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feedback and fic in fandom (3 f's of our own)

This conversation about feedback on fic says everything I’ve been wanting to say better than I could say it. But I’ll 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 clicks—to make money, to be successful, for some kind of social cachet.

AO3 doesn’t have advertisements. It’s 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 wasn’t built to be a community space. It doesn’t 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-recs’s blog was about someone who wasn’t 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 discarded—which 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 me—viral tiktoks about my fic, secret discord channels to follow and discuss my fic—and 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. They’re producing these products for free. We consume them at no cost. We must demonstrate our gratitude by paying them back.

It’s 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. I’m not a god. I’m not writing because I love you. I don’t 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. I’ve even seen posts stating that without creators, fandom wouldn’t exist—as though readers aren’t 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. I’ve even seen people scramble to include folks having these discussions as “creators,” 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 “content farm” 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. “Engagement” and clicks are the things that really matter. They are in fact suggesting that the way to solve the commodification of fanfic is by “paying authors back” with stats.

Before anyone comes at me with the idea that comments aren’t just “stats,” I will clarify what I mean. There are literally hundreds of posts on tumblr alone claiming that any comment “helps” the author. Someone replies that they are shy to comment. Someone else replies that incoherent keyboard smashes, a single emoji, or the comment “kudos” are all that is required to satisfy the author, all that is required as tribute—all that is required as payment to keep this economy healthy.

I’m 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, I’m really grateful for it. But this is not community-building. This is a transaction. In @yiiiiiiiikes25’s excellent response in the post linked at the beginning, they point out that “you have a cool hat” is something that is “perfectly nice” to hear from someone—and 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 ❤️are lovely things to receive, but they don’t 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, “No. 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.”

I’ve been told before (several times) that I’m not qualified to participate in such discussions because I am an established author who has some fics with very high stats. It doesn’t matter that I have also been a new writer with almost no one reading my fics. It doesn’t matter that I still write in new fandoms where no one in that fandom knows me. It doesn’t matter that I, like any human being, still care about receiving recognition and attention and praise.

And maybe that’s correct. I personally don’t 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 I’m not a billionaire, or even a millionaire, I’m definitely in the infamous “one percent.” So, just as no one wants to hear Elon Musk say “money isn’t everything,” maybe it’s not my place to say “kudos isn’t required, actually.”

That said, I’m 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 shouldn’t be writing fic for validation. If you’re writing for attention, you’re 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 out—creating 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 else’s 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, isn’t 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 won’t continue to go through the trouble of taking them and posting them. I’ll 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 art—I 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. It’s 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 it’s completely okay to be ignored and unseen—that’s not what a community is either. That’s some weird sort of self-aggrandizement through self-effacement—because 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: “some people write for stats, but I write for myself.” It’s 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 I’m bringing this back around to capitalism is that capitalism actively works to dismantle community. The reason that folks are out here pleading for “engagement” in order to “pay back” authors for the products they give us “for free” 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, it’s really, really not constructive to judge whether someone’s reasons for writing fanfic are valid. It’s also weird to me that it would be considered wrong that someone’s 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.

Let’s 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 there’s a secret discord channel dedicated to your fic. The people who respond to that with, “Ah, but you shouldn’t be writing to get attention!” 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 author’s profile, thereby preventing them from achieving the vaunted status of BNF and influencer—I don’t know, maybe you’re right. But I don’t think that’s why I, personally, have been hurt by these things, and I doubt it’s what hurt the people in these posts either. They’re 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 “kudos,” 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 don’t have solutions. My intent was to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. I wished to outline the problems that I’m seeing in what was hopefully a slightly new or at least thought-provoking way, rather than offer solutions.

But, now that I’m talking about being prescriptive, maybe I can offer one suggestion, which is—maybe the solution to this isn’t about prescribing behavior. I do understand the irony in writing a prescription saying we shouldn’t prescribe people, but I’m going to write it anyway:

Maybe we shouldn’t be telling anyone the appropriate reasons for writing fanfic or for sharing it. Maybe we shouldn’t be telling readers they need to kudos or need to comment. If we’re going to go pointing fingers, we should be pointing at the institutions of capitalism that have made the internet what it is today—but I don’t think that’s 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 it—I 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 fuckin’ discussion about hats. And we’re hungry for it.

