Why People Don't Comment: Data and History From the Tolkienfic Fandom by Dawn Walls-Thumma

Back in 2018, in collaboration with Long Live Feedback, I posted an analysis of data about why people don't comment. There's always a lot of angst around commenting—and especially in 2018, where commenting in the Silmarillion fandom appeared to be tailing off in some places. As I dug into the data about commenting, I found a lot of my own beliefs and assumptions shifting. In short, begging, persuading, and guilting readers to comment will not work. What my research showed was that commenting is a skill, and even if a reader possesses that skill, confidence and a sense of connection are what fosters comment-writing.

Six years later, I wanted to refresh this piece, which still gets read from time to time. (It is my second most commented on piece on AO3!) The original version and this one utilize data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, which I ran in 2015 and 2020, the latter in collaboration with Maria K. Alberto. In 2015, there were 1,052 total participants; 642 of them were authors, and 1,047 were readers. In 2020, 746 people participated, including 492 authors and 739 readers. Participants were asked demographic questions and a series of mostly Likert-style statements about their beliefs and behaviors surrounding Tolkien-based fanfiction. Moving forward, when I say a person agrees with a statement, I mean that they chose Agree or Strongly Agree from among the options; the same is true when I indicate that someone disagrees.

My interest in commenting is partly due to being a researcher in fandom studies of the Tolkien fandom, namely its fanfiction communities. However, a lot of my interest too comes from being an archive owner. I opened the Silmarillion Writers' Guild archive in 2007, and it is still going strong today, in 2024. While I am an author myself and love getting comments, as most authors do, my interest in seeing a robust comment culture in the Tolkien fandom has more to do with my ownership of the SWG archive and my interest in seeing it survive another two decades and beyond. Seventeen years running an archive and I know that people stick around (on archives, in fandoms) when they feel that their work is wanted and appreciated, and for most authors, that means receiving comments. Wanting the SWG archive to remain an active and thriving community—as well as the broader Tolkien fanfiction fandom—means that creators on the SWG must receive comments. So what is the secret to achieving that?

Commenting as a Learned Skill

Commenting is a difficult topic in fanworks spaces. Creators who feel their work has been ignored often (and understandably) feel hurt and angry about that. It usually does not take long for words like "lazy" and "unappreciative" to be attached to readers who don't comment. But participants in the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey valued commenting. In 2020, 80% agreed with the statement, “I think it’s important for readers to leave comments and other feedback on the stories they read.” 82% agreed with the statement, “I want to leave comments and other feedback more often on the stories I read.” (In 2015, both of these numbers were 78%—so we see a slight uptick but likely not a statistically significant one.)

So readers want to leave comments and want to do it more often. What’s stopping them??

The survey included two items about perceived barriers to commenting. Having discussed commenting in great depth and with many people over the years, I know that there are many reasons beyond these two, but one in particular caught my attention, both because the data were surprising to me and also because they suggested action that, as an archive owner, I could take.

78% of participants (in both 2015 and 2020) agreed with the statement, “I sometimes want to leave a comment but am not sure what to say.” Among those participants who agreed that they wanted to leave comments more often, the number who also agreed that they struggled to know what to say jumps to 85%. This number is hard to ignore. It suggests that there is a multitude of readers out there, wanting to speak with authors but running into a skill barrier: They simply don’t know how to distill the welter of emotions one feels after reading a great piece of fiction into the black-and-white words needed to express the enormity of those feelings to the author in a way that does them justice.

These data really triggered a change in thinking for me. There was a time when I discussed commenting with the intention of goading readers into doing something I assume they could do but just weren’t. I had never stepped long enough out of my own point of view to consider what commenting required of many of those readers. I have an MA in humanities, have worked professionally as a writer and editor, and now teach humanities; I have been critiquing and discussing fiction and literature daily since I was an undergrad. I assumed that kind of thinking and writing was as second-nature for everyone as it was for me; with these data in hand, it seems foolish that I never considered that it wasn’t, that the skills I brought to the process were just that: skills that had to be learned.

