A quick summary: 

• Commenting is a learned skill
  • Many people avoid commenting not because they didn’t want to comment, but because they didn’t know how to comment. 
• Commenting is also a matter of confidence
  • Even among readers who are authors themselves, many aren’t sure what to say or how their comment will be received. 
• A sense of community encourages commenting
  • People who feel more connected to the community, perhaps because of personal friendships and a sense of community built through other platforms and forms of communication, seem to have a greater desire to comment. After all, one feels less pressure when writing to a friend than an author to whom one feels little or no connection. 

Why People Don’t Comment

The other day, in response to @longlivefeedback‘s initial post about increasing feedback on AO3, I reblogged the post and shared some of my own data and research around the topic. I am a Tolkien fandom historian and own the archive the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild. In 2015, as part of my research, I conducted a survey of Tolkien fanfiction readers and writers. The survey was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the university where I was a grad student at the time, and was administered using Google Forms. There were 1,052 total participants; 642 of them were authors, and 1,047 were readers. As I came out of the survey overwhelmed with data and unsure where to begin, a key area of interest among my fandom friends was commenting, so I have recently been looking closely at the survey items related to commenting, which brought me to @longlivefeedback’s post.

In addition, I am an archive owner myself, contemplating a major software change in the next year or so. Like probably every archive owner ever, I’d like to increase the amount of commenting and interaction that happens on my site. Therefore, I had been considering many of the same questions as @longlivefeedback about AO3 but on a smaller scale for my own archive. They asked me to share some of my research and conclusions from the past several months of crunching data and discussing what it means with other members of the Tolkienfic community.

Commenting as a Learned Skill

Participants in my survey valued commenting. 78% agreed* with the statement, “I think it’s important for readers to leave comments and other feedback on the stories they read.” Interestingly, 78% also agreed with the statement, “I want to leave comments and other feedback more often on the stories I read.”

*When I say a participant agreed with a statement, I mean that they chose either the option Agree or Strongly Agree on the survey. When I say a participant disagreed, they chose either Disagree or Strongly Disagree.

So readers want to leave comments and want to do it more often. What’s stopping them??

The survey included two items about perceived barriers to commenting. Having discussed commenting in great depth and with many people as I’ve released my data over the past few months, I know that there are many reasons beyond these two, but one in particular caught my attention, both because the data were surprising to me and also because they suggested action that, as an archive owner, I could take.

78% of participants (again!) agreed with the statement, “I sometimes want to leave a comment but am not sure what to say.” Among those participants who agreed that they wanted to leave comments more often, the number who also agreed that they struggled to know what to say jumps to 86%. This number is hard to ignore. It suggests that there is a multitude of readers out there, wanting to speak with authors but running into a skill barrier: They simply don’t know how to distill the welter of emotions one feels after reading a great piece of fiction into the black-and-white words needed to express the enormity of those feelings to the author in a way that does them justice.

These data really triggered a change in thinking for me. To this point, I had discussed commenting with the intention of goading readers into doing something I assume they could do but just weren’t. I had never stepped long enough out of my own point of view to consider what commenting required of many of those readers. I have an MA in humanities, have worked professionally as a writer and editor, and now teach humanities; I have been critiquing and discussing fiction and literature daily since I was an undergrad. I assumed that kind of thinking and writing was as second-nature for everyone as it was for me; with these data in hand, it seems foolish that I never considered that it wasn’t, that the skills I brought to the process were just that: skills that had to be learned.

In my non-fannish life, I am a middle-grades humanities teacher, so I teach literacy and writing through the lens of history, cultural studies, and the social sciences. As an educator, I understand that each form of writing has to be taught, and my data have caused me to believe this about comment writing as well. It is a unique form of writing and one that even people who are highly competent in other forms of writing (such as technical writing or even fiction writing) might find challenging, especially given that comment-writing is performed in public and often directed at a writer whom one admires.

In education, we use the term “scaffolding” to describe how to teach a complex skill, like a challenging form of writing. Scaffolding begins with a lot of supports and entails the gradual release of responsibility until independence is achieved. Obviously, fandom is not a classroom, but ideas like comment templates, comment starters, and checklists fit the scaffolding model and could help draw out that 86% of readers who want to say more but often stare at that comment form and just don’t know how.

Commenting and Confidence

Another survey item asked participants to respond to the statement: “I sometimes want to leave a comment but think that my comment might not mean much to the writer.” 55% of participants agreed with this statement, which again surprised me because authors have been pitching a fit and begging and pleading for comments as long as I’ve been in the fandom.

I was also interested in a particular group of participants: fanfiction authors who do not leave comments. 13.5% of authors in the survey stated that they did not leave comments. This seemed counterintuitive to me: As an author, who knows firsthand how much a comment can inspire and encourage one’s writing, wouldn’t authors want to help other authors in this way? And presumably as the recipient of comments, wouldn’t one feel the pull of reciprocity to also respond to another author’s work? And many of the reasons I was hearing about why people don’t comment–they’re not writers themselves, they’re not comfortable writing in English, they don’t have access to technology where they can write at length with ease–clearly don’t apply to this group either. So why aren’t they commenting?

