in customer and user devotion, people don't actually like you that much

- Company is literally a meme, it's a running joke on social media that Wattpad has tasteless content

- Asked me if a punching bag will fix my mental health when I said I need therapy for the disturbing content I had to moderate ---- They expose foreign unpaid workers to pornographic, violent, and disturbing content. Their justification is that it "needs to be done to improve the community".

Why exploit people who love your platform and want to protect the community when you can pay what they deserve and give back the same appreciation and effort? They pay their senior management 6 figures for being obnoxiously loud about how they're correct and everyone else is wrong. 

On the other hand, they have to consider "serious justifications and reasoning" for paying someone at all when they sift through disturbing content for their platform. They also don't cover for therapy to mediate the potential mental impact it may have on their employees. They also tried to dismiss a harassment case a while back and some of the employees involved still work at this company.

It's really ironic especially given they always promote themselves with the "so many women work at our company" fake woke statistics. Management will do their most to protect people they like and throw people who they don't like under the bus.

Advice to Management

Don't punish people for speaking up as they genuinely care. Don't cover up shady practices because those you punish will talk about it. What an absolute pity that your company fails to learn from your mistakes every single time.

You lost great talent and passionate people that really speak true to Wattpad's brand and community, the same community you profit out of I might add. You wonder why people don't love your product anymore, but replace passionate and hard-working people with profit-driven, non-empathetic, disinterested employees that drool over making money from literal children. 

As a company that is well known in the Toronto tech space, you sure have a stinky reputation for being a terrible employer. It's well deserved though considering the crap your company does in the background."

****

February 8th, 2020:

"I worked at Wattpad full-time for more than a year

Pros

What most other reviewers noted:

- Great location, close to Union Station

- Beautiful offices in a historic building

- Some kind hardworking people (sadly, not always appreciated)

Cons

Where to start?

1. A beautiful facade - Wattpad has a stellar PR and is hungry for more PR/News press opportunities. Sadly, it seems like decisions are made solely on what will make a good headline. Wattpad as a company is all about what's sparkly, sexy and looks good, and this logic is applied both externally and internally. It's all about "being recognized as X or Y," but it doesn't matter if you are a terrible leader or you are trying to sell soft porn to kids, amongst other things.

2. Diversity and inclusion don't mean much without equality. It's common to see positive press about Wattpad being portrayed as advocates for diversity and inclusion in the workplace. But sadly, Wattpad doesn't walk the talk. Smart, hardworking people, get stuck in dead-end jobs, are repeatedly passed on for promotions and get paid ridiculously low salaries.

Strangely enough, employees who face this issue mostly belong to visible minorities, are people of colour, or are ESL. Yes, Wattpad is diverse, and it's inclusive. Still, if your work, ideas and contributions don't hold the same value as the ones done by others, then diversity and inclusion become another facade.

3. Show and tell culture - No real results, accountability, or leadership. Being a leader at Wattpad means being able to shamelessly self-promote and generate exposure for the company and yourself in the Toronto tech scene. There is no direction or real leadership. Leadership requires radical self-inquiry, but how can you do this if you are convinced you are the best and immediately ostracize anyone who questions you?

4. High employee turnover and lack of career advancement - You can see it by yourself if you look at LinkedIn or if you keep an eye on the company's website for six months. High turnover of designers, engineers and product folks. Also note that the group with the lowest turnover is the one with the mid/senior-level people (six-figure salaries, flashy titles, little accountability, comfy jobs and lots of PR). So good luck if you want to climb the ladder! You have better chances of doing it somewhere else.

5. Toxic content - I agree with the most recent reviewers, Wattpad faces a moral/ethical dilemma, but no one talks about it. The site is plagued with pornographic, violent, and disturbing content. Only 10% of the staff deals with content regularly, while the rest of the company doesn't even touch it (CEO included).

Most employees are unaware of this or look the other way. Unless, a revenue stream is affected, like when they got blocked by google (Adsense) for not doing enough to prevent illegal content, then the company acknowledges there is illegal content on their platform and reactively does something about it.