In my non-fannish life, I am a middle-grades humanities teacher. I have been teaching adolescents to write—and writing is a task that requires multiple simultaneous cognitive processes—for fourteen years now. I am National Board certified. I know that each form of writing has to be taught to my young writers. My data caused me to see back in 2018 that the same is true of comment writing as well. It is a unique form of writing and one that even people who are highly competent in other forms of writing (such as technical writing or even fiction writing) might find challenging, especially given that comment writing is performed in public and often directed at a writer whom one admires.

In education, we use the term “scaffolding” to describe how to teach a complex skill, like a challenging form of writing. Scaffolding begins with a lot of supports and entails the gradual release of responsibility until independence is achieved. Obviously, fandom is not a classroom, but ideas like comment templates, comment starters, and checklists fit the scaffolding model and could help draw out that 85% of readers who want to say more but often stare at that comment form and just don’t know how.

Commenting and Confidence

Another survey item asked participants to respond to the statement: “I sometimes want to leave a comment but think that my comment might not mean much to the writer.” 47% of participants agreed with this statement,1 which again surprised me because authors have been pitching a fit and begging and pleading for comments as long as I’ve been in the fandom. How is this message not being received??

I was also interested in a particular group of participants: the 15% of fanfiction authors who stated in the survey that they do not leave comments. This seemed counterintuitive to me: As an author, who knows firsthand how much a comment can inspire and encourage one’s writing, wouldn’t authors want to help other authors in this way? And presumably as the recipient of comments, wouldn’t one feel the pull of reciprocity to also respond to another author’s work? And many of the reasons typically given for why people don’t comment—they’re not writers themselves, they’re not comfortable writing in English, they don’t have access to technology where they can write at length with ease—clearly don’t apply to this group either. So why aren’t they commenting?

Once I began to look closer at this group, I detected a theme: confidence. This is where the 47% of readers who want to say something but don’t because they think the author won’t care also come in.

Demographically, authors who don’t comment are very similar to authors overall who participated in the study. They are a median 26 years old; participants as a whole are a median age of 27 years. They have a median 6.5 years of experience writing Tolkien-based fanfic—that's longer than authors in the survey overall, who had been writing for a median of five years.

However, these authors appear to have less confidence than authors overall. The survey also included an item stating, “Writing fan fiction has helped me to become a more confident writer.” Among authors who left comments, 92% agreed with this item. Among non-commenting authors, the number drops to 80%. In other words, where the process of writing and discussing writing in a fanfiction community boosts confidence for the vast majority of writers, this segment is less likely to experience this benefit. It is possible that this lack of confidence translates into doubt about one's skills in comment-writing—again, a form of writing that carries with it social and performative pressures.

The 3Cs: Community, Connection, and Commenting

There is more to the picture of non-commenting authors, though. These authors, in general, feel less of a connection with the Tolkienfic fandom than do authors as a whole.

• 83% of all authors agreed with the statement, “Comments from and interactions with other fans encourage me to write fan fiction.” Less than 7% disagreed. But for authors who do not leave comments, comments and interactions offer far less encouragement: only 59% agreed, and 27% disagreed.
• 80% of participants agreed with the statement, “I think it’s important for readers to leave comments and other feedback on the stories they read.” Only 42% of non-commenting authors agreed with this same statement, however, and more than twice as many (10%) disagreed with the statement as among participants as a whole (4%).
• 95% of authors agreed with the statement, “Commenting on stories is a way to give something back to the authors.” Among non-commenting authors, however, only 85% agreed. Interestingly, both groups disagreed at about the same rate—less than 1%—suggesting that the issue isn't that non-commenting authors don't think that comments give something to authors. Again, this seems to point to the lack of confidence that the comments they write actually matter to authors.
• 75% of authors agreed with the statement, “Writing fan fiction has helped me to make new friends.” Only 50% of non-commenting authors agreed.
• 52% of all participants agreed with the statement, “Commenting on stories I’ve read has allowed me to make new friends.” Among non-commenting authors, however, that number plummets to 30% (perhaps not surprisingly, since some may have never left a comment at all).