Once I began to look closer at this group, I detected a theme: confidence.This is where the 55% who want to say something but don’t because they think the author won’t care also come in.

Demographically, authors who don’t comment are very similar to authors overall who participated in the study. They are a median 23 years old; authors as a whole are a median age of 24 years. They have a median three years of experience writing Tolkien-based fanfic, compared to four years for authors as a whole. Where they differ is the rates at which they publish their fanfiction. Only 12% of authors had written but not published at least one Tolkienfic. Among non-commenting authors, that total more than doubles to 28%. 57% of authors had published the majority (81% or more) of what they wrote. For non-commenting authors, this number drops to 40.5%.

The survey also included an item stating, “Writing fan fiction has helped me to become a more confident writer.” 91% of authors overall agreed with this item. Among non-commenting authors, the number drops to 84%.

The 3Cs: Community, Connection, and Commenting

There is more to the picture of non-commenting authors, though. These authors, in general, feel less of a connection with the Tolkienfic community than do authors as a whole.

• 85% of all authors agreed with the statement, “Comments from and interactions with other fans encourage me to write fan fiction.” Less than 5% disagreed. But for authors who do not leave comments, comments and interactions offer far less encouragement: only 66% agreed, and 12% disagreed.
• 78% of participants agreed with the statement, “I think it’s important for readers to leave comments and other feedback on the stories they read.” Only 60% of non-commenting authors agreed with this same statement, however, and again, twice as many (8%) disagreed with the statement as among participants as a whole (4%).
• 92% of authors agreed with the statement, “Commenting on stories is a way to give something back to the authors.” Among non-commenting authors, however, only 79% agreed.
• 76% of authors agreed with the statement, “Writing fan fiction has helped me to make new friends.” Only 58% of noncommenting authors agreed.
• 48% of all participants agreed with the statement, “Commenting on stories I’ve read has allowed me to make new friends.” Among authors who leave comments, that number is much higher: 69% agreed. Among non-commenting authors, however, that number plummets to 18% (perhaps not surprisingly, since some may have never left a comment at all).

Taken together, these data suggest that non-commenting authors don’t feel as deep of a community connection as Tolkienfic authors and community members in general. As noted above, 78% of participants want to leave comments more often on what they read. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the above, for non-commenting authors, that number drops to 63%. This suggests that, in addition to confidence, a community connection fosters a desire to comment.

A Case Study in the 3Cs, or Tolkienfic Community History and Commenting

The Tolkienfic community provides an interesting case study for commenting since it has had steady–often high–levels of fanfiction activity since 2002. Tolkien fanfiction itself is even more venerable, with the first documented fanwork written in 1958. Online fannish activity began in 1991. (See this timeline on Fanlore for a detailed breakdown of the history of Tolkien fandom.) As the graph below shows, even fifteen years later, the bump in fandom entry when the Lord of the Rings trilogy first entered theaters still shows. While activity dropped between the film trilogies, the Tolkienfic community has nonetheless remained active since its inception.

This means that we can look at commenting across that time. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily cut-and-dried: The fandom has changed in major ways in the fifteen years since the first rush of fans excited by the LotR films started entering the fanfiction community, and those changes make an apples-to-apples comparison difficult or impossible. But putting together the various data to which we have access, a picture of how commenting has changed over time emerges.

The Tolkienfic community gained its foothold on email lists–eventually, this came to be dominated by Yahoo! Groups–and LiveJournal. In addition, the Tolkienfic community opened fiction archives at a high rate. Fanlore lists sixty-one of them. The first archive, the Least Expected slash archive, opened in 2001, and 2002-2003 saw a rush of archives appear online, covering ground from the highly specialized, focusing on a single group of characters or pairing, to the general. These general archives were widely used by Tolkienfic writers for sharing fanfiction. They also included a social component, and all of the major general archives from this time either included an associated Yahoo! Group and/or LiveJournal community for discussion or included a discussion forum within the site itself. Use of FanFiction.net also remained high during this time period.

When the LotR film trilogy concluded, activity diminished but did not stop–far from it. Several new archives opened between 2004 and 2011 and activity remained high on Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal, until poor administrative decisions from the owners of those platforms began to drive fans away. While activity slowed on FanFiction.net, it did not die. The Tolkienfic community, however, tended to remain isolated from the rest of fandom, which included adopting new technology at a lower rate than fandom in general.

The release of the Hobbit trilogy and another large influx of new fans forced the community’s hand in many ways. Widespread use of Tumblr by Tolkien fans began in 2012, as near as I can tell, and activity shifted also onto AO3 and away from the large Tolkien-specific archives. While some of the smaller archives began to close in the lull between film trilogies, the arrival of the Hobbitfilms began to impact the larger archives as well. Of the major archives opened during the LotR film trilogy years, all have either closed, opened to multifandom stories, or activity has dropped to almost nothing. Those archives that do remain active are those that were founded between the trilogies. Several LiveJournal communities remain active, and others have moved to Dreamwidth; with the exception of those communities and the few remaining archives, however, Tolkienfic community activity resembles that of any other fandom: largely concentrated on Tumblr and AO3.

