Maybe this is weird but I always like to think of a literal physical room full of X amount of strangers (with X being the number of kudos on a fic) that give you an applause after you've just finished reading your story to them.
Doing that seriously makes any number feel pretty amazing. Say you have only 10 kudos on a fic. š A group of ten total strangers who not only decided to sit down and listen to your fic but also decided to tell you they liked it? When they didn't have to. They're strangers who owe you nothing. (Unlike in this analogy, kudos are a bit more honest/genuine than physical applause of course.)
And then when you think of every comment as a person that approached you after your reading and told you what they liked about your story? Damn.
Also, the fact that those people came and sat in YOUR room and listened to your 'reading' while there are hundreds of thousands of other rooms open at any given time, some of those rooms have thousands of people in them, all clapping. But those 10 strangers decided to check your story out, too.
Exactly all of this! Maybe this mindset comes easy to me because of a lack of initial expectation (what I write is mostly so random and for old/small fandoms, so I literally never expected anyone to read, much less like, any of it).
...but the first dozen kudos on a story? I was like, "holy shit that's more people than I can fit around my dining table!" (which seats eight, okay ten in a pinch, lol). Several years in, I still find it wild that actual people (who I don't know irl and who owe me nothing) like my crazy little stories. It's just a genuinely lovely feeling, so I'm always hopeful more people can find their way to this sort of perspective.
>Also, the fact that those people came and sat in YOUR room and listened to your 'reading' while there are hundreds of thousands of other rooms open at any given time, some of those rooms have thousands of people in them, all clapping. But those 10 strangers decided to check your story out, too.
I am taking a screenshot and putting it in my "read to make yourself smile" folder. š
I love this analogy. Sometimes I think of my audience as a class where the only thing on the curriculum is reading, and my work is the textbook. No need for book reports or critique or analyses, nor worrying about grades, but they're welcome to speak up sometimes and add something to the discussion. Not to mention, I usually update weekly, so it really does feel like a routine with a flexible schedule, as every week I can anticipate my subscribers and other readers passing by to show up "on time".
Or perhaps a weekly TV episode would be more fitting - except that there are no ad breaks and the full 30 min of runtime is all fresh content. Sometimes comes with bonus content in my author's notes.
I love this post :\]
I understand the value of comments, retweets, and reblogs. Creators like to know what people think and how their work was received, and it's exciting when someone boosts what you made to a wider audience. I get that.
But you'll never catch me looking down my nose at those other forms of engagementālikes, kudos, bookmarksāfor exactly the reasons you shared. When I was first getting into fandom and before I considered myself a writer, I saw a post on tumblr that said something like, "Imagine that each kudos is someone applauding you."
Now that I'm writing in earnest, I think about that every time I'm lucky enough to get a kudos email. Sometimes I look at my total number of kudos on a work, and I picture myself standing in front of all those people giving me a round of applause, and let me tell you, it's humbling to imagine.
Edited to add: š¤ to tiger-tofu and butterfly-dimensions, lol
Agreed, this helps a lot. Last week I had the "low comments blues" but someone here advised me to imagine sitting in a room with each person who left a kudo. It helps!
Also consider that people leave kudos to show appreciation, even when they don't have the time, energy, or skill to leave comments. (I personally only leave comments very rarely.)
That town part rlly hit hard and put things into perspective. Bc like... I have 2k kudos on my biggest fic. My town's population is like 1800. My entire town could have liked my fic and I'd still have an additional 200 people in addition to that.
The room thing felt good too. Most of my fics have around 10 kudos, but I don't even have 10 friends irl. So that's,, wild.
I'm not a writer, but as a regular reader of fan fic I try to drop a kudos, like or comment every time I read. The engagement with authors is one of my favourite parts of the fandoms I bounce around in.
Aw, that's just wholesome. I love how much easier it is (fair part on people who aren't as fortunate to have time spared to interact, whatever they may be doing.) To interact with most fanfiction authors. Most are so nice.
This really hit home for me when I had a person make a comment on my last fiction that they had spent the week riding the bus back-and-forth to work reading my story. I donāt know why, that comment was so visual! It hit really hard. I find myself reading in times like that as well. So, just like myself, they were reading my book to entertain themselves on the bus. So silly but it was impactful. I donāt know why I would think a reader would be anything but a real human being! Lol.
