To the authors who are unhappy about their hits-to-kudos ratio on AO3: as a kindness to yourselves, please stop. That hit counter doesn’t mean what you think it means.
First, not all those hits are people. A substantial chunk of those hits, as I understand it, are machines, looking to see what the page is. The hits-to-kudos is whack from the hour a story is posted, because a bunch of those hits are machines.
Second, multiple hits can be the same person on their first read of the story. If I open a story in a browser tab to read later, my browser sometimes/often unloads that tab in the interim, resulting in it reloading that tab and creating a new hit when I finally go to read it. If reading it requires multiple sessions, that’s multiple new hits. If I then leave it open for a while to remind myself to leave a comment, my browser will reload it again, generating another new hit, before it lets me write a comment. Altogether, my first read of a story, plus leaving a comment, can easily turn into five or more hits, depending on how hard I’m finding it to find reading and commenting time.
Third, if your story has been up for a while, the people who adore your story are driving up your hit counter with their re-reads. They go away, they come back, they re-read, and they do it again, and they do it again. It’s probably only a small subset of your total readers, but if one of your stories becomes someone’s go-to comfort read for times when they are stressed out (or, if it’s an explicit story, if it becomes their favorite jack-off material), that one person’s devoted re-reading might easily hit your story dozens of times. But most readers feel hella shy about admitting that they treat your story like a fuzzy blanket (or a vibrator); either way, it’s pretty rare for them to tell you about it. (Which I’m sympathetic to! Fuzzy blankets are a very personal thing, and no one wants to feel stared at by the author while they’re having a vulnerable moment.)
Fourth, stories get read by people outside of fandom, people who don’t think of themselves as your friends/neighbors/community-members, and who just… never think to hit kudos, at all, because their social context is so far removed from ours. I’ve got a couple of stories that were linked on TVTropes once upon a time, and their hit-to-kudos ratios are fucking absurd. If your story got linked outside of fandom somewhere, odds are that most of the people coming in from that link will never think to hit kudos, no matter how much they liked it, because they never quite connect that there’s a real live author, breathlessly hoping to be liked and appreciated, standing just behind the screen, and that maybe readers should be polite and say ‘thank you’ to them when they finish the story and leave.
tl;dr Do not assume every hit is new human reader who didn’t like your story and clicked out. Your hit counts will often be ten times greater than your kudos, just for stupid ordinary internet-traffic reasons, and the older a story becomes (and the more times bots and re-readers hit it), the wider the hits-to-kudos gulf will become. Do yourself a kindness and stop calculating that ratio – and if you can’t stop making yourself crazy about it, go into settings and turn off your hit counter displays. Please be tender to yourselves; being an author is hard enough as it is.
pixelskylines
blakekathryn
kianamaiart
