drgaellon replied to your photo “rsfcommonplace: npr: It’s hard to talk about Jewish culture...”
As an Ashkenazic Jew with roots in Russia and Poland, I look forward to the day you and I can discuss Jewish food. (A predilection for debate is also a quintessentially Jewish personality trait - see Abraham and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.)
This is what is occasionally so maddening, I’m not educated enough to argue! :D
livingflame replied to your post “Hey, so I was thinking about how I give Kudos on AO3 and I'm really...”
kudos are supposed to be a like, just as on twitter or tumblr, but for some reason people can't comprehend that and turn it into an 'i was here'. which is like, look they already knew you were here just from the hits stat. and then we're told to comment we liked it which IS WHAT THE KUDO WAS ALREADY DOING. so yeah, people are weird, and for some reason disregard what kudos were meant to be in the first place, and force everyone to comment even if all they have time for/are comfortable doing is saying 'i liked this' by kudoing
The thing is, as with fandom, just vocalizing what a thing is meant to be doesn’t mean that’s how fandom will use it, or how individuals will interpret it, and there’s no real authority because even if there was, not everyone would listen. I mean, I don’t use likes to say I liked a thing! I use them to save a thing for more thorough examination later. Likewise, I don’t think of Kudo as “I was here”, but I do think of it as “this is a statistic about liking something, not actually something that compliments the author”. Probably because I work with data points and statistics a lot at work.
I know some people who do assume a kudo means “I liked this” but also assume a kudo means “but not enough to leave a comment.” I know people who are sensitive enough to this -- and they aren’t wrong, they just have a different view than others -- that they have to reskin their AO3 so that they don’t see kudos, because they find the ratio of kudos to comments hurtful. They don’t want gushing -- they just want that extra moment of time it takes to comment as an indicator they’ve done well. Or they’d rather have nothing (some people would like “leave a kudos on this” to be something they can turn off altogether).
I’m 100% sure nobody actually intends to hurt someone when they leave a kudo but not a comment. And I don’t think leaving a kudo instead of a comment is inherently wrong! For some people kudos is as much as they can manage or are willing to offer. But that doesn’t invalidate the person who can’t deal with kudos because they’ve dealt with damnation by faint praise all their life and don’t want it in their hobby as well. That’s not people being weird or disregarding what kudos mean -- it’s just that the concept of the kudo varies by person, and in an economy like fandom, which is based on transactional praise, levels of praise can be really important.
It doesn’t mean you’re wrong either if you think a Kudo is all you need to leave, but what you’re saying is one of many viewpoints -- as valid, but not more so, than theirs. That doesn’t mean you should feel bad for not commenting! Just that I want people who want comments not to feel bad either for rejecting the kudo as praise. And I have the spoons generally speaking to comment, so I do.
voyageboots replied to your post “Sam! Beto announced his candidacy for president! Does your mum have...”
Oh man never let her find out you're a BNF
Oh trust me, I work at that. It helps that she has very rigid privacy boundaries (she had a bad experience with someone reading her diary once and then using it against her in a legal proceeding) so she doesn’t WANT to know where my social media is.