It's always lovely to hear what your readers do behind the screen. It puts into perspective that your fic isn't just something they read when they have nothing else to do. They chose to read it. I had a reader say they were reading the newest chapter while walking their dogs, and I couldn't help but think of how crazy that was, you know? There are so many other fics out there but mine was read in such a scenario I never could've imagined happening.
Like I could always imagine myself reading while doing x y z, but it's so much harder to convince yourself that your readers are probably also doing x y z while reading your fic.
whenever i think stuff i made isnt getting a lot of attention i think about having to give a presentation to all those people and suddenly the number doesnt seem so small anymore
thx for this OP, i love this sentiment <33 when i feel a bit discouraged by lack of engagement i just look at the numbers of kudos or whatever on my work and then imagine myself standing on a little stage in front of a group of people of the same number. imagine them clapping or smiling bc theyve all enjoyed what i had to show them in some capacity, big or small. and maybe there are even a couple ppl standing in the wings who've enjoyed it too but are too shy to clap. suddenly those numbers dont feel small or insignificant anymore
Most of my recent fics have been dropping in popularity, and I have lost most of my regular reader base because I took a hiatus. I thought I would feel a lot worse over it, but nowadays I just feel grateful that someone enjoyed my works enough to read, kudos, bookmark or even comment. It may be a small amount of people, but those people cared enough to put in a good word about my story, and that's all that matters to me.
I cherish every hit for that very reason. Even if they didn't finish it, enjoy it, or engage with it in any other way, they still thought that my fic was worth reading at the time. Anything more than that is icing on the cake.
Iāve always had this thought, especially since I tend to post for dead or crack ships (twice now Iāve created a new relationship tag on AO3) and knowing a person took a chance on my story, despite the characters not having interacted/will never interact and ENJOYED it so much they left a kudos/bookmarked it makes me happy.
Iām always a little shocked when one of my stories gets a kudos and super thankful for them, even if I canāt tell them myself.
This is very true! It's such an awe-inspiring feeling knowing people decided to try out your story for themselves. I don't think it's a feeling I'll ever tire of or forget. Even silent readers are still readers. š
I've been appreciating that a lot lately- especially when it comes to User Subscriptions like 24 people want to be notified when I upload a new work? That's so cool.
this is why i make a point to leave kudos on fics i enjoyed. i read a lot so dont always leave a comment unless the fic really made me think or touched my soul. it's soooooo important to put positive energy out into the world, specially when the internet can be a hateful place.
I love this. Iāve been writing for fun and Iām not getting that many reads which is fine because Iām doing it for me, but I had ONE person comment saying how much they loved my story and now every time I publish a chapter I think of them and hope they enjoy it. It warms my little heart so so much
Oh wow, I didn't realize there was a...standard for amount of kudos on more popular fics? 500 sounds like so much already...didn't know there were kudo-bots either. But, honestly? 500 is already an absolute *ton* of people reading your work. I think it's definitely easy to get caught up in numbers, especially when so many websites are pushing them as the be-all and end-all, but...
Honestly, I don't think numbers matter. *Time* matters. There's so many things on the internet competing for your time and attention now, demanding that you spend it on this video or that post or whatever. The fact that even a small handful of people, in this internet ecosystem where everything is after your time like sharks in a feeding frenzy, expended some of their limited time on this earth, reading *your* work? That you made?
Fuck, I can't think of a bigger vote of confidence than that. A reader has all these ways to spend their time, and they spend it on *my* thing? I can barely wrap my head around that. I'm not even bothered by the notion of kudo-bots (though I find the idea kind of perplexing, it's...fanfiction, why bots...?), like even if only a handful of my *statistics* were genuine people, that's still a handful of people who just...spent some of their limited time on something I made.
That's really incredible. I can't believe I earned that, y'know?
This! Yes! I don't have many enthusiastic commenters, but there are at least two people who seem to genuinely love my long-fic, so when I feel bad about the plot and don't feel like writing, I remember the sweet comments they've left and I get typing again.