silentstaresfanficandfanart

Oh...*okay yeah that explains it so well thank you so much for putting this into words , as an author ive felt both really isolated by a lack of people talking to me in the comments under my fics as of late and really guilty for wanting to ask that of people when i know they may not want that-* but the thing i started writing fics for was because i wanted to be a part of a fandom and engage with it, this perfectly puts it into words why it bothers me. *ive been over here trying to decide if maybe im just like, unwell psychologically or something and i needed a therapist, like maybe i was broken if im this upset about it when i should be happy to just post regardless of what response i get* i really needed to read this post, thank you op :' ) this is a really good conversation to have and i hope reblogging it will maybe help this idea spread more so more fandom folk can read it and...maybe we can adjust how we're handling this whole comments thing.

and maybe...i can adjust how im approaching things. maybe i should ask more questions, maybe i should reach out more? hm..we'll see

wintersoldiersocks

I think the main thing is to make friends, post questions and stuff on tumblr and message people and just try and make friends. Then, you have people to talk about stuff with.

We should have fandom discussions like book clubs. When I organized a book club for a fic I love, I messaged the authors inviting them.

cesperanza

I really like this post, I think its smart and is articulating the problem the right way - and fwiw complex problems don't have easy solutions!

What the post made me think of is this: people are often surprised that as an AO3 founder and vocal advocate for transformative use, I don't have a--what is it even called, a blanket transformative works policy?--on my AO3 or anywhere else. That thing where you blanket give permission to people to podfic or translate your work or whatever. I don't have one and don't want one!--and it's not because I'm a permissions Nazi or whatever, it's because I want you to talk to me!! Tell me what you want to make, send me a copy of what you made or link it on AO3 so I can signal-boost it, let me know who you are so I can follow you and look at what else you're making or liking, because if you like my work you probably like other things that I like, can you put me onto any new writers or fandoms? I feel like, if you're moved to want to engage with my work to this extent, you at least have to talk to me, like, at least a little, because I'm in fandom to be with YOU, that's why fandom is my fandom! And IDK, that's the only way that I've resisted enshittification honestly! Fandom is a party that we're all collectively hosting, and I will bring all the hummus and make the kind of cakes I'm good at making, but you don't get to have my cake and then like, not even invite me? And that's what I think freaks people out about the comment session on discord or whatever, the idea that that's a party that the author would love to be at, NOT for the egoboost, but because those people are probably the sort of people who like what you like!

toast-the-unknowing

This post is really making me churn over some thoughts that have been stewing for, well, at least a year. Because a year ago, I found out that someone had plagiarized several of my fics.

At the time, I struggled to articulate exactly why it upset me as much as it did. In a way, it didn't matter, because I didn't need to articulate it: People were supportive. People told me, yes, girl, you get to be upset! And there were big, obvious reasons that it was upsetting, reasons that I could identify. But I felt like there was something else. I kept asking myself, "Well, why DOES it matter, really. Nothing was TAKEN AWAY FROM YOU. Your fic is still up there with all the comments it ever had." It had more comments than before, even. People who read the plagiarized versions came and said nice things to me. These were people who never read the canon, people who therefore never would have read my fic and never would have commented on it. So in purely transactional terms, in the question of the absolute number of comments I got, I actually came out ahead. In a way. So why was I upset?

Reading this post today, this bit really stood out to me:

Attention obviously wasn't why the writer was writing--they were writing to participate, and they didn't get to. At all.

I think that's the piece that I was struggling to put my finger on. I think it matters that the plagiarism happened in a period of my life when I felt even less than usual like I had a community to belong to. I reckon a lot of people are feeling that way, in this era we're calling post-covid. So it hits those people, it hit me, even harder than it might have otherwise, to feel shut out of participating in a fandom community. For some people that's maybe the last place they really felt they had any community left.

I imagine, for the folks in the secret discord rec servers, that the secret discord rec server IS their community, but that's not much help the folks outside of it. The answer obviously isn't "you shouldn't HAVE secret discord rec servers!" because the horse is out of the barn on that one, my friends, and besides, I don't want to be out here saying you have to let everyone into all of your spaces. This isn't elementary school, you don't have to bring enough for the whole class. And the idea of "well, if you HAVE to have a secret discord rec server, then you have to go leave a pro forma compliment on the fic itself"…idk, man, that's not it either. Increasing the comments that just say "I liked this!" is going to make a lot of writers smile and have a spring in their step for a bit, sure, but it's not going to do much to restore a sense of community. Saying "hi, how are you" when you bump into your neighbor is great, but if that's the only interaction you ever have with anyone in your zip code, that's not much of a neighborhood.

