judge not lest ye be judged: fanwork comment edition

[merelydovely]

I've been privately griping (i.e. mentally feeling hard done by) for the past few weeks about never getting a comment from my Sewerexchange gift recipient. Then today I was signing up for the Les Mis Holiday Exchange, writing my prompts, and as I re-added a prompt I'd used before, a memory stirred: hadn't somebody written a fill for this exact prompt?

I headed over to my Gifts tab on AO3 and paged back to 2020 only to discover yes, I had received a gift, opened it in the middle of a busy holiday time, seen a couple of my least favorite SPAG errors, lost my motivation to read 8k of text, and left the tab open until my ADHD ass forgot all about it. For TWO YEARS.

ಠ_ಠ

Anyway, I read it, and despite the SPAG errors at the beginning, it was pretty good as gifts from total strangers go! I left a nice comment with a profuse apology. And I have officially revoked my right to feel sorry for myself over the silence of my Sewerexchange giftee.

The discourse around fanwork comments is often pretty bitter, when it's not outright aggressive. I'm usually pretty firmly in the camp of "comments are wonderful, but nobody owes you any," but I do feel that when the fanwork itself was owed, as in an exchange, then some kind of at-least-minimally-positive reaction is the polite thing to do, even if you didn't enjoy what you received.

I'm usually in exchanges to give rather than receive, so it doesn't bother me much if what I get is underwhelming. Getting assigned an unskilled partner for a Big Bang, though? THAT has led to me dropping out of an event at least once TT_TT

I don't think I have a thesis here, other than that I want to put together a post about making my Sewerexchange gift, because comments or no comments, I'm really really proud of it (✿◡‿◡)

Comments

[merelydovely]

I don't think I've noticed a drop in engagement... Maybe slightly less commenting? But I've been writing for older fandoms lately and that puts a damper on things.

I think it's possible there might be fewer comments relative to hits, just because there are more young fans who don't think to comment, but since I usually write NSFW and my audience are adults anyway I'm not as affected?

Desire for interaction is huge though, which is one reason I'm always excited to be back on Dreamwidth! Just have to keep my energy up so I can comment on other people's stuff too :D

[sunshine304]

It's always hard to tell. I didn't expect my latest fic to take off or anything because the setting is quite "specialised" and so I think that some readers might shy away from it because they're unfamiliar with it. But yeah, comparing the hits-kudos-comments ratio, there definitely is a bit of a drop. I saw some other people that I follow comment on having a similar experience, and those were all WiPs too at the time. I guess it's a combination of several factors and I definitely can't compare it to my fic before that, because that included a lot of popular things in CQL fandom. XD
I'll see how the next one fares. XD

But yes, if you add older fandoms or NSFW, than it's different again, too.

I've always loved the interactions in fandom (well, if it didn't drift into wank XD) and talking about fic etc., so starting up DW again has been quite enjoyable! I think many of the younger fans just don't know about "comment culture", how it used to be in LJ threads etc. We'll have to lead by example, I guess! XD