fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6042 ]

[ SECRET POST #6042 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6042 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 42 secrets from Secret Submission Post #864.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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While I may disagree with the overdiagnosing here, there is something to be said in that leaving comments used to be the base standard form of interaction and now there's like this social A.T. Field most people don't dare to break through. This isn't a callout to people who only leave likes\kudos\etc., I'm just wondering... what the hell happened in the past 15 years?

At a guess, I'd say a pretty high percentage of today's fandom weren't around 15 or even 10 years ago. A decent number are barely even old enough to have been alive that long, but even among older fans there's an increasingly large contingent of "discovering fandom now for the first time in my 30s/40s/50s".

You’re really only thinking of LJ. Comments on fic were very rare in the dedicated archives and were usually from readers who had a connection with the author outside of whatever fic they were commenting on.

.......... fanfiction.net??????? I never did LJ but oh boy commenting on ff.net was just to be expected

I was actually curious about the math on this so I just went to AO3 and the tag for fic crossposted on ffnet. Found a fic that has 7766 comments on AO3. Exact same fic has 1388 reviews on ffnet.

Since ffnet doesn't have a hit count, and those aren't particularly reliable anyway, we can look at the bookmark/fave count. 7748 for AO3 and 3052 for ffnet.

So we have 7766 comments and 7748 bookmarks on AO3 vs 1388 comments and 3052 bookmarks on ffnet. This is a ratio of 1.002 comments per bookmark for AO3 vs 0.4558 for ffnet. So this fic was over twice as likely to get a comment on AO3 as on ffnet per bookmark.

Granted, it's just one fic (it would be a massive undertaking to do a statistical analysis on a site by site basis) and there's no way to see if such a thing has changed over time without having to dig for data, and ain't nobody got time for that.

Ehhh, I think this is hugely influenced by fandom and when it was posted. These days, I think AO3 is the more frequented place for reading fic, so the numbers will be influenced by that. And fandom also plays a huge role - I used to crosspost on both for a while and fics in anime fandoms would consistently get more comments on ffn than on AO3. Popular Western media fandoms (stuff like MCU ca. 2012-2014) got more comments on AO3. But I think that was mostly influenced by the fact that AO3 was already established in those fandoms due to BNFs posting there, whereas anime fandoms mostly didn't exist on AO3.

It really depends on the fic! I find my weirder shit gets more reviews on ffnet even today than it does on AO3, whereas my fluff is adored by AO3 but goes mostly unrecognized on ffnet.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-23 02:57 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-23 03:11 (UTC) - Expand

AYRT
I never saw that with FF.net so hadn’t considered it tbh. I was only thinking about LJ vs specific fandom archives, the old mailing lists and Angelfire circles. LJ was the only place I saw a large number of readers commenting if they didn’t have a personal connection to the author. And even on the pit it was like that but I was only ever there for a short while for one fandom after its archive disappeared.

... uh, no? I rarely got many comments on the stuff I posted on FF.net, even in the popular fandoms.

This kind of scared me off commenting back in the day. People would post fic to their journals and then share the link elsewhere, but if you, a stranger to them, left a comment on their LJ they would be weird about it.

Fifteen years ago I read just much fic, but didn't leave comments *or* kudos and nobody had hit counters.

Seriously, the proportion of lurkers hasn't gone up, they're just more visible now.

I think this is a large part of it.

If you were writing in old paper zines in the 80s one comment was a lot.

Eh. I know for a fact the same people who used to comment on LJ are now only posting kudos because they are still in the same fandom with me! Not commenting! I see their kudos and I wonder if they've somehow developed social anxiety since we've moved to AO3 or it's that kudos make it easy not to comment, or more that LJ made it more fun to comment because of the icons and the social aspect.

Either way, way fewer comments on AO3 from the exact same people.

AYRT There was definitely to some extent a more social aspect on lj that led to some people being more likely to comment (I'm still way more likely to comment on fic for people I consider friends) but it also led to some people being less likely. And I suspect there's more to the fact that you're seeing less comments from the same people than just something about modern fandom. To start with a fandom that still has all the same writers and readers after fifteen years is a really unusual fandom, there's lots going on there.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-24 22:56 (UTC) - Expand

You know, this comment has stuck with me. I think you're entirely right.

And it's weird, because old websites had pageview-counters where the sitemaster and any visitor could tell that umpteen thousand people had been to their place, but no one got weird about "buy why aren't all those people benefitting me in some way??" at all. You would have been seen as a complete nut if you got mad that people were reading "your" articles without signing your guestbook.

I remember observing the hit counter on my AO3 go up (it was the first fanfic archive I contributed to that had one) and being amazed that so many people had thought my summaries and titles were promising enough to click in, and that people from literally any country with internet connectivity could read something I'd written, if they wanted to. We're all going to die, and they freely chose to spend a piece of their time with something I made up.

No further compliment was needed.