Taken together, these data suggest that non-commenting authors don’t feel as deep of a community connection as Tolkienfic authors and community members in general. As noted above, 82% of participants want to leave comments more often on what they read. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the above, for non-commenting authors, that number drops to 59%. This suggests that, in addition to confidence, a community connection fosters a desire to comment.

A Case Study in the 3Cs, or Tolkienfic Fandom History and Commenting

The Tolkien fanfiction fandom provides an interesting case study for commenting since it has had steady—often high—levels of fanfiction activity since 2002. Tolkien fanfiction itself is even more venerable, with the first documented fanwork written in 1958. Online fannish activity began in 1991. (See this timeline on Fanlore for a detailed breakdown of the history of Tolkien fandom.) Both the Lord of the Rings (LotR) and Hobbit film trilogies brought new fans to the fanfiction fandom, where nearly all who stuck around went on to read the books and write fanfiction about those. While fandom activity dropped between the film trilogies, the Tolkienfic fandom has nonetheless remained active since its inception.

This means that we can look at commenting across that time. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily cut-and-dried: The fandom has changed in major ways in the twenty-plus years since the first rush of fans excited by the LotR films started entering the fanfiction fandom, and those changes make an apples-to-apples comparison difficult or impossible. But putting together the various data to which we have access, a picture of how commenting has changed over time emerges.

The Tolkienfic fandom gained its foothold on email lists—eventually, this came to be dominated by Yahoo! Groups—and LiveJournal. In addition, the Tolkienfic fandom opened fiction archives at a high rate. Fanlore lists eighty of them. The first archive, the Least Expected slash archive, opened in 2001, and 2002-2003 saw a rush of archives appear online, covering ground from the highly specialized, focusing on a single group of characters or pairing, to the general. These general archives were widely used by Tolkienfic writers for sharing fanfiction. They also included a social component, and a majority of archives from this time included an associated Yahoo! Group, LiveJournal community, or discussion forum within the site itself. These platforms were used for discussion and community-building activities. Use of FanFiction.net also remained high during this time period (and FanFiction.net also included an active forum section).

When the LotR film trilogy concluded, activity diminished but did not stop—far from it. Several new archives opened between 2004 and 2011 and activity remained high on Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal, until poor administrative decisions from the owners of those platforms began to drive fans away; Yahoo! Groups would shut down entirely in 2019. While activity slowed on FanFiction.net, it did not die. The Tolkienfic fandom, however, tended to remain isolated from the rest of fic fandom, which included adopting new technology at a lower rate than fanfiction writers in general.

The release of the Hobbit trilogy and another large influx of new fans forced the fandom's hand in many ways. Widespread use of Tumblr by Tolkien fans began in 2012, as near as I can tell, and activity shifted also onto Archive of Our Own (AO3) and away from the large Tolkien-specific archives. While some of the smaller archives began to close in the lull between film trilogies, the arrival of the Hobbit films began to impact the larger archives as well. Of the major archives opened during the LotR film trilogy years, all have either closed, opened to multifandom stories, or activity has dropped to almost nothing. As of this writing, the SWG is the only Tolkien-specific fanfiction archive that remains active. There are a few active Tolkien fanfiction communities, mostly on Dreamwidth, and the fandom has adopted Discord within recent years to meet its needs for community building, discussion, and socialization. In other words, the Tolkienfic fandom today resembles that of any other fandom: largely concentrated on Tumblr, Discord, and AO3.