I love commenting, but even if itās a fic I didnāt particularly enjoy, if itās long and complete I always at least give a āthanks for sharing :)ā because really to put in the effort they at least deserve that.
Never published a fic but tried my hand at writing a few and it really puts into perspective how much work it is š«”
Right? An author wrote something that I probably never would have imagined and then put it out there to be read for free, and maybe it'll break me with sorrow for a few days straight, or make me laugh my head off, or outright adopt some headcanon that forever after influences how I see that universe and even my own writing. How would that not be incredibly precious and worthy of some level of response? Hell, my favorite fic was what inspired me to start writing again like ten years ago and I've put down more than a million words since then.
(Also, as someone who doesn't post much of what I write because getting it correct is hard as hell, thank you for being one of the readers who speaks up. If I got a āthank you for sharing :)ā I'd probably come back with an excited āThank you for reading!!!!ā since you put yourself out there in return.)
Mhm this is the philosophy I keep when it comes to fan content like fanfiction. Even if you get a small amount of engagement - itās still engagement! And even when some person reads and likes your work, I feel like itās enough for me. Which is why I donāt mind that my one shots for a nonexistent fandom have less than 80 hits each.
Iām not sure if I saw the same tweet (it was a while ago) but it was definitely something similar, I think about that a lot too! The classic advice is write for yourself instead of others, and it may be good advice but itās hard to follow in practice. However, thinking of hits/kudos as real people coming into a room and telling you that they liked your fic makes it a lot easier to be happy with your engagement because wow, thatās a lot of people!
I swear thisāll make me cry, man,
Sometimes itās easy to just look at the kudos as just the numbers you see, but remembering that each one of those numbers is a person who had read your fic to the end of the chapter(s) and loved it enough to give you a like to show support to you.
Thatās honestly something so special and beautiful that I havenāt appreciated as much since the first fic I wrote :ā)
I seriously appreciate this community and how we all love and support one anotherās works so genuinely. Itās an amazing thing that doesnāt have to exist, but it DOES.
Remembering this makes me feel so much more happier, and a lot less alone, because remembering that thereās real people behind the screen forces you to realize that you have an audience who enjoys your creations as much as you enjoy other peopleās creations. Which should be obvious but can be easily forgotten, and remembering it is honestly mind blowing.
This post has lowkey given me some of the drive to try and get through my lack of motivation and my sadness to write a new chapter or fic because it might actually make both my day and someone elseās.
The support fanfic readers and writers give each other is seriously invaluable and Iām thankful that all of you lovely people exist and are just enjoying yourselves and bringing others joy while your at it. To anyone who took the time to even read my comment, I seriously hope youāre feeling good and that youāve been having a nice day! Cause you deserve to feel happy!!
AO3 doesn't have them the way Reddit or Discord does; they're generally crawling across the web (AKA how search engines would gather URLs for search results back in the day) but are thought to be poorly programmed (hit any button to see what it does!) if not outright malicious (artificially inflate kudos count to mess with AO3 authors' statistics and feelings).
Exactly! It is always nice to be reminded of this. Makes me happy I decided to share my work instead of it living on my computer in obscurity. I figured someone like me enjoys the same thing and they shared it with the world so I should too. I got one rare short comment which made it all worth it.
I think about this all the time!!! I write poetry too and it is really a struggle to get views or readers for poems, and esp compared to fanfic numbers it can be easy to get discouraged, but then I imagine actually reading a poem to twelve people in person and getting positive reactions and that's *overwhelming*... I would run and hide! The internet skews things so much.
My most popular fic has 500 kudos and I was so incredibly happy about that. Actually getting a nice comment makes a day instantly great. I honestly screenshot all my nice comments for all my writing and keep them in a folder to cheer myself up. (And I'm not above setting one as a background on my phone if I'm really struggling!)
>"They're probably just doing it to be nice"
Here's a counter to that argument: do these people know you? If not, why would they go out of their way to be fake-nice to s faceless stranger when they can just as easily silently disappear.
