feedback and fic in fandom (3 f's of our own)
This conversation about feedback on fic says everything Iāve been wanting to say better than I could say it. But Iāll go ahead and try anyway.
Over the last five years or so there have been some great discussions around the rise of commodification of fanworks and decline of fandom community. This commodification looks a bit like enshittification of the internet: a cool site exists; its popularity makes someone realize they can get money from it; it has more and more ads; the site adds features to drive engagement, including The Algorithm; the things that made the site cool start to fall away. The site exists now as a vehicle purely to get clicks, and the people on it are on it solely to get clicksāto make money, to be successful, for some kind of social cachet.
AO3 doesnāt have advertisements. Itās not making money. But what is happening to fandom is proof of concept that enshittification changes the way we as humans engage. A cool website in 2004 was often a community space where you could meet people, have conversations, find cool things, and make cool things. A cool website in 2024 is either a content farm that will continually feed you enough content to hold your attention, or a social media site where your participation will come with stats to show you whether you are holding the attention of others.
AO3 wasnāt built to be a community space. It doesnāt have great functions for meeting people and having conversations. The idea was that, because fandom community spaces already existed, AO3 would serve the part of that community where you can find the cool things and store the cool things you made. It was meant to be a library in a city, not the whole city itself.
But it was also never meant to be a website in 2024, a content farm constantly generating content solely for your clicks and eyeballs and ad revenue, or a social media site where the content creators themselves vie for your clicks and eyeballs.
The most common talking point when people discuss the enshittification of fandom is the folks out there who are treating AO3 as that first kind of enshittified website: the content farm. This discussion is about how people treat fanfic as a product for consumption.
The post that kicked off the discussion on @sitp-recsās blog was about someone who wasnāt getting very many kudos or comments on their fic, and was feeling pretty demoralized about it, then joined a discord server and found an entire channel dedicated to people loving their fic. But those on that server had never come to share that love with the author, which the author found really discouraging.
There are more and more stories like this. Someone on tiktok pulls a quote from a fic on AO3 and makes a 10-second video with them staring at a wall, the quote pasted at the bottom, music playing over it. It has 100,000 hearts, and 100 comments with people gushing over the fic, which has 80 kudos on AO3. Overall, people notice more and more hits on their fics, but fewer and fewer comments or even kudos. Fewer and fewer people seem to feel the need to interact with the author, instead treating the fic like a product to be used and discardedāwhich the enshittified internet (a stunning feature of late-stage capitalism!) encourages. The fandom community is dying, these stories conclude.
I agree. 100%. Both of the stories above have happened to meāviral tiktoks about my fic, secret discord channels to follow and discuss my ficāand let me tell you, it fucking sucks.
But from these observations about fandom enshittification, the discussion continues in a very odd direction. The solution to the death of fandom community is our favorite enshittification buzzword: engagement. We should engage the authors. Theyāre producing these products for free. We consume them at no cost. We must demonstrate our gratitude by paying them back.
Itās as though the capitalist consumption that the enshittified web encourages is so ingrained within us that we must think in terms of payment, in terms of exchange, transaction. Or as though, by forgoing payment, authors are some kind of martyrs defying capitalism, and the only way to honor their great sacrifice is comments and kudos.
Indeed, the discourse around this sometimes does veer away from capitalist rhetoric into something that smells almost religious in desperation. Authors are gods who bestow us mere mortals with the fruits of their labor benevolently, through love; the least we can do is worship them. Meanwhile the authors adopt the groveling sentiment of starving artists: I produce great art; I only humbly ask that you feed me in return.
These kinds of entreaties make my skin crawl for a number of reasons. Iām not a god. Iām not writing because I love you. I donāt expect your worship or even your praise.
I think the thing that disturbs me the most about it is that it suggests that authors (or, if the OP is feeling generous fan work creators) are the most important people in fandom. Iāve even seen posts stating that without creators, fandom wouldnāt existāas though readers arenāt just as important. As though conversations where people discuss characterizations and plot points and randomly spin out interpretations and ideas and thoughts related to canon are meaningless. Iāve even seen people scramble to include folks having these discussions as ācreators,ā as though realizing that these people are necessary and integral to fandom communities but unable to drop the idea that the producers are the ones who are important. As though that person who just lurks can never count.
