Wattpad is mainly a bunch of smut and romance no matter the genre while fanfiction.net is full of unfinished work and writers don't seem to take their writing seriously and often abandon before even making it to the tenth chapter. Which do you think is better for posting writing?
I've never posted anything on those websites, but if that is your opinion on them I don't see why you are asking this, really. If you should want your work published in the future, it's better not to post anything except for excerpts or one chapter. If you post a full story, it may be considered published online already.
Fanfiction.net is mostly that, people posting fanfics and I'm pretty sure most are younger with little to no desire to seriously write. Not sure why'd you look for people who take their writing seriously there. On the brighter note, lots of fun fanfics and some can even be amazing. Fictionpress is the same as fanfiction.net except for original works. Did you try smashwords?
I'm going to say Wattpad, even if most is smut or romance you can find (rarely) some pretty good stories and no one takes themselves too seriously there. If you want to post any serious writing, I'd say neither.
I post Backstreet Boy fanfiction was I was like 14 or something lol. Those are of game writing when you just want to totally have fun because you know you will never get your Dawson's Creek work published because of copyrights. Why would you want to post there anyways? I always imagine 13 year older's on those websites.
I have currently posted 8 out of 12 chapters of a Doctor Who story to FanFiction.net, and I am going to post Chapter 9 tomorrow. If you're taking your fan-fiction seriously and are going to finish it, then your story will make FFN better rather than the site making your story worse I don't even read 99% of the stories I find there because either the synopsis or the first chapter tells me the story's not going to be good - and even worse, occasionally I start reading a story that's so amazing that I'm legitimately dis-heartened that it's not going to be finished - but believe me when I say that the good, finished stories on the site are AMAZING.
I've never been to fanfiction.net so I can't speak for that one, but Wattpad isn't all bad. I've found plenty of stories in various genres, so its not allllll smut. I do agree though that it can be hard to find decent quality. I usually find the better ones by just looking through the titles that win the site's annual Wattys award, since their quality is usually a lot better. As for it reducing your chances of getting published the traditional way... probably, unless you're really good at self promotion and getting those reads and reviews up pretty high. I do however know of at least one writer who published her entire novel in serial form on Wattpad and then managed to get a publishing contract afterward (of that same book) so, I guess posting the novel online isn't the death sentence it used to be. The novel in question was part of a series of three and a fantasy novel, no smut at all. Don't quote me, since I'm not exactly an expert in publishing and still in the writing stages of my own novel, but you probably have to be pretty popular to get a publishing house to notice your work through that route. I imagine publishers still consider work posted on sites like Wattpad as essentially published which might make them less inclined to pick it up unless its doing really, really well on the site. So, self promotion, social media skills, and the willingness to self publish if all else fails is probably the way to go when looking at a site like that. If you're just posting for feedback or because you want people to read your work and don't much care about getting paid for it, Wattpad isn't absolutely terrible. And there are other sites, for example Jukepop, which does a similar thing with a smaller pool of authors, and likely a smaller audience.
The OP neatly sums up my experience of Wattpad.com After being there for a while it seems like a website tailored for 13-19 year old girls. It's like chicklit, fanfic, smut or a combination of aforementioned genres is all you can find there. I don't have anything meaningful to add to this thread, just wanted to say that Wattpad.com is terrible
