Hi! You made another (absolutely fascinating) post about commenting trends in fandom over time, and that got me thinking about another thing I’m curious about: differences in comment culture across fandoms. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed several fandoms (the Silmarillion and The Murderbot Diaries come to mind) that seem to get proportionally more / more detailed comments than other fandoms I’ve been in. I have no idea if this is backed up by evidence or if it’s possible to analyze that kind of thing with actual data, but I think it’s interesting!

Hey! Sorry this took ages to respond to -- I believe you were probably referring to this post or the original of that thread, if you or anyone else wants a refresher on the context. :)

That's really interesting, and matches with my own anecdotal experience when I've observed when I've dipped my toes into fandoms that were smaller but had at least a handful of people posting. I would bet that communities are more likely to form in smaller groups -- you keep recognizing and interacting with a smaller group of people, and you feel more motivated to be thoughtful about their fanworks. Which I suspect then encourages even folks outside the tight-knit core community to leave longer comments.

But I have no relevant data yet -- that's all anecdotal/speculation on my part. I hope to get back to working on my ao3 comments soon and to keep looking at comment trends over time, though. And you've helped inspire me to think about analyzing comment length and to compare different fandoms, as part of that! :)

I'd also love to hear if anyone else has relevant data, or feel free to share your relevant experiences and/or hypotheses!

hi! research question I'd love your input on:

do you know how to generate size-of-fandom stats? I'm researching the Ghost fandom and while I know from the This Week in Tumblr posts about what their size is *now,* I'd like to try to compare it to past years, and be able to make statements like "x% of the fandom is reblogging explicit content."

I'm also looking for deeper info on how tumblr works if someone deactivates - do their notes vanish too?

It sounds like you want to gather Tumblr information only -- is that right? I don't have a lot of expertise with Tumblr data (I think I last gathered some over a decade ago), but it looks like their API still lets you retrieve posts with a certain tag and specify a timestamp, if you're willing to do a bit of programming. So you could, e.g., retrieve the last N posts of each month that use a particular fandom tag. And then you can compare those samples of posts to see how the content has changed over time. If you want to do that, there are libraries in Python and probably other languages that can make it easier to work with the Tumblr API.

I believe the posts retrieved this way don't include reblogs, so you'd also have to look at the post notes to get info about how many reblogs different types of posts are getting. As to your question of deactivated accounts within those notes, I'm not certain of the answer. I frequently see reblog chains where some accounts in the chain have deactivated, so those notes are not entirely gone. But I don't know if the replies/likes from deactivated accounts disappear from post notes. Anyone else know?

Hello! I saw that you had done an AO3 language analysis back in 2020, when Chinese fandom began its boom. I'd like to ask, is there a way to filter for fics on AO3 by language alone? If I wanted to see the entire Archive's catalogue of fics in Spanish, is that something I can do? Or is it something more for people "behind the scenes", so to speak? Or would I have to filter for Spanish in every fandom tag?

Yes! The Work Search page will let you filter by language, and optionally limit the results to a particular fandom (or a particular ship, or other tag/combo of tags):

(If you want to include only a specific fandom, keep scrolling down to the Work Tags section, and enter the fandom tag you want. And if you scroll down further, you can also sort the results by kudos, hits, word count, etc.)

Right now, there are about 186K Spanish works on AO3:

Hope that helps! :)

Hello! I keep hearing that fandom culture has changed, and there are less comments now than there were years ago. Have you noticed this in your analysis? Is the percentage of comments being left today lower than before?

Hey! Thanks for the question -- it prompted me to start collecting data about comments (after procrastinating on it for a while, because I had to write new code to gather comment data). I've also seen other discussions from folks also thinking about how to do this kind of analysis (like in the fandom data projects community) -- hopefully we'll end up with multiple people attacking this from different angles and getting a variety of data about comments!

I'll give a sneak preview that partially addresses your question and contains some good news. If we look at the fraction of AO3 works that get at least one comment (focusing just on one-shots for now), I think things have gotten better over the past decade on AO3*:

In other words, it tentatively looks like more works were getting at least one comment in 2024 than in 2014 (for a variety of time periods). One caveat, though -- if a bunch of works with no comments got deleted in the interim, there will be survivor bias here. I'll try to look into that possibility later. Another caveat: this is based on only like ~100 randomly selected works from each year -- this may all change with more data!

Another interesting tidbit: I still see some of the 2014 works getting comments. In fact, ~30% of works have gotten new comments over 5 years after they were posted, and it looks like ~10% of one-shots posted back in Mar 2014 got a new comment in 10 years later, in 2024.

I'm still doing other analyses; there may be other factors that better match with the discourse around how comment culture has changed. It could be that comment activity peters out faster now than it did back then, for instance. Or the total number of comments left on the popular works is less now than it was back then (though my current methods may not be able to capture that). Edit thanks to quick eagle-eyed readers: it's likely that some of what people are thinking about is ratio of comments to hits -- that is hard to compare in 2014 to 2024, because we don't know which hits came from which years. But I am working on some analyses along those lines. :)

If you have other hypotheses about what's changed in commenting culture, feel free to share! I'll look into what I can.

