Fandom Chocolate … or Authors Love Comments by Dawn Walls-Thumma

I remember when I posted my first fanfiction story, Another Man's Cage, to FanFiction.net back in 2005. The next day, I logged onto my computer, my head full of those tender kinds of hope that flutter at the edge of your thoughts, too timid to fully articulate themselves: There will be several comments. People will like this story. People will say that it was good.

Instead I logged on to find … nothing.

This would change over time. Twenty years later, I think AMC has probably received more comments than anything I've ever written, many times over. But I still keenly remember sitting down at my desk at my first apartment, a newly minted fanfiction writer, opening FanFiction.net, and having those tender hopes ignobly dashed by an inbox filled with the usual drek but none of those sweetly anticipated comments. I expect this is a familiar experience to other fanfiction writers as well.

Comments function differently for fanfiction writers than they do for fiction writers more generally. While both the online and offline worlds are populated by a variety of creative communities, most feedback sought by original fiction writers, in my experience, is done for workshopping purposes: what worked, what didn't, what should be changed. And once a story is published, you generally assume you won't hear much or anything about it at all. (I did once get a kind comment on an original short story I'd published in an anthology—from a fellow fanfiction writer who had purchased the anthology and recognized my name and contacted me on LiveJournal.)

The fanfiction world is different. First, if you post a story, the assumption is generally that you want comments. And comments function differently too. They are not for workshopping purposes—or "concrit," as we fanfic writers call constructive criticism—but for encouragement, support, or sheer celebration. In other cases, they allow the reader and author to connect over their shared fandom. This can be celebratory or shade into the analytical, evidenced by comments that function as small meta works unto themselves. Because it is generally assumed (even encouraged) that authors will reply to comments, comments can unfold into discussions that lead to deeper relationships being formed. I have friendships twenty years' strong now that originated with a comment on a fanfic.

This all sounds lovely, but like anything, there is a flip side to comments. The aura around them—the small essays, the enduring friendships, the writers who claim to be transformed by a single comment they received, pulled back from the abyss of quitting writing—can create pressure for both authors and readers: authors who "want what she's having" and readers who worry that the comments they leave will never measure up to these lofty anecdotes. Seeing a story or writer feted in comments inevitably invites comparisons. "Is this because I'm not as good? Not as well-liked by other fans? Is this because she writes x and I write y or because they ship those two and I ship these two?" And then there's the reader on the other end, who has just finished a story they enjoy at the end of a hard day and feels these political and emotional undercurrents they may not fully understand, worries about how to say, "I liked this, thanks for writing it," while navigating these turbid waters, and decides not to bother commenting at all.

Over the next few months, I will be exploring commenting in the Tolkien fanfiction fandom. This month, I'm using data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey to look at commenting from the author's perspective. The Tolkien Fanfiction was run in 2015 and 2020 by me (both years) and Maria Alberto (2020). Involving 1,052 and 746 participants respectively, it collected demographic data and included a series of mostly Likert-style statements about beliefs and practices related to participation as a writer and reader of Tolkien-based fanfiction. In this article, when I say that participants "agreed" with a survey item, I mean that they chose Agree or Strongly Agree; likewise, when they "disagree," they chose Disagree or Strongly Disagree. (A fifth option—No Opinion/Not Sure—was also available.) Survey data should always be interpreted with caution and is not the only way to study fan communities and practices and should not be used in isolation to make sweeping statements about those communities and their cultures. For example, I had no way to reach every reader and writer of Tolkien-based fanfiction to invite their participation in the survey, so responses will necessarily favor some groups and underrepresent others. Furthermore, comments in particular are a touchy subject. To say you don't leave comments, as a reader of fanfic, verges on taboo in some places; you're not likely to meet with a positive response. Even in an anonymous survey, these values likely shape people's responses. Commenting generates strong feelings, both positive and negative, which means the data on commenting should be viewed with an extra dose of skepticism.

The Good: Comments Benefit Authors

Authors like comments. This is like saying that people like chocolate. Someone will inevitably show up and bring up that one time that an author reacted negatively to a perfectly innocent comment or the author who posts on Tumblr about all the things commenters do wrong. So just like chocolate (or anything), there is the occasional author who won't like comments. But the reality is that, for most authors, just like if you hand a piece of chocolate to someone, if you leave a comment on their work, they are not just going to accept it but be grateful and happy—even delighted.

Survey data about how authors react to comments on their work didn't change much between 2015 and 2020. Two survey items asked authors about the impact of comments on their work:

• Feedback from other fans has helped me to improve my writing.¹
• Comments from and interactions with other fans encourage me to write fanfiction.