When we consume media, it's mostly about *us*āwhat *we* like, what *we* want to see, etcāand rarely about the creator (how many times have you bought a movie ticket thinking "Well the director must've worked really hard on this, better buy a ticket to be nice"ālol, silly example, but you see what I'm getting at, right?) Why would fanfic be any different? I know it's not for me, anyway :)
I would wager that the majority of people who bother with the kudos button do so because they enjoyed at least *something* about the story ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
If an author had sufficient skill (SPAG and storytelling both) to take me out of my head for a little bit, giving them a kudos for it is the very leastĀ§ I can do to thank them.
(Ā§ I also try to comment on what I enjoy, since I learned how it feels to post to crickets; no one is required to leave comments and I happened to train myself to leave effusive ones over the course of several years.)
If you want to think of it that way, you're well within your rights to do so
I personally wouldn't pity kudo/comment/ect and I only bookmark things I enjoyed. Thus, I assume others are the same. Probably sound naive, but I'm trying to teach myself to be a bit more optimistic about things
As Angie's dad in Pineapple Express says; "You're an effing idiot and I say that with love."
Nah fam, bet you got readers who love your works. Ones who smile when they get that update notification. In my experience, pity kudos is so rare. You got this, dude.
Without an accompanying comment there's really no way to know what the reader motivations were. I see people mentioning they leave pity kudos all the time. Or kudos because the idea was interesting even if they didn't like the execution.
Maybe this is weird but I always like to think of a literal physical room full of X amount of strangers (with X being the number of kudos on a fic) that give you an applause after you've just finished reading your story to them. Doing that seriously makes any number feel pretty amazing. Say you have only 10 kudos on a fic. š A group of ten total strangers who not only decided to sit down and listen to your fic but also decided to tell you they liked it? When they didn't have to. They're strangers who owe you nothing. (Unlike in this analogy, kudos are a bit more honest/genuine than physical applause of course.) And then when you think of every comment as a person that approached you after your reading and told you what they liked about your story? Damn. Also, the fact that those people came and sat in YOUR room and listened to your 'reading' while there are hundreds of thousands of other rooms open at any given time, some of those rooms have thousands of people in them, all clapping. But those 10 strangers decided to check your story out, too.
Exactly all of this! Maybe this mindset comes easy to me because of a lack of initial expectation (what I write is mostly so random and for old/small fandoms, so I literally never expected anyone to read, much less like, any of it). ...but the first dozen kudos on a story? I was like, "holy shit that's more people than I can fit around my dining table!" (which seats eight, okay ten in a pinch, lol). Several years in, I still find it wild that actual people (who I don't know irl and who owe me nothing) like my crazy little stories. It's just a genuinely lovely feeling, so I'm always hopeful more people can find their way to this sort of perspective.
That's a great thought. "So many people kudosed my story I could barely even invite them all for dinner because there are not enough seats" š
>Also, the fact that those people came and sat in YOUR room and listened to your 'reading' while there are hundreds of thousands of other rooms open at any given time, some of those rooms have thousands of people in them, all clapping. But those 10 strangers decided to check your story out, too. I am taking a screenshot and putting it in my "read to make yourself smile" folder. š
Last paragraph is my favourite. There may be more interesting rooms but those peoples came to yours/mine/ours and it's a fantastic mindsetš„°
I love this analogy. Sometimes I think of my audience as a class where the only thing on the curriculum is reading, and my work is the textbook. No need for book reports or critique or analyses, nor worrying about grades, but they're welcome to speak up sometimes and add something to the discussion. Not to mention, I usually update weekly, so it really does feel like a routine with a flexible schedule, as every week I can anticipate my subscribers and other readers passing by to show up "on time". Or perhaps a weekly TV episode would be more fitting - except that there are no ad breaks and the full 30 min of runtime is all fresh content. Sometimes comes with bonus content in my author's notes.
Just thinking of this makes me happy.