Is this what community is? When you join the queer community, are you expected to produce a product of your queerness? If not, must you actively participate and give back to the queer community in order to be considered a part of it? Or is it enough that you are queer, that you exist as a queer person and want to be around others who are queer, you want to be a part of something? What is community, anyway?
The problem with people raising the authors above everyone else in the community and demanding that tribute be paid is that they are decrying the ācontent farmā style of 2024 website out of one side of their mouth, but out of the other side are instead demanding that AO3 become a 2024-style social media website. Authors are influencers. āEngagementā and clicks are the things that really matter. They are in fact suggesting that the way to solve the commodification of fanfic is by āpaying authors backā with stats.
Before anyone comes at me with the idea that comments arenāt just āstats,ā I will clarify what I mean. There are literally hundreds of posts on tumblr alone claiming that any comment āhelpsā the author. Someone replies that they are shy to comment. Someone else replies that incoherent keyboard smashes, a single emoji, or the comment ākudosā are all that is required to satisfy the author, all that is required as tributeāall that is required as payment to keep this economy healthy.
Iām not condemning the comments that are keyboard smashes or emojis or a single kind word. I receive them. They make me happy. If anyone wants to leave such a comment on my fics, Iām really grateful for it. But this is not community-building. This is a transaction. In @yiiiiiiiikes25ās excellent response in the post linked at the beginning, they point out that āyou have a cool hatā is something that is āperfectly niceā to hear from someoneāand it is! We all want to be told we have a cool hat! But as they go on to say, what builds community is interactions that are deep and specific, interactions that are rich in quality, not in quantity. A kudos or a comment that says only ā¤ļøare lovely things to receive, but they donāt build community.
My reaction, when I see people begging for kudos and comments as the only means by which to keep fandom community alive, is very close to @eleadore's. I want to say, āNo. Readers do not need to comment or kudos. Believe not these hucksters who claim to know the appropriate method of fandom participation. Participate as you feel able, or not at all; nothing is required of you.ā
Iāve been told before (several times) that Iām not qualified to participate in such discussions because I am an established author who has some fics with very high stats. It doesnāt matter that I have also been a new writer with almost no one reading my fics. It doesnāt matter that I still write in new fandoms where no one in that fandom knows me. It doesnāt matter that I, like any human being, still care about receiving recognition and attention and praise.
And maybe thatās correct. I personally donāt think that billionaires have a place in deciding the direction of the economy, and--if we're really going to consider fandom an economy--in fandom terms, if Iām not a billionaire, or even a millionaire, Iām definitely in the infamous āone percent.ā So, just as no one wants to hear Elon Musk say āmoney isnāt everything,ā maybe itās not my place to say ākudos isnāt required, actually.ā
That said, Iām not the only one who has a problem with the stats-based discourse around fandom community. However, the main counter-response to this discussion I see goes something like this: you shouldnāt be writing fic for validation. If youāre writing for attention, youāre doing it for the wrong reason. Authors should write fic because they love it without any expectation of return.
This is, in my opinion, missing the point of what is meant by fandom community.
I wrote fanfic before I knew that fanfic, as a concept, existed. I read books; I wanted them to be different; I wrote little stories for myself with new endings, with self-inserts, with cross-overs, with alternate universes. I did it for myself in the 90s. It never occurred to me that anyone else would do this, much less that people would share.
As @faiell points outācreating and sharing are two different things. I created fics for myself, but I decided to share them in the early 2000s because other people might like them, too. And of course, I wanted to hear whether other people liked them. How could I not? I might decorate my home just for me and not for anyone elseās preferences, but when people come over and say my house is nice, how can I not enjoy that? And if a lot of people think my house is nice, which encourages me to post pictures of it online, isnāt it understandable I might do so with the hope that more people will say my house is nice? And, honestly, if no one is appreciating my pictures, I probably wonāt continue to go through the trouble of taking them and posting them. Iāll just enjoy my house that I decorated without sharing, the end.
