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My recent fandom stats post about the numbers of kudos, comments, and other popularity metrics on AO3 works (and also word count and dates) is about to hit 4,000 notes (making it my second biggest post ever). Here are some things I’ve learned from the notes on this post (this got long, so I put a bunch of it behind a cut tag):
- Some authors think AO3 is hard to post to compared to FFNet. (Mostly in terms of formatting, I think?)
- Some authors think that AO3 isn’t as worthwhile to post fanworks to as FFNet because it doesn’t get nearly as much engagement. (Both this and the previous item are counter to my own experience of the two sites, so it was especially interesting to read these opinions!)
- Some authors/readers think AO3 is intended mostly for archiving works (as a backup, I guess?), and that leaving feedback there is beside the point. (“It’s in the name!”)
- Many (most?) authors love comments/reviews.
- Some authors value comments but not kudos. (Paraphrasing: “It’s better to say something, even if it’s really short”, “kudos are just like facebook likes; they don’t mean anything.”)
- Some authors value kudos only a little bit. Some of the same authors value kudos about equally with short comments that say something like “lovely!”
- Some authors think kudos are less desirable than comments specifically because you can only leave kudos once.
- Some authors really love kudos and think it’s a terrific system – they get more feedback because it’s much lighter weight engagement than leaving a comment.
- Some authors value public AO3 bookmarks and read through the comments people make on bookmarks of their works.
- Some authors value recommendations made outside of AO3 – sometimes even more than feedback directly to them.
- Some authors value high hit counts even when few people leave feedback.
- Some authors don’t like big numbers of hits without any feedback; they mostly value high kudos/hits or comments/hits ratios.
- Some commenters get anxiety about leaving comments or don’t have anything to say and love the kudos button.
- Some authors feel entitled to feedback – to them it’s fair and expected compensation for their work.
- Some authors don’t update their fics unless they get a bunch of comments/reviews – they don’t see the point if there isn’t any demand.
- Some authors are writing mostly for themselves and will post with or without feedback. But a bunch of these folks still find feedback encouraging.
- Some readers only want to leave kudos or comments works that they find particularly outstanding… Some of them seem to feel their kudos is an endorsement with a lot of weight, and that they don’t want to water it down/make it less special by giving feedback on things they don’t really love. (Nobody said exactly that; I’m inferring, perhaps incorrectly.)
- Some readers bestow kudos very liberally, on most things they read and don’t actively dislike.
- Some people are angry/indignant if readers don’t leave feedback for authors – it’s seen by some as the reader’s role in a gift economy. Some folks will try to guilt/harangue others into leaving more feedback.
- Some people are angry/indignant if authors feel entitled to feedback, or if fandom treats leaving feedback like an obligation.
- Graphs = boring; angry rants = awesome. My stats posts really take off and get lots of reblogs after somebody uses them as a basis to write an angry screed haranguing fandom for something. Sometimes involving bad math and/or ignoring the caveats in my original post. (Note: I don’t actually mind that people prefer heated debates to unopinionated graphs… I kind of expect that.)
- Even when I try to make a post not be specifically about popularity metrics – so that people ideally won’t feel bad about their own fanworks, and so that people won’t yell at each other – it’s really no guarantee that those things won’t happen. And you know, that’s actually okay; people can transform my posts however they like. (Except no bad math please. ;) )
I haven’t quantified any of the above observations, nor have I read all the notes on the post. (I learned the last time that one of my stats posts went viral that most of these people are really not talking to me, and don’t even know that I can see their conversations – in fact, a number of them think that the graphs are from some kind of organization that isn’t even on Tumblr.)