(1) Hi! I love what you all are doing here. A bit of feedback from someone who's been writing for over a decade for fandoms now: I'm not sure how I feel about the "template" idea for leaving comments. I know there's a lot of anxiety about commenting - I feel it as a reader quite often - but something about templates/pre-written comments feels very artificial, and comes off as a pseudo-kudos in a way. It's not as impactful as a personalized comment detailing something the reader liked.
(2) In a way, I’d almost rather have no comment, than one generically written that someone can just click and post. It’s just as quick, easy, and thoughtless of a task as clicking kudos and moving on. Perhaps instead, having a caption below a comment box with “tell the author 1 thing you liked!” or “what was the most impactful moment of the fic/chapter?” instead – prompts, rather than pre-written statements. Also, apologies if I misconstrued this idea/effort! Thanks for all your work!
Hi Anon! I think you are referring to the LLF Comment Builder, in which case my responses will be with that in mind, but please do let me know I misunderstood and you!
As you know, commenting can be hard, and @dawnfelagund has written an excellent piece on how commenting is a learned skill. Partially in response to that and in the feedback we’ve gotten on this blog, the comment builder was created as a way to help users learn to comment as well as lower barriers on leaving feedback for authors.
Yes, it is very much a template with a “fill in the blanks” sort of feel to it, but that is quite the point of it, I believe, since that is probably the easiest way to get people comfortable with commenting. As to whether those responses feel canned, I’m not sure. Would you (or other authors) be able to tell if you got a comment that was constructed using our comment builder? Have you gotten so many comments that are copy + pasts of the comment builder that they don’t seem like valid comments to you?
I agree with you that your suggesting about having a prompt instead of pre-written statements is a good one and seems like a next step in the instructional scaffolding scale of commenting. Neither of us (the two mods for this blog) are software engineers, so getting a caption to show up below the comment box on AO3 is probably not something that is feasible for just the both of us, currently but we are open to collaboration if this is something you or anyone else would like to see this happen.
Perhaps the first step in that is collecting prompts, which is something that we can definitely help with.
I hope this answers your questions and concerns. Thank you for sending this ask in!
