August 7, 2026

Hey everyone, it's @nick back with another monthly product update.

Previously, we shared changes to Browse as part of the move to the new story categories (genres, subgenres, fandoms). One missing piece of that switch is the Hot Lists, our fabled ranking system that is never broken and makes perfect sense... Okay, yes, tag rankings have been confusing, contentious, and often broken.

Last year, we updated the underlying logic and simplified how it calculates rankings, moving away from a handful of legacy algorithms that were difficult to explain and replacing them with a two-factor system:

🔸 7-day popularity by reading time

🔸 Week-over-week growth in engaged readers

That's it!

Well...

There are additional filters and factors that help identify stories in the wrong language, consolidate tags, and remove abandoned stories that haven't been updated in more than 6 months. These factors often result in the bugs that get reported or the strange stories that might pop onto the list one day. We're still working on those, and we'll continue to make updates to the underlying ranking logic to make it a little more dynamic, but I wanted to acknowledge the ongoing work there before we get into the new stuff.

The rankings are presently attached to tags. There are millions of tags across the platform with a variety of sizes and popularity, from #romance or #fantasy to things like #dream or #cloud. While this allows niches or new genres to emerge, it also causes confusion and dilution. Writers have given us feedback that they don't know the value of ranking highly in something like #target, nor do they know how stories get discovered in those spaces. Readers have given similar feedback. That's about to change.

With the new story categories, and the upcoming changes to Browse to match them, we'll also be updating the rankings to align with these categories. This means stories will no longer rank by their tags and will instead rank by their supergenre, genre, and subgenre. Stories will also be locked to their supergenre, so a Fanfiction story with Romance as its genre cannot rank in Romance; instead, it ranks in Fanfiction and its specific Fandom. Similarly, Poetry and Non-Fiction stories will only rank in Poetry or Non-Fiction, respectively, and then the subgenres of those spaces.

This move will take us from millions of ranking lists to under a thousand, but every list will now have its own associated Browse page, giving every category a dedicated place where readers can discover stories and every writer a consistent path to being found through their story categories.

This also changes tags from being the way you declare everything about your story to becoming more niche information relevant to a reader. Hopefully, you'll have seen the update to Story Details, which now displays story categories, so stories no longer have to repeat their genres in their tags; use them for settings, themes, tropes, dynamics, and other information.

When we make this change, we will maintain the existing Hot and New lists. Those lists have been around longer than me, and as a Wattpad old, I need to tread carefully and not dunk on things for being old. But... we should probably experiment with some new lists.

We're going to explore different ways to rank stories with new types of lists that go beyond "Hot." We have plenty of ideas, but no clear direction on which ones people will find the most valuable, intriguing, or maybe just plain different. So we're adding a poll here to get your feedback on the lists you'd like us to try.

These lists would not replace the existing Hot/New lists, but instead add more variety. Also, just because one list wins the poll doesn't mean we won't try the other ones, too, so vote guilt-free.