It's one of those twisty situations where I hate the picture as a whole and yet I don't find any individual action objectionable. Sometimes people don't leave comments, even on a fic they really loved. I'm not going to shame or berate anyone for that. Sometimes people tell their friends about things they loved. Sometimes those conversations happen in spaces that aren't visible to others, because people like to hang out with their friends in their own spaces that are free of people they don't know or don't like.

None of that is in and of itself malicious. (I bet some of the shit that gets said on some of those secret discord servers gets pretty nasty, but hey: all the more reason to be saying it somewhere I don't have to see it.) And yet when OP said they have been systematically excluded by the very people they thought were part of the community they thought they could participate in, it resonated with me, specifically about the time someone stole my fanfic and reposted it in a fandom that I didn't know existed.

What do you do about a situation where the intentions are totally different, the causes are totally different, but the end result feels so similar?

I've been thinking about communal vs individual story telling a lot lately, because I'm getting back into improv, and when you do improv people tend to ask you do you do stand-up, will you do stand-up, when will you do stand-up. I usually tell people that I don't do stand-up because it's so much fucking work. But I'm also realizing more and more that I love improv for the communal aspect, and I find the solitary nature of stand-up demotivating.

I've written screenplays and I've written novels and I've mostly written exclusively fanfic, and I think a lot of the reason for that is fanfic has that communal aspect. That's part of the fun, and that's part of the motivation. You write fanfic because "this is a gift for a friend and I know she'll love it, this is an exchange fic for someone I don't know so I went and read their whole blog and I HOPE they'll love it, this is a trope I loved when I saw someone else do it, this is a trope I fucking hated when I saw someone else do it so I'm going to do it right, this is an idea that was circulating tumblr as a three sentence plot bunny that caught my imagination and won't let it go, this is an opinion I have about this ship and I have GOT to know if anyone else sees it the same way, this is a thing I love and please won't someone love it with me…"

The communal aspect can also be part of the motivation in the sense of "fanfic is a faster and easier way of getting external validation than going through the slow and grueling process of publishing and marketing a book with no built-in audience." That's fine. If folks are hoping to get some compliments for their fanfic, they're allowed to hope for that, and telling them "you SHOULDN'T care about that, and therefore it doesn't matter if you get it or not" is unlikely to change hearts and minds, except in regard to those hearts' and minds' opinion of you specifically. It's also missing the point. If you say, "Toast, you ONLY do improv because you don't have the attention span for stand-up," you're skipping over and discrediting all the special beautiful moments that can only happen in improv. You're missing the point.

The communal nature of fanfic is a huge part of the joy of fanfic. And the fact that it is a communal act means that, as the community is drains away, it becomes harder and less fun.

I don't know what we do about the alienation that so many fans are feeling. Sometimes it sounds like all of that it's so hard to make friends as an adult discourse, where the more that you hear people say it, the worse of a problem you know it is, and yet it almost feels like the omnipresence of the complaint should itself be the solution somehow -- all of you are lonely? Go be each other's friends! Everyone in fandom feels disconnected? Go talk to someone, boom, now you have a connection!

That's obviously not how life works, and to the extent that there's structural forces at play dismantling our communities, they can't be solved by individual acts of leaving a comment, or sending an ask, or @-ing an author when you post a rec. A lot of the comments I've received on fic have been self-contained niceties, which I loved getting, but which didn't go beyond that.

But some of the comments have led me to go create more art. Some of the comments have made me feel a sense of belonging. One comment straight up gave me insight into my own psyche that I did not consciously possess before that. And some comments have led to friendships, and one of those friendship meant that this weekend, I had a silly little conversation about a silly non-fannish thing, and the 'aha, there's a fic idea in here' part of my brain lit up and I wrote four thousand words of a brand new fanfic for the first time in a year and a goddamn half.

I don't know that I have a point. Fandom has been a lot harder and less fun for me lately, because of enshittification and capitalism and social media and my mental health and the hours that I work these days and the rise in streaming and the general underwhelmingness of a sequel which failed to revitalize a fandom I had really been enjoying writing for; maybe I just needed to talk my way through all this to remember that harder and less fun is not impossible and joyless. But it is still harder and less fun, and I wanted to remember that, too. I like the grace that this post has with both readers and writers. I think that's a good place to start.

#fandom

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