For the first item, "Feedback from other fans has helped me to improve my writing," in 2015, 79% of fans agreed with the statement, and in 2020, about 76% of fans did. Fanfiction writers in the Tolkien fandom generally take their craft seriously and view fanfic as an opportunity to improve as writers, so these data suggest a benefit for most writers in helping them to advance this goal. Interestingly, norms within the fanfiction community have moved away from viewing unsolicited constructive criticism as appropriate (70% of readers in the survey disagreed that they ever leave constructive criticism, solicited or not; I will discuss the data about constructive criticism more in a later column), yet authors feel that the celebration and discussion that happens on their stories advances them forward as writers.

Even more authors felt that "[c]omments from and interactions with other fans encourage me to write fanfiction": 85% agreed in 2015 and 83% agreed in 2020. From these data, we see that fans self-report that comments cause them to write more stories. Comments, therefore, are one aspect of what keeps fanfiction communities and archives thriving.

The Bad: A Lack of Comments Hurts Authors

The flip side of that asks the question of what happens when authors don't receive comments?

Over half of authors (57%) agreed with the statement in 2020 that "[a] lack of comments or feedback sometimes discourages me from writing or posting my fanfiction."² (This item was not included in 2015.) At the same time, just over a third of authors (35%) disagreed with the statement.

These data shock at the outset and, for the voracious reader who angsts of a shortage of fresh fic to read, it seems a call to arms: Leave more comments! Certainly, I am not going to argue against the reader who takes this article as a nudge to do so. However, as I dug deeper into the data, I saw that discouragement with a lack of comments also seemed entangled with opportunities for fannish interactions more generally.

To begin, what is the difference between these two groups, between the writers who find a lack of comments saps them of motivation and those who keep writing even when the comments don't come? I ran demographic data and a few select survey items for fans who agreed that they are discouraged by a lack of comments and for fans who disagreed with that statement. The differences between the two groups weren't large in most areas. The graphic below shows the data overall for this survey item and some key differences between the two groups.

Some key takeaways:

• Authors who were not discouraged by a lack of feedback tended to be older and more experienced writers than those who were (average age thirty-two and years writing seven compared to average age twenty-seven and years writing five, respectively; all averages are median).
• The archives and sites used by the two groups of authors for posting fanfiction differed in key ways. Authors undiscouraged by a lack of feedback tend to use independent Tolkien-specific archives (38% compared to 33%) and "old school" fandom community platforms like Yahoo! Groups, LiveJournal, and Dreamwidth more often. Authors discouraged by a lack of feedback use FanFiction.net (45% compared to 39%) and Tumblr (54% compared to 34%) more often. Both groups use AO3 about equally.³
• Authors in the discouragement group are slightly more likely to write about sources that had flashes of intense popularity (The Lord of the Rings or the Jackson films), while those who disagreed with the statement wrote for The Silmarillion slightly more often.
• These same authors self-report leaving feedback on a median average of 40% of the stories they read, with authors discouraged by a lack of feedback self-reporting feedback on 50% of the stories they read.⁴ Self-report data are inherently unreliable, but it is interesting to think of these data in terms of how authors in each group perceive themselves. Discouraged authors claim to comment more, which could be further evidence that they value comments more. It could also show more effort put toward commenting (or perceived as such) that results in disappointment when they do not feel that effort is being reciprocated by other authors.
• Authors who feel discouraged by a lack of feedback agree slightly more often to survey items about community and belonging. They agree 79% of the time with the statement "Writing fanfiction has helped me to feel like I am part of a community" (compared to 76%) for the other group and agree 77% of the time with "Writing fanfiction has helped me to make new friends," compared to 72%. This could show that this group values a sense of belonging more than those undiscouraged by a lack of feedback. As noted above, it could also suggest that those undiscouraged by a lack of feedback have existing communities and friends who meet their needs for both feedback and community.

But the biggest difference between the two groups was in their response to the item discussed above: "Comments from and interactions with other fans encourage me to write fanfiction." This is not surprising, given that these two survey items were designed to complement each other. Authors discouraged by a lack of feedback agreed that they were encouraged by comments 99% of the time. Authors who aren't discouraged by a lack of feedback, on the other hand, found that comments motivated them only 72% of the time.