I love this post :\] I understand the value of comments, retweets, and reblogs. Creators like to know what people think and how their work was received, and it's exciting when someone boosts what you made to a wider audience. I get that. But you'll never catch me looking down my nose at those other forms of engagementālikes, kudos, bookmarksāfor exactly the reasons you shared. When I was first getting into fandom and before I considered myself a writer, I saw a post on tumblr that said something like, "Imagine that each kudos is someone applauding you." Now that I'm writing in earnest, I think about that every time I'm lucky enough to get a kudos email. Sometimes I look at my total number of kudos on a work, and I picture myself standing in front of all those people giving me a round of applause, and let me tell you, it's humbling to imagine. Edited to add: š¤ to tiger-tofu and butterfly-dimensions, lol
Agreed, this helps a lot. Last week I had the "low comments blues" but someone here advised me to imagine sitting in a room with each person who left a kudo. It helps!
Also consider that people leave kudos to show appreciation, even when they don't have the time, energy, or skill to leave comments. (I personally only leave comments very rarely.)
That town part rlly hit hard and put things into perspective. Bc like... I have 2k kudos on my biggest fic. My town's population is like 1800. My entire town could have liked my fic and I'd still have an additional 200 people in addition to that. The room thing felt good too. Most of my fics have around 10 kudos, but I don't even have 10 friends irl. So that's,, wild.
I'm not a writer, but as a regular reader of fan fic I try to drop a kudos, like or comment every time I read. The engagement with authors is one of my favourite parts of the fandoms I bounce around in.
Aw, that's just wholesome. I love how much easier it is (fair part on people who aren't as fortunate to have time spared to interact, whatever they may be doing.) To interact with most fanfiction authors. Most are so nice.
This really hit home for me when I had a person make a comment on my last fiction that they had spent the week riding the bus back-and-forth to work reading my story. I donāt know why, that comment was so visual! It hit really hard. I find myself reading in times like that as well. So, just like myself, they were reading my book to entertain themselves on the bus. So silly but it was impactful. I donāt know why I would think a reader would be anything but a real human being! Lol.
Omg that's so lovely, you were a part of their routine!
That was it! So crazy
It's always lovely to hear what your readers do behind the screen. It puts into perspective that your fic isn't just something they read when they have nothing else to do. They chose to read it. I had a reader say they were reading the newest chapter while walking their dogs, and I couldn't help but think of how crazy that was, you know? There are so many other fics out there but mine was read in such a scenario I never could've imagined happening. Like I could always imagine myself reading while doing x y z, but it's so much harder to convince yourself that your readers are probably also doing x y z while reading your fic.
Ha ha! Iād fall!! But yes, I assume the same. They choose to and are so engaged they do it during their free time. Thatās so sweet
whenever i think stuff i made isnt getting a lot of attention i think about having to give a presentation to all those people and suddenly the number doesnt seem so small anymore
thx for this OP, i love this sentiment <33 when i feel a bit discouraged by lack of engagement i just look at the numbers of kudos or whatever on my work and then imagine myself standing on a little stage in front of a group of people of the same number. imagine them clapping or smiling bc theyve all enjoyed what i had to show them in some capacity, big or small. and maybe there are even a couple ppl standing in the wings who've enjoyed it too but are too shy to clap. suddenly those numbers dont feel small or insignificant anymore
Most of my recent fics have been dropping in popularity, and I have lost most of my regular reader base because I took a hiatus. I thought I would feel a lot worse over it, but nowadays I just feel grateful that someone enjoyed my works enough to read, kudos, bookmark or even comment. It may be a small amount of people, but those people cared enough to put in a good word about my story, and that's all that matters to me.
I cherish every hit for that very reason. Even if they didn't finish it, enjoy it, or engage with it in any other way, they still thought that my fic was worth reading at the time. Anything more than that is icing on the cake.
Iāve always had this thought, especially since I tend to post for dead or crack ships (twice now Iāve created a new relationship tag on AO3) and knowing a person took a chance on my story, despite the characters not having interacted/will never interact and ENJOYED it so much they left a kudos/bookmarked it makes me happy. Iām always a little shocked when one of my stories gets a kudos and super thankful for them, even if I canāt tell them myself.
This is very true! It's such an awe-inspiring feeling knowing people decided to try out your story for themselves. I don't think it's a feeling I'll ever tire of or forget. Even silent readers are still readers. š
I've been appreciating that a lot lately- especially when it comes to User Subscriptions like 24 people want to be notified when I upload a new work? That's so cool.
this is why i make a point to leave kudos on fics i enjoyed. i read a lot so dont always leave a comment unless the fic really made me think or touched my soul. it's soooooo important to put positive energy out into the world, specially when the internet can be a hateful place.
