AO3, fanfiction, and comments: the system isn’t working.
Fic authors have a problem with feedback – or rather, with the lack of it. Fanfiction has a notoriously low ratio of comments to hits, and many of us have expressed our frustration that we can get a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, even a thousand views on our stories, but only a handful of readers will leave kudos, let alone comments.
Unfortunately, this only gets worse for long, multi-chapter stories (aka, the longfics we know, love, and would sell our souls in a second if it meant an update), which also happen to be the stories that authors need the most support to continue and complete. Law of diminishing returns, y’all, and it sucks.
We’re not here to guilt you into leaving comments.
We want to address the problem by changing the format, and we need your help to do it.
The goal is to increase the amount of feedback authors get from readers, especially on stories with multiple chapters, and to make it easier for everyone to show how much we love fics. We’re opening a discussion with ao3 to figure out how/if any of these options can be implemented, but first we need options to present!
Some of our current ideas:
Ability to leave a form of kudos on every chapter, instead of only once on the entire story: this lets authors know that you’re here and you’re reading their updates, so their hard work isn’t getting tossed into the internet void.
Comment templates: suggested comments that can be customized or posted as-is. Many of us draw a blank or get nervous when we try to think of a comment, so having pre-made options will both increase the total level of feedback and serve as practice, making it easier to leave more in-depth comments in the future.
Upvoting/leaving kudos on comments themselves: positive reinforcement makes giving feedback more fun and rewarding, and it lets the author know that readers are present and agreeing with other comments, even if they don’t leave one themselves.
We’ll contact AO3 to discuss the possibility of adding any of these as native features, and if that won’t work, we’re looking into creating and sharing a user script.
What you can do to help:
As a reader, what would you like to have? What would you be most likely to use? New ideas, opinions on ideas that are listed here, they’re all good.
As a creator, how would you feel about each of these options? Can you think of other ways of receiving or encouraging feedback?
Pros and cons of these (note: our thoughts on this are discussed in this google doc)
GET THE WORD OUT! Reblog this post, send it to your friends, link to it from your stories. We need as much input and support as possible to get this off the ground.
Feedback makes for happy authors. Happy authors make for more stories. Let’s keep this part of fandom alive!
More details about our thoughts, discussions, and ideas can be found inthis google doc.
wow, changing the format itself to facilitate comments! and interesting and rad way to go about helping authors
honestly I still think it’d be super rad to have a floating comment box on the side so that you can comment on different parts as you go, but I super like these options a lot!!! I especially like the kudos every chapter and upvoting other comments. I think that would be super helpful.
I’ve been asked many times what someone should look for when trying to find a good artist. The best way you can do this is to look at their portfolio, whether it’s in a book at their shop or online. If they don’t have good work in their portfolio, they’re probably not good artists.
The shop may be clean, the people there might be nice, and the design they draw up for you might be exactly what you want, but if your artist doesn’t stand up to the points listed above, then you’re going to get a bad tattoo.
It’s okay to walk into a shop, talk with an artist for a while, and decide you don’t want a tattoo from them. Even if the artist has a bad attitude about it or tries to convince you to just let them do it, remember this is going to be on your body for the rest of your life.
Why do grown ass adults want to eat Tide pods so much?
Because a ton of the visual/olfactory/textural sensory information these pods give me the match nutritionally-dense fruit. It’s got the oleic gleam of something high-fat like an avocado, but bright carotenoid-rich coloration like a berry that wants to be eaten by red-seeing primates and birds. It tends to smell sweet and slightly floral, enhancing that effect. Similarly, when you hold it, it is quite dense (denser than water), but very soft and liquid, once again reaffirming that this “fruit” has either high sugar or high fat content and almost no cellulose to it.
As a result, within me is a less-clever monkey just screaming to eat this delicious fruit in my hand about to go into the laundry, and it does in fact take willpower to tell him he’s a stupid monkey and this is a bubble of foul-tasting poison. But every time I do laundry, this fucking limbic monstrosity rises again and assures me it’s basically like a cherry but Even Better. I have legitimately debated just biting down on one in the hopes of inducing a deterrent memory to forestall this urge in the future, but that’s what my goddamn mammal-brain wants me to fucking do and I refuse to let it win.
Human Brain: Don’t eat the posion pod its fucking posion Monkey Brain: Eat the fruit pod its fruit Lizard Brain: The Washing Machine Is Vibrating Give It The Sex Fish Brain: Climb inside the washing machine it is safe.
I had this billion-dollar idea to make edible candy that’s packaged like a Tide pod and would satisfy this urge, but one of my friends got an actual lawyer on the phone to explain why I would set some sort of world record for lawsuits
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