The dumping ground for Wattpad
I’ve been using Inkitt since 2022 or 2023, and it’s difficult to recognise what this platform has become. When I first joined, Inkitt felt like a much more serious and adult alternative to other writing platforms. There seemed to be some kind of filter, a different audience, and a clear identity of its own. Of course, not everything had to appeal to me, but at least it felt as though there was some thought behind what kind of platform they wanted to build. That version of Inkitt has almost completely disappeared. Management has allowed the catalogue to deteriorate to a point that is difficult to understand. These days, unless you are specifically looking for Korean fanfiction with sexual content, stories about BTS members in increasingly explicit situations, or material mixing manga, pornography and fanfic with seemingly no standards at all, finding something genuinely worth reading means digging through an enormous amount of very low-quality content. And the problem is not that this kind of content exists. The problem is that Inkitt seems to have completely given up on having any kind of filter, editorial direction, or even a recognisable identity. A platform that once had the potential to attract adult readers and writers increasingly feels like the dumping ground for everything other platforms such as Wattpad no longer want to host. What makes this particularly disappointing is that Inkitt had something other platforms did not: it could have occupied the space of a more adult, serious and curated fiction platform. Instead of building on that, they chose to dilute it until it became almost unrecognisable. The community also feels increasingly neglected. There are barely any activities or initiatives left that make active participation worthwhile, and customer support has deteriorated considerably. Replies can take an extremely long time, and the overall impression is that there is less and less interest in looking after users who have been on the platform for years. I’m not giving Inkitt one star because it was never good. I’m giving it one star because it used to be. And that is exactly why it is so disappointing to see what its management has done to it. You took a platform that could have built a strong adult audience of its own and turned it into one saturated with teenage-oriented content, sexual Korean fanfiction, and explicit material that appears to be published with little to no quality control. I have no idea whether your internal numbers say this strategy is working. Perhaps they do. But if the goal was to destroy what once made Inkitt different from every other platform, congratulations. You succeeded.
By Perséfone E.