So, are comments dropping in the Tolkien fanfiction fandom? The data here (compared to 2018, when I wrote the original version of this article) is hopeful. I looked at two archives as part of revising this article: FanFiction.net and AO3. (If you're wondering why I didn't include my own site, wait another month! I will doing a deep dive into the SWG's comment data in the next article and will add my findings here as well.)

FanFiction.net has been diminishing in popularity among nearly all fanfiction writers for years now; in fact, Tolkienfic writers have hung on more than most. I chose to include it for the historical perspective it offers. Tolkienfic was first posted there in 2000, and it has remained a site at least somewhat popular with Tolkienfic writers for most of the quarter century since. I decided to use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to look at comment data for past years.

Unfortunately, FanFiction.net does not make click/hit data public. Also, because they use a paginated format with twenty-five stories per page—and the Wayback Machine often does not archive beyond the first page—it is again difficult to compare apples to apples. I settled on using two methodologies to try to overcome this obstacle.

Methodology 1 was my preferred methodology. I located the first story posted two weeks after the archive date on the Wayback Machine. I then looked at the review counts for that story and the next nine stories posted earlier. (I did this since recently posted stories often don’t have a lot of comments for the simple reason that people haven’t had the chance to read and comment on them. My own experience as an author tells me that most comments have come in by the two-week mark.) I looked only at one-chapter stories.

If I could not access enough stories to follow Methodology 1, then I used Methodology 2 and looked at the comment counts for the ten oldest one-chapter stories on the page. Here, I used my judgment and did not include data sets if some of the stories were less than five days old. Again, I did not want low comment counts on new works to skew the data.

I looked at the Silmarillion section, which is less likely to show impacts based on the films alone. I included only English-language stories. All averages are median.

While the data are very limited, they mostly show a steady decline in commenting, aside from a slight uptick in the mid-2010s. (Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine doesn’t have the Silmarillion section archived between 2004 and 2009, or between 2009 and 2013.) If you look at FanFiction.net alone, you would conclude that commenting in the Tolkienfic fandom is on the decline.

AO3 paints a different picture. When I wrote this article in 2018, it was prompted, in part, by the impression that comment counts were dropping in the Tolkienfic fandom. At the time, I was able to document that that was almost certainly the case. However, in recent years, commenting activity in the Silmarillion tag on AO3 shows comments are on the rise.

To evaluate commenting behavior on AO3, I looked at comments on single-chapter, English-language written fanworks posted on July 22 for each year between 2011 and 2024. Why July 22? Because it was unremarkable. No regular holidays fall around this time in the English-speaking world, and there is little overlap with the school calendar either in Anglophone countries. There are also no major fandom events happening at this time, such as the Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang, that might produce changes in commenting behavior. I counted only top-level comments, not author replies or conversations that proceeded from there. Beginning at July 22, I counted comments on at least ten written fanworks that met the eligibility criteria. If I had to proceed forward on the calendar beyond July 22, I counted comments on all eligible works posted on that date, so all years have at least ten data points and many have more. All averages are median.

The graph above shows a steady increase in comments on Silmarillion stories on AO3. The years preceding 2018 were indeed quite dismal; the median comment count was lower than two per story until 2018. In the original article, I proposed that platform shifts in fic fandom overall—including Tolkien fanfiction—likely explained the comment drought. During the 2010s, Tolkien-specific archives had closed, were closing, or had largely gone inactive, along with their forums, mailing lists, and journal communities that served as the hubs where friendships were made and communities built.2 Platforms popular for sharing fanfiction—and socializing with other fans as part of that activity—were doing stupid stuff that drove fans away. FanFiction.net engaged in several purges of content, and LiveJournal changed owners and capitulated to religious fundamentalists, resulting in the Strikethrough and Boldthrough debacles. Tumblr, which opened in 2007, was waiting in the wings with fan-friendly policies that allowed the kinds of content that had been getting fans in trouble with platforms, like LiveJournal, that had to increasingly appeal to advertisers in order to keep the lights on. (Tumblr has since done its share of stupid stuff too, of course.) When the Hobbit films came out in 2012, Tolkien fandom activity spiked on Tumblr, and many fans who had been eking out an existence on LiveJournal, Yahoo! Groups, and FanFiction.net migrated to where the action was. This was, of course, shortly after AO3 opened and Tolkien fanfiction began to be posted there in earnest.

