The culture of basing the worth and quality of a fanfic off its length, popularity, and how frequent the updates are/if it’s finished is extremely damaging to fanfic authors, especially since most of you saying this read a lot of angst filled fics and don’t realise how emotionally draining that is to write. Not engaging with a fic because it’s not finished is damaging AO3 as a community. Engagement motivates the writer to keep writing it. Most of your favourite authors are teenagers or young adults in education, and have more things they should be doing than writing that fic. They do it out of genuine love for the fandom and don’t get paid. They don’t owe you shit. Stop treating AO3 like it’s an algorithmic platform, good≠popular and nothing can go “viral” on AO3, it is an archive. Hits and Kudos mean nothing about the actual quality of a fic, stop pretending like they do.
Fanfic authors owe you properly tagged fics, and nothing else. That is the only valid reason to be feel frustration at a fic author, for any other reason, you are a shitty person.
