For me what ended up helping me be more positive about getting kudos but not comments was like hearing explanations from readers as to why they don't write comments. And while I still prefer that they did write them even if they were just "ashdfihioagdshiodsaghildsgahkl;dsg" in my inbox like...Yeah I get it? Sometimes you don't really know what to say. Or you're nervous of saying a thing. Or you're afraid of somehow insulting the author. And while I do wish they'd get over those anxieties and comment like. I can at least understand it? I guess. That and I try to think on the fact that like...People are interacting with it at all. When they very much could just not be at all. I suppose it's a small interaction but like it's an interaction at all on something as niche as f/f poemfic. It's a difference between a wordless acknowledgement that someone liked a thing and getting literally nothing. It also helps I think to have like...People who I do regularly show my writing to and who comment upon it. Like having just art friends to share things with and comment on regularly a lot help takes the edge off the bitterness some. I am still kind of bitter though, admittedly. But like able to appreciate kudos more.
I understand all that, but I still can't sympathise. It's not like leaving comments was any easier back when I still used sites without a kudos button, and yet, we just learned to fucking do it.
I sometimes feel... trite? Leaving a comment that doesn't really say anything beyond just "this was really good" and sometimes I don't have anything more specific to say. Kudos is a way for me to go "yesgood" without having to scrape my brain together enough to make Actual Words at someone to show my appreciation.
I think a part of what makes kudos so immaterial and, like, just a number, basically, is that there's no good way to review them. At least comments that just say "<3" will be a part of the chronology of comments I've gotten on a fic, at least I can pull up the whole list of everything anyone has said about my writing and scroll through it. Kudos is just this mass of Interactions:tm: Like... I'm just not sure who kudos serves as a system. There's no way for me to check which fics I've kudosed the way there is for me to check likes on other sites, or bookmarks on Ao3, and also I don't really get anything but an ever-increasing Arbitrary Number out of them.
ways i appreciate kudos as a writer: - lots of people sort by kudos so the more it has the more likely it is more ppl will see it - the kudos:hits ratio helps me figure out if a fic is liked or not & having a good one does feel nice - i have said yes pls to getting emails when i get kudos (they all arrive in one clump it's not like one email per kudos that'd be hell) & seeing the same username kudos on multiple fics honestly gives me way more of a !!! reaction than getting a <3 comment. not as much as the same person commenting on all the fics they read but still a distinctly good and nice feeling? like, that's somebody who read something i wrote and enjoyed it enough to read more of my things! holy shit! I'm not gonna say that it isn't nicer to get comments than kudos bc it definitely is, but I still very much do appreciate & get something out of kudos as well (plus sometimes with short comments that are just "i liked this!" i stress a little about whether or not I am expected to reply? Don't need to worry about that with kudos!)
To me, it's not an arbitrary number; it represents the fraction of people who viewed the fic who liked it enough to interact with it, which considering i get very few views on my fic and even fewer kudos (and like. very few comments, i can probably count the number of comments by strangers I've ever got on two hands), means quite a lot to me. Also, as someone who doesn't leave comments very often due to a variety of reasons that I'm not going to get into, if I felt like I had to leave a comment on every fic I read I would read zero (0) fic ETA: to clarify, I'm not saying you're wrong to prefer comments; I do too! I'm mostly saying that as a non-commenter I find the hostility you apparently hold to anyone who reads and doesn't comment a little personally worrying
Oh I never left any engagement on fic back before things like "like" buttons on tumblr and the kudos button on AO3 showed up. I'd silently read, silently copy-paste into a Word doc, and silently cherish fic forever because the idea of Being Seen and leaving a record of my existence was complete anathema to me when I was younger. Kudos are a low impact way for people to say "hey! neat!" and I think that's a good thing. I make an effort to comment now (sometimes) but frankly, now that I've gone and made the mistake of replying to comments on my works, kudos are such a relief. Having to come up with a dozen different ways to say "glad you liked it" is exhausting, and as nice as comments are, I have a solid enough body of work that I reliably get a kudos email every day for that little hit of serotonin. But I also had to get very used to getting No Fucking Feedback as a non-BNF artist so that helps. I get more engagement on my writing than I ever did on my art, so the grass is always greener etc.
Yeah that was another thing that helped me a lot. Was just thinking about like. How small my numbers are at all? I write in very small fandoms, I write in a niche medium, and I write almost exclusively f/f. I am writing for an incredibly niche crowd and many people are not willing to take a shot on some weird little poemfic. Like my yorusoi fics tend to get like around 3-6 kudos generally. And hover around 100-200 views. There's like a sole exception to that and that's because it's porn. I often feel like no one cares about the kind of work I make. Because poemfic has such a stigma and because the fandoms I like are small and because f/f is just not terribly popular to begin with. So like I'm still kind of a salty bitch who wants more but like. Thinking about the fact that the kudos mean people like what I write at all just kind of ended up meaning a lot when I consider that like I have essentially written myself into the nichest corner possible. I'll often go days without getting any sort of notification at all but then I get the little email and while I do kind of wish it were a comment instead it's still nice to see? Especially if it's like one of my truly bonkers ass things. Like I got them on most of my Zero/Fieth works a few days ago and was like holy shit what. Who the fuck is even reading fic for Force of Will. That's a fandom where like. I HAD to promote the fics to get what very few responses I did. And someone popped the fuck in out of the blue to give kudos to them. What the fuck. Who even are you. This mystery person I owe my life to because they brightened my day. This I think is part of what their purpose is. They do a service to people in like the smallest of the small.
