Unpopular Opinion but I think AO3 should try going a year with all Comments and Kudos disabled, if that's what it takes to teach this generation of writers that (fandom) writing shouldn't be able Making Number Go Up
And then you’d have no more writers.
Because nobody likes screaming into a void.
What an assholish thing to suggest.
The writers who are supposedly obsessed with having "number go up", btw, are almost invariably people with a median of zero comments on their fic.
Nobody bathing in feedback because they write popular fics for a juggernaut fandom talks that way.
Writing, scratch that, telling stories, is an attempt to communicate, to connect with our fellow human beings. It's a fundemental need, to connect, to be heard, to not only have a story, but to tell it to others. And writing a story out is hard fucking work. It's draining. It is psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually hard fucking work. And in the end, we post our stories so that they will be heard, so that other people will read them, so that the connection will be made. Posting a story is reaching your hand out into the dark, hoping someone will take it.
Getting a kudo, or even better, a comment, tells a writer they've been seen. Someone has heard their story, and liked it, liked it enough to respond, to reach out from the dark and take their hand. And when that doesn't happen, when your fic you worked hard on gets nothing, it hurts. It hurts really bad. Acting like people are selfish or entitled because they tried to make a connection, and they worked really really hard to do it, and nobody reached back, just means you have no idea what's really going on. No one's entitled to a connection with you, but you're not entitled to people continuing to reach out to you if you keep slapping their hands back.
Fanfic writers aren't trying to be influencers. We aren't obsessed with the line going up, or numerics, or whatever it is people who make their living vying for our attention need to be obsessed with. We are people telling stories who just want to know that somebody heard it and enjoyed it.
Anon, in an extremely snotty and annoying voice: "i think writers should continue doing all of this unpaid labor and give me free artistic works to revel in but i think they should be explicitly punished for making me feel kind of shitty about the fact that i do nothing in fandom to make the creating of all this art worthwhile hurr durr i am very intelligent"
I have little to add to this argument that others have not already said, except to express my own sense of "OMFG" at the audacity of /anyone/ suggesting such a thing, and in knowing that sadly, there are many people, (too many), out there consuming writers' and artists' and other creators' works essentially 'for free' and espousing their entitlement to do so.
If you have taken the time to give kudos or to comment on something our talented fic writers and other creators have made... THANK YOU.