When I found out there were whole fannish communities where people discussed canon and tossed ideas around about it, made theories and prompts and insights into the characters, fics they had written and recs for other fics and analyses of fics and art based on fics and fics based on artāI wanted to be a part of that, too. Now, sometimes, I write fic not out of an internal need to do so but out of a desire to participate in that community.
The idea that we write fic only for the love of it, then post it only because we possess it, is a process entirely centered on the self. Itās fandom in a vacuum. The idea that we share this thing, that we feel pleasure if someone likes it but feel nothing at all if no one says anything about it, that itās completely okay to be ignored and unseenāthatās not what a community is either. Thatās some weird sort of self-aggrandizement through self-effacementābecause yes, there is often a weird kind of virtue-signaling in this kind of discourse.
I say this as someone who has virtue-signaled in that way: āsome people write for stats, but I write for myself.ā Itās bullshit. Sure, I write for myself, but why post it on the internet? Honestly, said virtue has a whiff of the capitalist machine, which would like you to produce for the sake of production, work for the sake of work. The noblest among us expect no recompense for that which they give!
The reason that Iām bringing this back around to capitalism is that capitalism actively works to dismantle community. The reason that folks are out here pleading for āengagementā in order to āpay backā authors for the products they give us āfor freeā is because people no longer even have the language to discuss how to participate in meaningful community. And frankly, how to build back fandom community, in the face of enshittification, is getting harder and harder to see.
But I do think that if we value fanfic and the fanfic community, itās really, really not constructive to judge whether someoneās reasons for writing fanfic are valid. Itās also weird to me that it would be considered wrong that someoneās reason for sharing fanfic is because they would like to receive some recognition for it, when in fact that seems to be the most natural reason in the world for sharing something so private and vulnerable with the world.
Letās go back to that idea of how hurtful it is to find out your fanfic is trending on tiktok without anyone from tiktok saying anything to you about your fic, or how it can be painful to find out thereās a secret discord channel dedicated to your fic. The people who respond to that with, āAh, but you shouldnāt be writing to get attention!ā are missing the point. The fic did get attention. It got lots. Attention obviously wasn't why the writer was writing--they were writing to participate, and they didn't get to. At all.
However, if your conclusion is that the author was upset because these particular stats were not accruing under this authorās profile, thereby preventing them from achieving the vaunted status of BNF and influencerāI donāt know, maybe youāre right. But I donāt think thatās why I, personally, have been hurt by these things, and I doubt itās what hurt the people in these posts either. Theyāre hurt because they want to participate, and they have been systematically excluded by the very people they thought were part of the community they thought they could participate in.
Sure, if those folks from tiktok and the discord server all came and showered the author with kudos and comments that said ākudos,ā the author might have felt satisfied enough with the quantity of this recognition that they would continue writing. But in the end, this still does nothing to address the problem of fandom community, in which the deep, meaningful recognition, interactions, and relationships in fandom are getting harder and harder to have and to build, as a result of how people now expect to engage in online spaces.
So, how to address the problem of fandom community? You probably read this long, long post hoping that I had an answer, and for that I must apologize. I donāt have solutions. My intent was to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. I wished to outline the problems that Iām seeing in what was hopefully a slightly new or at least thought-provoking way, rather than offer solutions.
But, now that Iām talking about being prescriptive, maybe I can offer one suggestion, which isāmaybe the solution to this isnāt about prescribing behavior. I do understand the irony in writing a prescription saying we shouldnāt prescribe people, but Iām going to write it anyway:
Maybe we shouldnāt be telling anyone the appropriate reasons for writing fanfic or for sharing it. Maybe we shouldnāt be telling readers they need to kudos or need to comment. If weāre going to go pointing fingers, we should be pointing at the institutions of capitalism that have made the internet what it is todayābut I donāt think thatās going to solve the problem either.
But I do think that describing this problem, understanding what it actually is, not blaming readers for it and not blaming authors for itāI do think that helps. The discussion I linked at the beginning of this post is what I think of as the fandom I miss, the fandom that's now harder and harder to access, the fandom that is dying. That fandom was a social space where people had opinions and disagreed and went back and forth and gazed at their navels and then talked about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In the words of @yiiiiiiiikes25, it was a fuckinā discussion about hats. And weāre hungry for it.