Putting all of these together, what I think is happening is that authors who share their fanfiction on smaller communities with tighter-knit cultures that facilitate (either logistically or culturally) higher levels of interaction, including feedback, tend to be less discouraged by a lack of feedback. These are smaller sites and those geared toward high levels of interaction, like mailing lists and journal platforms. However, it seems very possible that those undiscouraged by a lack of feedback maintain this resilience because their needs for community and belonging are in fact being met. Even if not in the form of feedback on their fanfiction, they are interacting regularly with other fans about their work and ideas. These fans tend to be older and more experienced writers because the sites they use (or used) were largely located in the past and have either closed or diminished in popularity as platforms for fanworks.

A question I've discussed with other writers many times: What can I do to get more comments on my work? I now wonder if that is the wrong question and we should be asking: What can I do to be more satisfied with my connections with others in the fandom? (This question admittedly does not roll off the tongue as easily!) And the answer is less doing-this-thing-equals-getting-more-comments and more about finding where you belong and feel a sense of community—as cliche as it sounds: finding your people.

The Complicated: One-Click Feedback

In the midst of all this is the fact that comments are not the only feedback available to readers on some sites. AO3 radically shifted feedback on fanworks with the introduction of their one-click kudos system. AO3 certainly didn't invent this; one-click feedback was an option on eFiction-powered archives (which AO3 largely mimicked when developing their own archive software) with options to rate stories using a five-star or like/dislike system, but at least in the Tolkien fandom, this feature was not heavily deployed. (As an archive owner for almost two decades now, I get cold chills thinking about subjecting authors on the various archives I've built and run to the abuses of either of those systems!)

One-click feedback surged in popularity due to its wide use on social media. Facebook was the first major social media platform to debut its "like button" in 2009, and many other platforms followed suit; today, it is hard to imagine social media without it. Much has been written about the insidiousness of posting for likes on social media, which shape what people post (i.e., the occasional tourist who meets a bad end with a wild animal due to getting too close for a selfie or art museums clogged with people who stand with their backs to the art to take selfies in front of a famous painting—all in pursuit of "likes" or other platforms' equivalent) and function as the empty calories of human interaction. The numerical data these platforms produce seem to tell us something, but like other single data points that create anxiety and alter behavior—body weight and standardized test scores, for example—they are single metrics within a much more complex context, which is often lost in the focus on that single number. (As a researcher in quantitative humanities, I think about these perils a lot with respect to my own survey data!)

The same technology deployed in relation to fanworks is no less fraught. Fanlore correlates Facebook's "like button" with the introduction of kudos on AO3 a year later, in December 2010. The kudos system was and continues to be a controversial feature on AO3 for a number of reasons—see the aforementioned Fanlore article for a breakdown, as well as links to meta on the subject—but key among them was the perception among some authors that kudos decreased the number of comments readers left on stories. It's not hard to see why; if you want to let an author know you enjoyed their work and can either 1) spend several minutes writing a comment or 2) spend about two seconds clicking a button, many people will choose the second, much easier option. Yet, as discussed above, the single data points provided under such a system invites drawing quick conclusions absent important context, and authors absolutely do this. (When I typed in the search term "ao3 kudos history" into Google, one of the recommended questions in my results was along the lines of what ratio of hits to kudos on AO3 shows your story to be any good.) It also makes it dreadfully easy to compare yourself and your work to others and becomes evidence to support the kinds of conclusions I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that emerge from the emotional churn of comments and feedback, i.e., "Stories about that ship or character always get so much more attention than my favorite characters or ships"; "She gets that many comments because she is a BNF [big name fan]; her writing isn't even that good"; "People just crank out drabbles for the kudos and no one wants to take the time with my novella"; "They write what's popular and that's the only reason they get those kinds of numbers." (These have all been said to me by distressed authors.)

But, as the title to this section suggests, one-click feedback is complicated. It's clearly not all terrible or it likely wouldn't have existed on AO3 for thirteen-plus years as of this writing. First, it does offer clear advantages (also outlined in the Fanlore article linked above), including around accessibility and inclusivity. A fan without written English proficiency or whose severe anxiety means that interacting in a comment is a near-impossible ask or who lives with language-based disabilities was once shut out of expressing appreciation for an author's work. Kudos make that no longer the case. As fan communities have, in recent years, actively grappled with what it means to be inclusive, providing a means to participate for fans whose needs were often waved away is no small deal.

Furthermore, survey data show that kudos, likes, and other one-click feedback are generally enjoyed by readers and authors. Among readers in the 2020 survey, 96% agreed with the statement, "I have left one-click feedback such as likes or kudos on stories I enjoyed," a significant jump from the 87% of readers who agreed with the same statement in 2015. When we look at the percentage of readers who felt "strongly" in either direction, the number jumped from 56% who strongly agreed with the statement in 2015 to 72% in 2020. The opposite is true as well: 7% strongly disagreed in 2015 compared with just 3% in 2020. The graphs to the right show the data for both years.