To deal with this cesspool (believe me, I'm scarred for life), Wattpad uses volunteers who love the community and want to keep it safe. These unpaid foreign workers are exposed DAILY to harmful content, and because they aren't employees, they have no access to support or therapy of any kind. Hey, they get Wattpad Swag! But this means Wattpad gets to moderate its cesspool for free while keeping the facade of being a global company and closing deals all around the globe.

Advice to Management

1. Lack of equality - Diversity and inclusion fall short without equality, and Wattpad LACKS this. It's not just about being included in the meeting; it's about your opinions and your work mattering. The work of people of colour or non- native English speakers don't seem to be as valuable, and they seem to be stuck in the same roles forever.

2. Stop making decisions thinking only about the headlines, PR, the news press and the photo sessions. At this point, it looks like you are more interested in being perceived as a tech mogul in Toronto than on the actual work that's being done by your front-line employees.

3. Don't let your kids use Wattpad without supervision."

****

I'd like to add to that last line of the last review, Wattpad's age restriction is 13+. And when creating a story you have the option to select your target audience, that's cool beans and shit but they added Middle Grade as one of the target audience options. 

Middle-Grade fiction is for ages 8 to 12. Notice I said 12 and not 13 which is Wattpad's age limit... Because when you Google middle-grade age range, every site says 8 to 12. Wattpad's middle-grade option says 13. They deadass changed the Middle-Grade age range so they could add it to their site because they know otherwise they'd be violating their own guidelines, again. 

Why would you list a genre for people under the age requirement? I fully believe Wattpad only has an age restriction so they don't get in trouble for advertising an app full of disturbing shit as being kid friendly. Maybe that's the reason they chose the youngest restriction possible because they know that doesn't stop kids from being on the app so they don't actually care.

I also believe the fact Wattpad's team refuses to deal with disturbing content and pushes it off to their Ambassadors is the reason why the child predators and pedophilic activities going on in some groups is still going on despite them telling me directly they were looking into it over a year ago. They don't care at all. They didn't even care enough to remove the books.

~~~~~

There are a lot more reviews but I'm sure you can see the running themes with these three examples. Now, I expect companies to get a few bad reviews and have mixed employee experiences, but when you have reviews dating as far back as May of 2016 (On Glassdoor alone, not including other possible sites), all expressing the same issues, your company is problematic and it's not just "Oh they were a bad employee and they're just salty we fired them".

All of the good reviews listed are from people who are still currently at Wattpad and have been there for under a year. All of the bad reviews are from employees who worked at the company for over a year. That should say something too.

I also find it funny how Wattpad only replies to the short positive reviews and completely ignores the very detailed negative ones, real mature and professional. 

Wattpad itself, aside from its toxic userbase, is yet another crappy corporation valuing money more than anything else. A lotta people are mad about the way they took care of this security breach but I seriously doubt this will affect their platform that much, unfortunately.

There's not many options for online writing platforms other than fanfiction sites, ones that require contracts to write for, and the small number of other free sites like Wattpad. Therefore, while there's many who hate this platform, and rightfully so, they don't leave because where else are they going to go?

It's 6 am so I'm going to take my ass to bed, I hope this helps you hoes realize Wattpad isn't this hip, diverse, and humble platform they claim to be.

Update

I thought I'd do a little update on this rant because it's been a few years and I checked back on Glassdoor to see if Wattpad's employee reviews have changed any.  Given these reviews here, I don't think they have improved a ton since then.

Before I show you a few of the newer reviews from this year, let me clarify what they're talking about when they mention Wattpad's acquisition:

By the way, I also looked at WEBTOON's employee reviews and they struggle with many of the same issues as Wattpad, some are even worse I'd say. I looked into Naver's reviews as well, and you guessed it, same issues.

I know some people have hope that Naver will help Wattpad improve, but yeah mates I seriously doubt that'll happen.

Anyway, onto Wattpad's recent reviews:

May 10th, 2022

"Was good before acquisition."

Pros

Compensation was decent but not as competitive as other org. Most people are good and helpful.

Cons

Some of the changes that were implemented because of the acquisition had left some people to get the shorter end of the stick. There has been turnover on an almost regular basis. Wattpad lost a lot of good people.

Also, some who are currently in the Wattpad do not have a good work attitude which makes the workplace toxic and management doesn't seem to notice these people who need to be in PIP as these particular people contributed to why some people leaving the company.

