bar2d2s: professorsparklepants: webheadstan: Some of you have never shipped a rare pair and it...

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webheadstan:

Some of you have never shipped a rare pair and it shows.

professorsparklepants:

Some of you have never invented a rarepair, written the only fic for it, and then wallowed alone in your special mud pit of crack pairings and it shows

bar2d2s:

Some of you have never been the only person producing content for a rarepair for 5+ years and it shows

Bless all you rarepair creators.

I am having A Mood, for various frustrating reasons, and this...

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I am having A Mood, for various frustrating reasons, and this pleases me.

(I loved this show very much. That is definitely not the same as me recommending that you, personally, watch it.)

Do you know if there’s ever going to be a way to

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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.)

luvtheheaven:

That’s feels very much like a writer specific way of handling things if not being able y leave kudos means you wouldn’t still consume and enjoy the same number of fics because you’d feel so guilty about reading and increasing the hitcount without actually adding to the feedback at all. I thin it would be a different world and idk you might adjust in a number of ways instead but yeah it’s a valid point.

I get stressed out and don’t comment on tons of things I want to comment on. I also comment a lot more than most non-creators and generally with a lot more detail. I comment on blogs because i know what it’s like to write a blog post and get no feedback. I also try to at least “like” them even when I can’t/don’t want to comment, if I’ve read it, as proof I’ve read it. It works best on Tumblr or WordPress because I know how to like successfully there. Not all blogs have like options, you can even disable it on some WordPress blogs and so i read without liking or commenting more often on those.

I have hosted two totally different podcasts. The feedback to silence ratio when you look at the number of hits we get skews very heavily toward silence. But still. I keep doing it. I keep putting my energy into all sorts of projects for… Limited payoff.

I never ever want to just say “great video” on a fanvideo I paid attention to for a full 3 minutes, i know groom experience the hours of work that went into it so I want to leave something… More detailed! But i appreciate getting those comments more than nothing, I shouldn’t avoid leaving those if it’s all I have time to leave our all I can think of in the moment, but… Idk.

This fandom culture of feedback as currency is so complex. XD and stressful.

Yeah, this is absolutely fandom/context specific; I feel no pressure to get in touch with e.g. traditionally published authors ETA: that I don’t know to review or comment on everything I read (which is good, because, you know, 100+ books a year). As you say, feedback as currency.

But it wouldn’t just be guilt: if an author explicitly says “I don’t want kudos, I only want conversation”, a huge part of the reaction would honestly not be just guilt-avoidance but relief. They have said up-front that their preferred currency is one I literally cannot pay up front or afford to guarantee; therefore, the question of “do I think I can afford to spend time enjoying this” is answered before I even start reading.

Am I sure I can I afford to travel for an hour each way to visit someone? No. Am I sure I can afford to knit a $30/skein sweater? No. Am I sure I can afford the time and energy it takes to compose a thoughtful and engaging comment, especially minutes or hours from now rather than right now? No. Oh look, free time! Sure, there’s a little sorrow about missing out on a nice experience, but it’s not like I have time/money/energy to do everything I want to do before I die anyway; it’s less work when external circumstances filter out my options.

If an author didn’t explicitly say that, and it was just that e.g. AO3 somehow lost the mechanism for comments, and if that happened in the current context of feedback being what keeps fan writers going, then the motivation would more heavily be avoiding guilt.

I strongly suspect that the whole “pay after you’ve consumed, set what you think is a fair price” aspect of feedback is factoring in in another way, too. It’s “pay what you want”, and that makes some people disinclined to buy at all because they’ll feel bad if they don’t pay the “right” amount. Add in that you have to pay the price in the future, for people who don’t know how long it’ll take them to read or how many spoons they’ll have to write something by the end of the evening, or the next day, or the weekend…

Do you know how fast my book reading would tank if the price was understood to be “free, but after you read it you have to write a thoughtful review and start a conversation with the author”? My book acquisition might not take a nosedive, but the actual time spent reading, with that obligation hanging over me? Eugh.

This isn’t academic. I am a lot slower to read traditionally published or self-published original works by authors I know socially, or even tell them that I’m reading it, because even when they (kindly) signal they don’t want to push me to talk about it, I know that they’d like me to leave a review somewhere and those are hard. I feel guilty when I don’t get around to writing something, I feel tired about feeling guilty, it’s exhausting.

(I’d do much better if the price was “free, but you have to tell me what you thought of the last book of mine that you read.” That could be paid up-front.)