fannish currency and me, a Modest Name Fan

[isozyme]

so i read some meta about how kudos devalue reader interaction with fan work.  fan work is being taken for granted, these essays posited.  possibly, even, readers were lazy and entitled.  an idea was floated: instead of letting people click an I Liked That button, maybe getting rid of the junk food version of feedback would force encourage people to eat healthy and leave long, thoughtful comments.

setting aside the question of would removing kudos on AO3 lead to more comments (no, it would not), i'd like to talk about the value of my hit counter and my kudos number for me.  and i'm going to start with a digression.

when i was in College, i hung my senior art thesis in the Smith Gallery, which was a small room right by the entrance to the cafeteria.  the show was eight big charcoal drawings (6 feet high, more or less) and a handful of smaller ones.  they represented a huge amount of work.  i remember locking myself in the semi-private studio for eight hour stretches, blasting ceremonials by florence and the machine, working until my hands were covered wrist to fingertip with black.  the concrete floor underneath where i was drawing would collect a pile of broken charcoal pieces and bits of eraser and fine black dust.  it was freezing in there.  i put soul into that project.

an absolute maximum of 1,500 people walked through the gallery while my show was up; probably significantly fewer, but that's how many it would have been if every student had come to visit.  it was, and is, one of the most important things i've done with my art.

5,000 copies is a respectable number of sales for a debut novel.  10,000 is a very good sign for your career.

videogames aren't considered a success until sales cap 5,000,000.

it's hard to keep large numbers straight.  it's very easy to look at 1,500 compared to 5,000,000 and think, good grief, 1,500 is nothing! practically zero!  but -- 1,500 is every person at my school.

my fanfiction isn't a big deal, certainly not by BNF standards.  i've got a couple fics with more than 5,000 hits; more hovering between one and two thousand.  i get about a 100:10:1 hits:kudos:comments ratio, which gives me a warm feeling of accomplishment.  i love the comments!  i go back and re-read them when i'm sad; i do an embarrassing wiggle of excitement when i see [AO3] Comment on... in my inbox; I show them to my wife all "look, look, someone liked the fingerbanging one!"  but the hits and kudos are important to me too, because i imagine the 1,500 students, or the 5,000 books, and i think "my fic has been seen by so many people."

maybe it feels different if you are more fandom famous than i am.  maybe the less personal quantitative feedback becomes a dull background roar.  but i know what it's like to publish stories into the void where you don't see how many people clicked on and quietly enjoyed your story.  professional short story markets don't have kudos or hit counters, and tell you what, i convince myself every time that the only people who've read the story are the people who've commented on it.  so i don't get to imagine the auditorium full of 300 people and think "i got a chance to talk to all those folks for 4,000 words."  i imagine the dude who writes reviews for rocket stack rank sitting in an empty cafe, rolling his eyes and putting me down for another three out of five stars.

frankly, the fandom feedback experience is better now than it was a decade and a half ago.  still no money, granted, and it's still easy to forget that 2,500 isn't zero even when 250,000 exists, but better.

Comments

[stellar_dust]

I totally agree. I haven't been following the broader BNF discussion, but -- kudos doesn't take the place of comments, it makes (at least some of the) lurkers count.

[manyblinkinglights]

+1 like

[momijizukamori]

Word, and I say this as one of the lurkers (I'm trying to be better this year about calling out bits and pieces I really enjoyed but in the Yahoo groups/FF.net/LJ era I left very few comments) - kudos definitely give people like me a little bit more of a voice.

idk if it's because I don't write much, and consequently don't really think of myself as a writer or define myself by my writing, but even a kudos email in my inbox brings me a little spark of happiness. The only time I get a little bummed out about comments is when something is for an exchange and the person I wrote the piece for never says anything (which unfortunately has happened the last two times I've done them, sigh), but that's kind of a different context.

[chickiedeare]

Oh interesting. I haven't seen that post or similar yet, but I am feeling in general like people are trying to Optimize fandom. when to my understanding that's not... really how it's ever worked?

Weirdly I've also seen a couple posts about how the kinds of feedback that in my deviantart poetry days I would've considered concrit, aka comments of the highest value, are not okay and are in fact what chases writers out of fandom (!!!). Because negativity or something.

[thisweekmod]

Hello! May I link this post over at thisweekmeta?

[laurajv]

I feel like a lot of the folks objecting to the kudos button do not remember the days of posting one’s fanfic to a mailing list, and then hoping for even a single one-line email response from the sub-200 people on the list. you didn’t even have a way of knowing if anyone READ it, let alone liked it, unless at least one person liked it ENOUGH to deal with sending email back. it was casting fanfic out into the void. (although a slightly less voidy void than zine days.)

because as someone who DOES remember those days, I adore the kudos button. It tells me someone liked the thing! it made it easier for them to tell me they liked the thing! hooray!

[g_uava]

Here from thisweekmeta! Would like to ask OP and anyone reading this post (hope this is ok): do you have any experience with encouraging repeat readers who leave kudos to leave short and simple comments? I'm wondering if there's a good way to do so while also emphasizing that a) kudos are equally appreciated and b) there's no pressure to write lengthy analyses or even comment using perfect SPAG as the author would just like to exchange thoughts about mutual favs.

I write multiple fics for a ship and often see the same users leaving kudos. In trying different ways to start a discussion in comments with these serial kudosers and anyone else reading, I've found that making a direct request (e.g. 'if you'd like to, let's talk about what you like about the ship and characters in the comments') isn't very effective. I've gotten no results either from linking to my tumblr for chatting in private and away from AO3.

It'd also be nice to be able to attach a name to guests who've maybe left kudos on multiple fics. Once when I was writing for a rare and rather controversial ship, I'd only receive 4 kudos per fic - 2 from my fandom friends with accounts and 2 from anons. I can't help but wonder if they're the same Anon 1 and Anon 2 who've been following my work and ended up not asking in case I scare them off.

here from thisweekmeta

[fred_mouse]

Something that I see as missing in the discussion is what do the readers do with kudos? I use them as my sort by, not comments. Because comments is 'how many engaged/articulate/garrulous people liked this', and kudos is much more likely to indicate how many people at least got to the end. One enthused reader in a discussion with the author will inflate the comments section, but each reader only gets a single kudos.

[catalenamara]

Totally agreed. I used to publish an ezine dedicated to fan fic reviews (it was a continuation of a print fanzine). In speaking to a lot of people who read fanfic but do not write fanfic, one common theme was they felt intimidated by their own writing abilities and felt they just did not know how to properly write feedback for authors. They could express how much they liked/loved a piece, but had a lot of difficulty explaining why. I welcomed the kudos button when I joined AO3; it's a great way to know that people are reading your work and liked it enough to hit that button.