These data show that readers are not just using one-click feedback but embracing it. It suggests that some of the concerns around this type of feedback may be fading in fans' minds (possibly because they had ten years at the time of the 2020 survey to see that fanfiction wasn't going to dry up and go away because of the kudos system. Or, a cynic such as I might say, they had ten years to accept one-click feedback as the new normal.)

Authors, too, generally like one-click feedback. In the 2020 survey—unfortunately, this item wasn't part of the 2015 survey—88% of authors agreed with the statement, "I enjoy receiving one-click feedback such as kudos or likes on my fanfiction."⁵ The reaction of authors is, perhaps not surprisingly, a little more tempered than the reaction of readers, with only 34% strongly agreeing with the statement. At the same time, only 6% disagree with the statement, so cranks such as me who find the whole experience of getting kudos rather … empty … are in the minority.

It's complicated. The two survey administrations spanned a time in the Tolkien fanfiction fandom's history where small communities and archives were disappearing, and fic fandoms increasingly consolidated on a few mega-sites. Kudos and likes can be seen as another symptom of that (sometimes painful) shift, acknowledging that not every reader is going to be comfortable or able to jump into talk to an author while still preserving the fandom norm of showing authors appreciation for their work.

Conclusion

Through all of these data, though, the emerging theme is how much our interactions with each other can matter in fandom. The idea of the solo genius writer, typing away in an isolated loft, is not the experience for most people who write fanfiction. Part of the purpose of fanfiction is the interaction. Our stories themselves become sentences in a conversation about the canon but also the world around us.

Comments, then, become but one part in a system that, ideally, is highly interactive. Changes in the fandom—whether the proliferation of "like" buttons, the shift to larger platforms, or the closure of platforms like mailing lists that once provided opportunities for interaction—have altered what this interaction looks like. In the present moment—although I have hope that this is changing—fans seem to interact less, and comments become a convenient proxy for dissatisfaction with this new status quo. After all, they are neat little numbers that we can hang our disappointment on—but they are part of a bigger, more complex picture.

Notes

1. There was a slight difference in how this item was structured in the 2015 and 2020 surveys. In 2020, Maria and I tried to be more cognizant of questions where we were assuming a particular behavior from fans and so weren't including options that described everyone's experience. For survey items related to commenting, in 2015, we assumed that nearly all authors published their fanfiction online. The 2015 results showed this was not the case—but the typical five options we offered didn't allow these folks an option on questions related to commenting. Therefore, in 2020, we added the option to this item, "I have never posted my Tolkien fanfiction or sought feedback from other fans." In sharing data from this item for the 2020 survey, I excluded these fans (about 12%) from the percentages for this survey item.
2. This item included the option "I have never posted my Tolkien fanfiction"; participants who chose this option are not included in the final percentages shared here.
3. Platforms used by participants who agreed that they are discouraged from writing and posting due to a lack of feedback: independent Tolkien-specific archives (like the SWG!), 33%; AO3, 85%; FanFiction.net, 45%; LiveJournal, 19%; Dreamwidth, 10%; Yahoo! Groups, 5%; Tumblr, 54%.
   Platforms used by participants who disagreed that they are discouraged from writing and posting due to a lack of feedback: independent Tolkien-specific archives, 38%; AO3, 87%; FanFiction.net, 39%; LiveJournal, 28%; Dreamwidth, 14%; Yahoo! Groups, 6%; Tumblr, 34%.
4. Some notes on methodology for the survey item, "Estimate the percentage of Tolkien-based fanfiction stories that you leave comments or other feedback on": If participants provided a range (e.g., 10-20%), then I took the midpoint of that range (15%). If participants broke their response down by feedback type (e.g., 90% kudos, 20% comments), then I took the higher number (90%). Responses like "everything" or "all" were entered as 100%. Responses like "I comment on all stories I enjoy" were eliminated. The participant might like one story in one hundred or ninety-nine; accurate data cannot be gleaned from that response. It was interesting to observe how many participants phrased their response in this way, as though to inflate the number of comments they were leaving.
5. This survey item, "I enjoy receiving one-click feedback such as kudos or likes on my fanfiction," included the usual five options, plus the choice "I have never posted by Tolkien fanfiction." I did not include authors who chose the latter option—which was 10% of authors—in calculating the percentages for this item.