Some methodology notes:

*I've been tackling this by comparing AO3 one-shots posted in early 2014 to one-shots posted in 2024, and comparing activity in the days/weeks/months immediately after the works were posted. (To start with, I'm only scraping the first page of comments for each work -- meaning the first 20 comment threads -- so there are lots of comments I'm potentially missing for the really popular works. But for many works, this captures all the comments, and I think it may be sufficient for a lot of the analyses I am interested in.)

I'm choosing to focus on 2014 vs. 2024 because 2024 is close to now (but it's been long enough for comments to have settled down a bit), and 2014 was well after AO3 was established (thus it was already a pretty lively time on AO3). I don't want to collect data about every single year because it's too time intensive/too hard on AO3's servers. But if people think that I should be looking at different years, I'm interested in feedback.

Because it's only been ~10 months since March 2024, I am limiting a lot of my analyses to only look at commenting activity the first ~10 months after works were posted in both cases.

Hello! I keep hearing that fandom culture has changed, and there are less comments now than there were years ago. Have you noticed this in your analysis? Is the percentage of comments being left today lower than before?

Hey! Thanks for the question -- it prompted me to start collecting data about comments (after procrastinating on it for a while, because I had to write new code to gather comment data). I've also seen other discussions from folks also thinking about how to do this kind of analysis (like in the fandom data projects community) -- hopefully we'll end up with multiple people attacking this from different angles and getting a variety of data about comments!

I'll give a sneak preview that partially addresses your question and contains some good news. If we look at the fraction of AO3 works that get at least one comment (focusing just on one-shots for now), I think things have gotten better over the past decade on AO3*:

In other words, it tentatively looks like more works were getting at least one comment in 2024 than in 2014 (for a variety of time periods). One caveat, though -- if a bunch of works with no comments got deleted in the interim, there will be survivor bias here. I'll try to look into that possibility later. Another caveat: this is based on only like ~100 randomly selected works from each year -- this may all change with more data!

Another interesting tidbit: I still see some of the 2014 works getting comments. In fact, ~30% of works have gotten new comments over 5 years after they were posted, and it looks like ~10% of one-shots posted back in Mar 2014 got a new comment in 10 years later, in 2024.

I'm still doing other analyses; there may be other factors that better match with the discourse around how comment culture has changed. It could be that comment activity peters out faster now than it did back then, for instance. Or the total number of comments left on the popular works is less now than it was back then (though my current methods may not be able to capture that). Edit thanks to quick eagle-eyed readers: it's likely that some of what people are thinking about is ratio of comments to hits -- that is hard to compare in 2014 to 2024, because we don't know which hits came from which years. But I am working on some analyses along those lines. :)

If you have other hypotheses about what's changed in commenting culture, feel free to share! I'll look into what I can.

Some methodology notes:

*I've been tackling this by comparing AO3 one-shots posted in early 2014 to one-shots posted in 2024, and comparing activity in the days/weeks/months immediately after the works were posted. (To start with, I'm only scraping the first page of comments for each work -- meaning the first 20 comment threads -- so there are lots of comments I'm potentially missing for the really popular works. But for many works, this captures all the comments, and I think it may be sufficient for a lot of the analyses I am interested in.)

I'm choosing to focus on 2014 vs. 2024 because 2024 is close to now (but it's been long enough for comments to have settled down a bit), and 2014 was well after AO3 was established (thus it was already a pretty lively time on AO3). I don't want to collect data about every single year because it's too time intensive/too hard on AO3's servers. But if people think that I should be looking at different years, I'm interested in feedback.

Because it's only been ~10 months since March 2024, I am limiting a lot of my analyses to only look at commenting activity the first ~10 months after works were posted in both cases.

Okay - reading your stats about Goncharov (and LOVING it) and can't help but wonder if you've done any stats regarding Steve Kornacki fic, because I remember a rise in stories during the LAST major election and am curious if he gets a boost every four years. ;-) (Especially now that Chuck Tingle has written a story about it.)

Hey! So glad you enjoyed the Goncharov stats -- I've been pleasantly surprised by how enthusiastic so many folks still are about stats related to the film. :D

Ha -- I had missed the fact that Chuck Tingle wrote about Steve Speve in SPEVE KORNACKI POUNDED ENTHUSIASTICALLY BY HIS HANDSOME ELECTION MAP! XD But there has been no recent surge in Kornacki works on AO3.

There are 27 works on AO3 that use the Steve Kornacki tag, and the most recent one (a Loki/West Wing/Newsroom crossover which includes the extreme rarepair Jed Bartlet/Loki) was last updated in Sept 2021.

There are 35 AO3 works that mention Steve Kornacki, but they're all from 2021 or earlier except for one OFMD AU work that was posted in 2024 (it takes place during the 2020 election, and it only mentions Steve in the author's note).

Hi,

I'm new here, but your Halloween fic stats just crossed my dash a couple of times. I have some insight as to why Fall Out Boy and MCR are top of the list. Members of both bands have expressed a love of Halloween/scary movies etc. They've both played Halloween shows over the years and dressed up on stage. One of MCR's members even has a Halloween birthday.

So I think the fans latched on to that and it shows in the fics they write.

It looks like you put a lot of work into these posts so I'm off to check out some of your other stats.

Ooh, thanks for sharing! Halloween shows in costume sound like such fun. And I can see how all the things you mention could easily inspire a lot of Halloween fanworks!