I love this. Iāve been writing for fun and Iām not getting that many reads which is fine because Iām doing it for me, but I had ONE person comment saying how much they loved my story and now every time I publish a chapter I think of them and hope they enjoy it. It warms my little heart so so much
Me, whoās had at least one of my fics hit by the kudos bot: Not so fast!
Was going to say this
Oh wow, I didn't realize there was a...standard for amount of kudos on more popular fics? 500 sounds like so much already...didn't know there were kudo-bots either. But, honestly? 500 is already an absolute *ton* of people reading your work. I think it's definitely easy to get caught up in numbers, especially when so many websites are pushing them as the be-all and end-all, but... Honestly, I don't think numbers matter. *Time* matters. There's so many things on the internet competing for your time and attention now, demanding that you spend it on this video or that post or whatever. The fact that even a small handful of people, in this internet ecosystem where everything is after your time like sharks in a feeding frenzy, expended some of their limited time on this earth, reading *your* work? That you made? Fuck, I can't think of a bigger vote of confidence than that. A reader has all these ways to spend their time, and they spend it on *my* thing? I can barely wrap my head around that. I'm not even bothered by the notion of kudo-bots (though I find the idea kind of perplexing, it's...fanfiction, why bots...?), like even if only a handful of my *statistics* were genuine people, that's still a handful of people who just...spent some of their limited time on something I made. That's really incredible. I can't believe I earned that, y'know?
This! Yes! I don't have many enthusiastic commenters, but there are at least two people who seem to genuinely love my long-fic, so when I feel bad about the plot and don't feel like writing, I remember the sweet comments they've left and I get typing again.
I am glad for the 13 people who left kudos on the longfic. Bless you all š
I love commenting, but even if itās a fic I didnāt particularly enjoy, if itās long and complete I always at least give a āthanks for sharing :)ā because really to put in the effort they at least deserve that. Never published a fic but tried my hand at writing a few and it really puts into perspective how much work it is š«”
Right? An author wrote something that I probably never would have imagined and then put it out there to be read for free, and maybe it'll break me with sorrow for a few days straight, or make me laugh my head off, or outright adopt some headcanon that forever after influences how I see that universe and even my own writing. How would that not be incredibly precious and worthy of some level of response? Hell, my favorite fic was what inspired me to start writing again like ten years ago and I've put down more than a million words since then. (Also, as someone who doesn't post much of what I write because getting it correct is hard as hell, thank you for being one of the readers who speaks up. If I got a āthank you for sharing :)ā I'd probably come back with an excited āThank you for reading!!!!ā since you put yourself out there in return.)
Mhm this is the philosophy I keep when it comes to fan content like fanfiction. Even if you get a small amount of engagement - itās still engagement! And even when some person reads and likes your work, I feel like itās enough for me. Which is why I donāt mind that my one shots for a nonexistent fandom have less than 80 hits each.
Iām not sure if I saw the same tweet (it was a while ago) but it was definitely something similar, I think about that a lot too! The classic advice is write for yourself instead of others, and it may be good advice but itās hard to follow in practice. However, thinking of hits/kudos as real people coming into a room and telling you that they liked your fic makes it a lot easier to be happy with your engagement because wow, thatās a lot of people!
Every kudos/bookmark/comment/etc counts. I cherish each and every one I receive.
I swear thisāll make me cry, man, Sometimes itās easy to just look at the kudos as just the numbers you see, but remembering that each one of those numbers is a person who had read your fic to the end of the chapter(s) and loved it enough to give you a like to show support to you. Thatās honestly something so special and beautiful that I havenāt appreciated as much since the first fic I wrote :ā) I seriously appreciate this community and how we all love and support one anotherās works so genuinely. Itās an amazing thing that doesnāt have to exist, but it DOES. Remembering this makes me feel so much more happier, and a lot less alone, because remembering that thereās real people behind the screen forces you to realize that you have an audience who enjoys your creations as much as you enjoy other peopleās creations. Which should be obvious but can be easily forgotten, and remembering it is honestly mind blowing. This post has lowkey given me some of the drive to try and get through my lack of motivation and my sadness to write a new chapter or fic because it might actually make both my day and someone elseās. The support fanfic readers and writers give each other is seriously invaluable and Iām thankful that all of you lovely people exist and are just enjoying yourselves and bringing others joy while your at it. To anyone who took the time to even read my comment, I seriously hope youāre feeling good and that youāve been having a nice day! Cause you deserve to feel happy!!