As an archive owner and fandom historian, I have been hearing from community members for some time now that comments have been decreasing in the Tolkienfic community. This certainly seems to be the case for me: As a relative unknown in 2006, having only started publishing Tolkienfic six months prior, I received far more feedback on my work than I do now as an archive owner, well-known author, and published scholar in my fandom. And activity is higher than ever in the Silmarillion community of which I’m part. (I compare my 2006 and current comment data here.)

Because Tolkien fanfiction was posted across such a wide array of sites–and many of those sites are now gone or do not make data collection easy–documenting the drop in commenting is challenging. The one site that has remained consistently active in the Tolkienfic community is FanFiction.net (FFN). The first Tolkienfic was posted there in 2000, and it has remained a site popular with Tolkienfic writers. I decided to use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to look at comment data for past years.

Unfortunately, FFN does not make click/hit data public. Also, because they use a paginated format with twenty-five stories per page–and the Wayback Machine often does not archive beyond the first page–it is again difficult to compare apples to apples. I settled on using two methodologies to try to overcome this obstacle.

Methodology 1 was my preferred methodology. I located the first story posted two weeks after the archive date. I then looked at the review counts for that story and the next nine stories posted earlier. (I did this since recently posted stories often don’t have a lot of comments for the simple reason that people haven’t had the chance to read and comment on them.) I looked only at one-chapter stories.

If I could not access enough stories to follow Methodology 1, then I used Methodology 2 and looked at the comment counts for the ten oldest one-chapter stories on the page.

I looked at the Silmarillion section, which is less likely to show impacts based on the films alone. I included only English-language stories. All averages are median.

While the data are very limited, they mostly show a steady decline in commenting, aside from a slight uptick among the most recent set. (Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine doesn’t have the Silmarillion section archived between 2004 and 2009, or between 2009 and 2013.) In essence, it confirms what authors who have been around for all–or most–of these years have been saying: that commenting in the Tolkienfic community is on the decline.

(Nor do I believe it is a change in activity in FanFiction.net that is causing the drop. The Silmarillion section has remained fairly active; on 29 November 2004 and today, 31 December 2017, a median of two stories were posted per day, looking at the first page of stories. In 2009, on the other hand, less than one story was being posted to the Silmarillion section per day without a drop in commenting.)

So what caused the drop in commenting? Note that in 2003, at the height of fanfiction activity during the LotR films, commenting was at its highest, despite a much smaller Silmarillion fandom.  When The Hobbit films were released in 2012, shouldn’t this have also spurred more commenting? It certainly seems to have spurred more activity on the FFN Silmarillion section in general, as well as in the Silmarillion fandom in general. So what happened?

In addition to 2012 as the year The Hobbit hit theaters, 2012 was also the year that the Tolkien fandom widely adopted Tumblr. As discussed above, before Tumblr, most Tolkienfic activity occurred on Tolkien-specific archives and discussion groups that were located on those sites, on LiveJournal, and on Yahoo! Groups. All of these provided a very different setting than Tumblr: smaller and more intimate. One interacted with fewer people but knew those people more closely than tends to be the case now. As part of a fandom history paper I’m currently writing, I looked at some of the discussions that were happening on my site’s Yahoo! Group in 2007, between the film trilogies. I was surprised, looking back, at how personal these discussions often felt. People shared and commiserated about their lives, cheered each other on, teased each other, celebrated together, and asked questions that showed personal knowledge of each others’ lives and writing. It was obvious that they both knew and cared about each other.

I do not mean to imply that deep friendships cannot be formed on Tumblr or that people cannot connect with others on that platform. But in the Tolkienfic community, Tumblr has changed how we talk to each other in major ways, and I do believe that it has had a collateral impact on commenting. The data in the section above show that people who comment feel stronger social connections with the fanfiction community. If those deeper connections atrophy, it is not unreasonable to assume that people will feel less comfortable and compelled to comment. Returning to the idea of commenting as a skill–and a skill that requires a measure of confidence in oneself–I believe that social media used in the Tolkienfic community before Tumblr lowered the barrier in these regards somewhat. After all, one feels less pressure when writing to a friend than an author to whom one feels little or no connection.

Nor do I mean to disparage Tumblr unequivocally. Tumblr has benefited fandom, and the Tolkienfic community specifically, in many ways. Fanworks other than fiction and meta now reach a wider audience. The isolationism and partisanship that once plagued the Tolkienfic community has receded a lot. But I also can’t deny that the shift onto Tumblr–and for everything, even content for which Tumblr is ill-suited, such as discussions–has also taken an important element from our community and how we used to interact with each other.

As I’ve been pondering how to raise comment levels on my own archive, I keep coming back to the notion of commenting as a skill, yes, but maybe even more importantly than that, to the idea that commenting is a natural outgrowth of community and connection, and without them, increasing comment counts will be an uphill climb–and a destination we may never reach in a satisfactory way. For a small archive like mine, adding features that allow people to reach out more easily and comfortably to each other is a relatively small task. For a large archive like AO3, it becomes a much heavier lift, making me wonder if the answer doesn’t partly lie in the older archive-discussion group dichotomy.