Commenting, matters of

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Anonymous asked:
Do you know if there’s ever going to be a way to turn off kudos? Every time I get one I’m so discouraged because I just feel like I’ve failed somehow. Like, my story was almost good enough to evoke a response, but just missed the mark and whoever read it was underwhelmed to the point that all they felt it earned was a generic ‘meh,it was okay’.

ao3commentoftheday answered:

I’m sorry you feel that way about kudos. I can assure you with actual real facts that readers who click the kudos but do not just think ‘meh, it was okay.’ They mean “I loved this!” or “This story was awesome!” or “I recommend this story to others!”

That said, if you don’t want to see kudos there are ao3 skins and browser extenstions out there that remove those stats from your view. Take a look at this post for an example of each.

menaceanon:

Kudos are a result of the fanfic.net heyday. Back then, literally everyone used to say, “I don’t know what to put in a comment/I’m too shy to comment/I don’t have time to comment/I don’t have the spoons to comment/etc, but I still want to let the author know I really loved their fic. I wish there was a way to do that!!!”

Fanfic.net, in classic fanfic.net style, did not listen. Thank fic for AO3.

Are comments the best and awesome and amazing? Of course they are. There’s nothing like a comment. But there are a whole host of reasons people don’t comment, and its exceptionally rare that the reason is “I don’t think this story deserves it.” That‘s the statistical outlier, the “getting-hit-by-a-meteor” of reasons people don’t comment. ao3commentoftheday has the research to back it up.

Take every kudos to the bank. Your readers hit that button with a whole lot of love in their hearts.

greycecile:

Perhaps it’s a less popular opinion, but I agree with anon’s sentiment that turning off kudos would be a nice option for authors to have. I don’t even post fics to AO3 currently, I’m just a reader there, but I often find myself discouraged when I read a great fic and find so few comments at the bottom. I’m always eager to see how other readers respond to fanfics, in their own words. So I personally am open to the idea of seeing how AO3 fanfics would fare without a kudos option. Why shouldn’t we be able to experiment with that?

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask that AO3 consider giving authors the option to turn off kudos if they want to.

luvtheheaven:

I also LOVE reading other people’s comments on a story I loved.

I love reading them too, but no lie, if the option was between “comment or nothing” rather than “comment, or kudos, or nothing”, I would be a lot less inclined to read fanfic, and when I did read I’d skew “nothing” pretty heavily.

I feel embarrassed leaving a keysmash or a “this was really good” with no details (I love getting them, but I feel anxious and embarrassed leaving them), and I have a pile of over two hundred books and half as many magazines in my possession that I want to read (and that have the bonus of there being zero expectation of me actually stringing together coherent words when I do read them).

It can take me anywhere from ten minutes to ten days to gather up the wherewithal to leave a comment, and when I haven’t left them yet, they are One More Thing on the nigh-infinite list of things I need to do. If I knew that the only thing I could do was leave a comment, I’d be prone to quietly unsubscribing and consoling myself with the fact that at least I wasn’t adding to the hitcount of people who read and didn’t leave a comment.

(Does it suck? Yes. Would it be great if I could leave more comments? Yes. Is anyone coming over to take care of the pets, clean, help me do my full-time job, help me do my part-time job, help me job-hunt, or magically take away the time I need to spend on physio or therapy or sleep and notice that I haven’t put “maintain a relationship” or “write my own stuff” on this list? No? Then guess it’s not going to change anytime soon.)

gorogues: waterwindow: Cheers An unbelievably gorgeous

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gorogues:

waterwindow:

Cheers

An unbelievably gorgeous piece.  The amount of detail here is amazing as always, and you really set a scene here with the lighting, the snow, the fire escape, and of course the guys sitting languidly on it.  Even the window has a bit of winter fogging and a plant in it!  Such beautiful work here, especially with the colouring and the lighting, and definitely a piece to proud of!