But the shift to Tumblr was not a neutral one: an even swap of one platform for another. Tumblr was different from fan platforms used by Tolkien fanworks creators to that point in that it included few tools for limiting content to a smaller audience (such as the LiveJournal friends-only setting or members-only mailing lists on Yahoo! Groups) and was clunky for conversation and interaction. As a result, many fans just—didn't. (Obviously interactions happen[ed] on Tumblr and friendships are/were made, as fans could probably make friends with each other even under the environmental conditions found on Venus. But interactions and conversations were not prioritized by Tumblr's format in the same way that they were on LiveJournal, Yahoo! Groups, and forums, and the Agora-like nature of Tumblr tended to dissuade the more intimate sharing from which friendships grow.)

The shift away from fandom-specific archives and FanFiction.net and onto AO3 was a less dramatic but nonetheless similar shift. AO3 is an archive; it does not attempt to double as a community space in the same way that earlier platforms did. While it offers the comment feature, cultural norms often prevent that from being used for the kinds of casual, friend-making and community-building interactions that happened on forums, mailing lists, and journal platforms.

I believe that the loss of and shift away from community-oriented platforms and toward Tumblr and AO3 likely produced the 2010s comment drought. Recall that the survey participants who commented were those who experienced the greatest community connections. Confidence plays a part too, and people are more likely to comment when they believe their comment matters to the creator. (In the recent Fandom Voices on commenting and feedback, several respondents mentioned that it is easier to comment on a friend's fanworks rather than someone they do not know.)

But, as the data show, the late 2010s through now produced an upswing in comments. What happened? I believe there are likely multiple forces at play, but one of them is likely the use of Discord, which opened in 2017 and began to be adopted more frequently by fan communities shortly thereafter. (The SWG opened its Discord in 2018, for example.) Discord offered what was lacking with Tumblr and AO3 as the fandom's primary platforms: the opportunity to interact with other fans. These increased community connections are, I suspect, at least partly behind the rise in comments.

What are the implications here? Commenting is a skill, yes, that should be continued to be built by those who want to write comments. There have been various efforts by fans who are comfortable with that skill to teach it to others; Long Live Feedback is one such project, as are my 101 Comment Starters that use evidence-based instructional practices to teach comment writing. However, even more important is the notion of community. When community exists, the barriers to commenting begin to evaporate. Suddenly, you are talking with a friend, not to a distant author who may or may not care what you have to say.

Discord offers an option for community-building, but relying on a single platform for a fandom need—especially when that platform is for-profit—has been shown to be dangerous time and again across fandom history.  Discord, too, will likely do something stupid that affects fans before long. After the extreme consolidation of the Tumblr-and-AO3 era in the 2010s, fanworks fandoms are showing signs of wanting to diversify the platforms they use again, with more small, independent, and fan-run options available. Those projects should be supported so that fanworks fandoms always have a place to go to share their work, to comment, to talk, and to connect with one another.

Notes

1. In 2015, 55% of participants agreed that they "think that [their] comment might not mean much to the writer." This is likely a significant change across those mere five years, suggesting that efforts at promoting commenting has served the function of dispelling some of this particular anxiety.
2. My poster for the 2023 Fan Studies Network North America conference, (Re)Archive: The Rise and Fall (and Rebound?) of Independent Fanfiction Archives, includes a detailed timeline that attempts to show the complex connections between archive openings and closures and the broader timeline of fandom history. Additional data for the (Re)Archive timeline, such as use of social networks by archives, can be found here.