To be quite blunt, I´m with Mirrors, if i had to leave comments or not read, I would not get to read fic, period. I find it very hard to make words go sometimes, especially in social situations, and fic hits that very hard. I highly appreciate a way to tell the author i liked fic without having to make words. Bc fun fact, if the kudos button didn´t exist, i would still not comment bc it does not magically fix my being bad at making words go.
I know if nothing else, kudos are useful to prospective readers; both “kudos” and “hits” are publicly visible with the fic link, and if I’m on the fence about reading something based on tags and summary, I’ll look at the kudos-to-hits ratio to see how other readers felt about it. ... Sorry if that’s not very helpful to you as a creator, though. :/ *edit* whoops, yeah, what @Erica said.
Kudos functionally are a rec. A lot of people I know when they're getting into a new fandom they'll sort fics by kudos, which means fic with more kudos overall get more hits which leads to more engagement.
Yeah, fair -- kudos is a tool that does distinctly nothing for me, but I'm not denying its utility, just complaining (in the dedicated complaining thread so yeah, goddamn I'm not gonna bother watering down my frustration, if you take that as personal hostility towards you, then that's not on me, sorry my feelings do not reflect yours). Tha creation of that utility was directly inspired by tales of "oh I just kept clicking the kudos button again without thinking about how beyond that first engagement it actually does nothing". My memory is shit enough that I don't recognize repeat usernames despite having kudos e-mails enabled, and since there's no convenient way for me to check when and what kudos I get, it goes into the shadow realm of visual noise I'm a way comments don't. It just does nothing for me, and frankly I get very annoyed at people going "it's better than nothing!" like this. Don't talk to me like your ND experience of this is somehow more valid than mine, like I haven't struggled with engagement, like I don't experience inability to engage with my brain -- why would I make an auto commenter that helps me with Exactly That if I didn't? Goddamn why is it like this *every* time I get frustrated about how every year I get less comments on my shit, and every time I ask why it is, people are like "well, I leave kudos!" Is it so unbelievable that the same system someone too shy to comment relies on gets used by others to get out of the brain work of leaving a comment b/c they just can't be bothered?
Not hostility, just pedantic brain going "Oh, let me explain the thing!" Sorry about pedantic brain. In theory it understands venting, but in practice it auto-switches to problem-solving mode.
Now this I can vibe with. I already solved the problem for myself (again, userscript) I hyperfocused on solutions for four hours last night, now is bitch about why this is a problem in the first place, time. Seriously, people who were never gonna engage without a kudos button? Who used to do no engagement in Fandom before the kudos button? I'm sorry, but I literally don't even know that you exist, and I have literally no way of returning the favour other than checking if you've written your own stuff (EDIT: WHICH US MULTIPLE HOOPS TO JUMP THROUGH FOR ME B/C THERE IS NO WAY TO LIST KUDOS IN A SINGLE PLACE). If the point you wanted to make overall is that kudos is a tool for *readers*, I agree -- and I'm frustrated to hell by being told to be happy with what I've got when what I get is demonstrably less people to talk about the thing I liked enough to write about it, and have been getting progressively less for years now.
I apologize if I've come off poorly. I'm sincerely attempting to help since I have similar feelings towards the things.
For what it's worth, yes my tone is very hostile now b/c this is a classic case of competing access needs and I'm feeling distinctly like I'm getting Anxiety Carded with the assumption that all the common struggles people relate aren't things I have to think about and that I don't struggle with.
No offense but. You came in here hostile, the people whos access needs you attacked are allowed to have a problem with being attacked. "having to think about" those needs doesn´t excuse you being a dick.
Didn't realize the question was meant to be a hypothetical! I was trying to answer "how does this serve writers" with genuine sincerity, my bad.
I was specifically reacting to your statement that you 'can't sympathise' with people who don't leave comments, which I interpreted as a direct hostile reaction to something I struggle with. I can see how so many people reacting the same way made you feel invalidated though. For that, I apologise.
Ah, shit, is this Language Being Bullshit again? Yeah, no worries, I literally meant "I do not have the emotional resources to sympathize", ie. if I'm at a point of complaining instead of solution-searching, I'm already at the end of my rope. And frankly, everything said here is already things I've heard over and over every time I express dissatisfaction with the kudos system. It's not that I don't know the reasons, it's that I just don't... Get it. I cannot relate to the experience, because my garbage brain works on a completely different principle. It didn't even occur to me there was a different way to read my complaining. My bad, nothing personal, sorry for not keeping my cool better.
