fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6437 ]

[ SECRET POST #6437 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6437 ⌋

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

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Notes:

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01. https://i.imgur.com/sSUsAUV.png

Maybe people like to look for high comment counts because they like when an author is active in their own comment section? Idk, "sort by comments" has always been a mystery to me. I sort by date, by kudos, by bookmarks, but never by comments.

I sort by Kudos then Comments. Comments will usually give you a couple of different from fics from top Kudos. And then I usually compare number of comments to chapter count.

Interesting. Do you read the comments? I honestly pay no attention to comments and never really thought about them before. I leave mine and bounce.

(no subject)

kaijinscendre - 2024-08-21 00:32 (UTC) - Expand

I do both: fics with a ton of kudos but relatively few comments tend to be of a different type/have a different appeal or engagement than fics with a moderate amount of kudos but many comments and it depends what I'm in the mood for.

Edited 2024-08-21 00:55 (UTC)

Why does it matter? There's no threshold above which you get a Comments Medal. If you're doing a deep dive into a new fandom you're going to be trying a large number of fics, not just the top 10 or so.

Does anyone really care about comment numbers that much? I don't. I certainly don't filter by them or anything. If I see the author is replying to comments I just mentally divide the number in half, it's no big deal.

I like to see some conversations in the comments going on. It's not a deciding factor of any kind in which fics I read, but I do low-key respect authors who reply to comments more than authors who don't.

quite some time ago I remember some tumblr grumblrs claiming that authors responded to comments to inflate their count and make it look like their fic is more popular than it is, and like OP that's when I started hesitating about replying to everything. but it was def a while ago, and I stopped caring about that attitude in the interim.

I guess it was the very small subset of readers who actually think lots of comments = better fic, and don't click to see if any percentage are the author, so they get irrationally buttmad if their metric doesn't work. those kind of people aren't worth listening to I guess, do what feels right to you (OP, or any other writer, including me if I write anything in the future).

Tumblr grumblrs is an amazing phrase and I know exactly what type of people you mean by it.

When I’m into a fic, I like to read other people’s comments and the authors’ replies to them, so I appreciate that the number goes up because then I know when to check for new responses. It doesn’t feel artificial to me.

IMO the true gems tend to be underrated. Out of curiosity I sorted the fic in my primary fandom by comments and found: a lot of crossovers with more popular fandoms, (or worse! drabble collections with 50 different fandoms tagged!) and 80-chapter sagas by people with a lot of tumblr friends who show up to have lengthy comment exchanges with them on every chapter.

Sometimes I filter by comment count specifically because I like it when authors and readers talk to each other in the comments. It's more fun to comment when you are pretty sure you'll get a response. Also the story will posses a certain vibe. I don't know how to explain it.

But no, yeah, I don't care about this possible feature.

Don’t worry about how some imaginary reader is going to view your comment count. Engage with your readers if you like and don’t if you don’t want to. AO3 has a variety of ways to filter and sort and there’s no right way to do it, there’s no One True Way to comment on fic, and there’s nothing wrong with just doing what makes you comfortable even if it may cause a tiny pang of annoyance for someone who likes to do things differently.

Weirdly, if authors go to their stats dashboards, the sort is by comment threads, not total comments, and I never figured out why they don't have that as an option on filter pages (unless it's just prohibitive in terms of database calculations.)

But yeah, sort by comment as is gets pretty useless even if no authors answer comments and you exclude chaptered fics, because all it takes is two fans getting in a long conversation together and they completely blow the curve.

Yeah, I was coming here to say this. It's weird that AO3 *could* display number of threads instead of total number of comments, but it just... doesn't? I wish that the default display was number of threads.

But yeah, given that it's not, I am not too bothered by appearing like I'm inflating my comment count. I like replying to comments to thank the person who left them; I like when authors reply to mine. If people think that's comment inflating rather than a preference for actually acknowledging people like a human being, I don't particularly care for their opinion to be honest.

Yeah and honestly as someone who never gets around to replies, I'm not bothered by people who actually bother to work on building dialogues getting a small stats boost. They deserve it.

I cannot for the life of me understand how people get worked up over numbers to this degree.

IMO it's your fic. Who cares if people get turned off to comment number counts whether an author's are part of the reply or not? To get all critical about whether a fic is worth reading based off these numbers and interactions IMO kills all the joy and fun in fanfic writing and reading.

For some folks, numbers speak to everything. Kind of like how getting A+ and 100s in school were way more important than whatever you were putting into the project/assignment.

I'm disappointed that this kind of thinking has crept into what are supposed to be fun spaces, but I'm not surprised it has.

DA, but yeah, basically. I see it as monkey brain: social primate brain really likes when the easily-comparable social score goes up!

And then people get annoyed and jealous of other people when those people's easily-comparable social score is higher than their own, and accuse them of cheating/gaming the system! It's all a bit sad, really.

I always assumed high comment fic are terrible and people are telling the author so. Always by Kudos, and if I want recent things, I use the calendar function to only search the last week/month/year

Are you for real?

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2024-08-22 15:07 (UTC) - Expand

Have you looked in any comment section on AO3, like ever? I know the comment sections on the rest of the internet are horrible, horrible places, but AO3 isn't the rest of the internet.

You're right. That's why nobody should search by comments if they're looking specifically for good fic.

Yeah, I always have to mentally divide the comment count by two (approximately; I reply to most comments but not literally all) when I look at my own fics, because I definitely think my own don't count and it's inflating the count in a way.

I did not make this secret.

But, my goodness, I could have.

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