~~~~

April 21, 2022

"Went downhill very fast since being acquired"

Pros

Used to be a fun place to work but since the acquisition, it is a very toxic and unrewarding place. As of now I cannot think of any pros other than some coworkers are very nice people.

Cons

- Base salary is well below industry standard.

- Very inexperienced leadership team. Bad decision-making and lack of transparency. On top of that a huge lack of accountability.

- Very hard to get promotions, because it's a popularity game. Your hard work will not be rewarded unless you are on good terms with the correct people.

- C Level executives keep getting promotions and raises while anyone below that level is underpaid.

- The working culture is not great, people seem very unmotivated which could also be a result of how the work has been set up. I would steer clear of Wattpad if you are looking for a job in 2022, there are good people who want to see the company improve but as of now, I cannot recommend it to anyone.

Advice

Improve base salary and take a good hard look at the leadership processes because current ways are driving people out of the company.

~~~~~~

January 25th, 2022

"Good culture, if you get into certain circles"

Pros

Nothing I can think of at the moment.

Cons

Incompetent and inexperienced leadership/management, systematic issues.

There are career ladders, but also a glass ceiling. Biased promotion process that heavily depends on if management likes you. To get to more senior levels, you need to be in certain circles. 

Uneven work distribution. Some people need to work long hours (and nothing is being done to alleviate this), and some have nothing to do. Some are able to delegate their work to junior members who don't have a voice.

Do not be fooled by their diversity and inclusion numbers. Their report doesn't show the distribution of marginalized people with their role level at the company. How many of them are in junior positions compared to non-marginalized people. It also doesn't show the turnover rate (which has been high in the last year). How many people surveyed joined the company last year. Also, the report doesn't shed light on the people who disagreed with their survey statements.

The majority of the people here (especially in leadership/management) think they are aware of diversity and inclusion issues and are empathetic but they are not, which is problematic because they think they're doing an excellent job but they are not.

Advice

Naver could shake up leadership.

~~~~~

There are quite a few more positive reviews, but I do not believe them to be genuine reviews.

A lot of times companies will ask employees to write good reviews, and the reason I feel like this is the case is that many of the positive ones are pretty short and vague. They don't really detail their experiences at the company other than listing the pros and either listing pretty minor or very few cons, or some say they have no cons at all or they just say something very very very simple like "it's a great place to work!", which is extremely shady given their past reviews like the ones I listed above.

A company that has had these issues consistently for years isn't going to suddenly turn around and have zero or few cons now, unless they completely changed everything and everyone, leadership included.

I feel my theory in this is also supported by the fact, as I said earlier in the rant, most of these 4-5 star reviews of the company that say it's great, are still from current employees or ones who worked there for less than a year. Meanwhile, more critical ones are from older employees. 

(Naver has this too, the majority of reviews are 5 stars, list little to no cons, and are from current employees. Sure, it's very possible many people have good experience there. But there are still those few bad ones that list issues with the company, and again, I refuse to believe a very large IT corp just has no cons to working there.)

Now some of the more positive ones do seem real as those list cons, such as how they don't really like giving employees a raise or promotion, and how the company lacks organization or other things along those lines. They personally still had a decent experience at the company, but also still have criticisms which I believe is fair and honest.

So, I mention this because I don't want to ignore that there are more positive ones and make it seem like I'm only cherry-picking bad ones to paint the company worse than it is, as I've said before, I try to give wattpad credit where it's due.

Anyway, I just wanted to add a few newer reviews to this rant so people could see where the company stands today.