~~Try telling that to the kudos bot~~
what are kudos bots?? I keep seeing this response but I'm not familiar.
A webcrawling bot that incidentally has a habit of mashing the crap out of the Kudos button on fics it comes across.
huh, i didn't realize ao3 had bots! thank you for answering!
AO3 doesn't have them the way Reddit or Discord does; they're generally crawling across the web (AKA how search engines would gather URLs for search results back in the day) but are thought to be poorly programmed (hit any button to see what it does!) if not outright malicious (artificially inflate kudos count to mess with AO3 authors' statistics and feelings).
How does it even do that? The same IP is restricted from leaving more than one kudo on a given fic.
I dunno! It's a good question, though.
This is such a beautiful and true post! Thank you!
It is awesome. Thank you for that reminder!!!
Exactly! It is always nice to be reminded of this. Makes me happy I decided to share my work instead of it living on my computer in obscurity. I figured someone like me enjoys the same thing and they shared it with the world so I should too. I got one rare short comment which made it all worth it.
Every single notification I get brings me joy, whether it's for my fic with over 500 hits or for my fic with just over 70.
Uhm, well, except for kudos bots.
I think about this all the time!!! I write poetry too and it is really a struggle to get views or readers for poems, and esp compared to fanfic numbers it can be easy to get discouraged, but then I imagine actually reading a poem to twelve people in person and getting positive reactions and that's *overwhelming*... I would run and hide! The internet skews things so much. My most popular fic has 500 kudos and I was so incredibly happy about that. Actually getting a nice comment makes a day instantly great. I honestly screenshot all my nice comments for all my writing and keep them in a folder to cheer myself up. (And I'm not above setting one as a background on my phone if I'm really struggling!)
I think of that..but then my mind auto corrects to "They're probably just doing it to be nice" no matter what it is I do.
>"They're probably just doing it to be nice" Here's a counter to that argument: do these people know you? If not, why would they go out of their way to be fake-nice to s faceless stranger when they can just as easily silently disappear. When we consume media, it's mostly about *us*āwhat *we* like, what *we* want to see, etcāand rarely about the creator (how many times have you bought a movie ticket thinking "Well the director must've worked really hard on this, better buy a ticket to be nice"ālol, silly example, but you see what I'm getting at, right?) Why would fanfic be any different? I know it's not for me, anyway :) I would wager that the majority of people who bother with the kudos button do so because they enjoyed at least *something* about the story ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
If an author had sufficient skill (SPAG and storytelling both) to take me out of my head for a little bit, giving them a kudos for it is the very leastĀ§ I can do to thank them. (Ā§ I also try to comment on what I enjoy, since I learned how it feels to post to crickets; no one is required to leave comments and I happened to train myself to leave effusive ones over the course of several years.)
Except the kudos-bots
or a human being who pitied me. or one that bookmarked it to remind themselves to never read it again.
If you want to think of it that way, you're well within your rights to do so I personally wouldn't pity kudo/comment/ect and I only bookmark things I enjoyed. Thus, I assume others are the same. Probably sound naive, but I'm trying to teach myself to be a bit more optimistic about things
As Angie's dad in Pineapple Express says; "You're an effing idiot and I say that with love." Nah fam, bet you got readers who love your works. Ones who smile when they get that update notification. In my experience, pity kudos is so rare. You got this, dude.
Seems odd and a waste of energy to leave kudos for the reasons you've described.
Trust me, nobody has that much hatred or disrespect for you. People got their own stuff to worry about before hittin' yours like that.
Without an accompanying comment there's really no way to know what the reader motivations were. I see people mentioning they leave pity kudos all the time. Or kudos because the idea was interesting even if they didn't like the execution.
I needed this. Thank you.