AYRT I mean people did whine incessantly about how nobody comments on lj too! That's not new either. It's just if they were bringing up ratios it meant they had snuck in one of those hidden-pixel hit counters and people would get mad at them about using invasive spyware, because that was a thing we still cared about.

I think a lot of it has to do with the way technology's shifted to where everything involves a kudos or 'like" button nowadays, rather than a chance to actually comment and engage in a discussion. People just find it easier to click that stuff nowadays, or have more opportunity to click that stuff nowadays, rather than leave a comment.

And then some of it is also more personal and individual in nature - fandom drama putting people off from wanting to comment, or people getting tired of authors complaining and nitpicking about whether or not certain comments are "good enough" to post, even positive ones (like if someone says "This was great!", some authors will say that's not detailed enough), or things of that sort, too.

And with more people reading on their phones nowadays, that can make it harder sometimes to comment even when you want to, too. Especially if you do most of your reading during work breaks or on a trip or something, where you don't have a lot of time to read and comment.

My experience: I used to leave comments but then there was a phase fandom seemed to go through where people got mad about types of comments and there was all this discourse about what was the right kind of comment to leave, and how if you just left a "love it!" or something then you might as well not comment at all, among other varied opinions. It made me really paranoid and now I just don't engage beyond kudos.

>if you just left a "love it!" or something then you might as well not comment at all

Ah yes, the "likes do nothing and kudos are worthless" from before likes and kudos.

Ha! I've never thought of it like that but you are absolutely spot on. I wonder if it's the same genre of people that get upset at both.

Crazy discourse shit. The kind of person who promotes this kind of discourse I am fairly sure either ACTUALLY doesn't have a life outside of fandom (someone who navigates life shouldn't have the time and energy to be petty over the quality... of a stupid comment... on a stupid fic) or are in fandom simply to annoy others and not enjoy themselves

Leaving comments was never the base standard. I read dozens of fic on fanfiction.net and Livejournal and never left a single comment, and I never thought I was special and sneaky. I assumed there were lots of lurkers doing the same for fics they liked. Nobody ever knew I was there!

And before those sites? Fanfiction was hosted on regular old websites, where you couldn't leave a comment on a fic directly. Sometimes the author would link to their fic on a forum, and you had to leave your comments on the post. If they didn't, I guess the most you could do was sign their guestbook if they had one, or email them. But you wouldn't make a separate guestbook post or email every single fic like you would a comment, because that would be spamming.

You're taking one moment in history and assuming it was the ur-thing when it wasn't. Comments played a marginal to nonexistent role in fanfic writing before the early social-media-ization of the internet. When fanfics were stored on private websites and fan shrines, there was often no way to leave feedback for the author, short of getting in touch with the owner of the site and seeing if they would give you contact info for the person who had submitted a particular story to their library, and then sending the author a private email. People who are going "comments have always existed" grew up with fanfiction.net or livejournal or the AO3 - all of which came along considerably later. Before, there were no view counts, there were no comment walls, and there were no likes or kudos. There were just people who went from writing and publishing their stories in zines to publishing them on the internet, out of love for the canon and love for the fan-created stories they'd read. The whole assertion that fanfiction will go extinct if praise isn't forthcoming is a lie.

That said, I think "what's happened?" is a good question. The social fabric has been damaged on a lot of different levels. One of the more obvious changes is that people are threatened offline with being ostracized, arrested, punished at school, or fired for things they post online. And that "we are policing you, so you'd best police yourselves and each other" ethos makes it hard to maintain a space where people are being genuine with each other. Another is that highly abusive verbal attacks have been trivialized as if they were to be expected, and despite the fact that anyone who's had in-person experience with bullying should know "oh, just ignore them and it will stop" is useless advice, fandom often stood by and admonished the people who challenged assholes insted of the assholes themselves. The worst of this involved serious emotional violence - there was a particular time in fandom when I remember a number of incidents involving someone faking their suicide or death from a serious illness, turning out to have never been the person they'd pretended to be ... and the people affected had to deal with that betrayal alone, because life on the internet was treated like it was trivial, unreal, and unimportant. AFAIK, that tapered off when police investigations brought fraud charges against some of the perpetrators. But they deceived many people before they were caught. And to this day, I've spoken with disabled people who've felt compelled to send me pictures of confidential medical documents that I (an internet friend) had no right to see, because they think otherwise I have no reason to believe them if they just tell me that they're dying.

I realize that went somewhat off on a tangent from fanfic, but it's backdrop to panfandom water-cooler spaces like this one getting bombarded with secrets about how people "side-eyed" you for leaving the wrong kind of comments, or not enough of them, or criticism, or just kudos, or even showing that you interpreted the story in a way the author thinks is morally wrong. And it's like a death of a thousand cuts to people feeling like an attempt to interact with a stranger who made something they liked will be well recieved. As opposed to judged.

What happened? All of this, plus anti crusades and more.

+100000

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