December Days 2018 #20: Commenting Is A Learned Skill

[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]

Interaction between creators and their fans has always been somewhat regulated. In live media and performances, the stage (and sometimes the attendant bodyguards) are there to make sure the creator and the fans don't interact with each other in too personal a way. In recorded and telebroadcast matters, the creators and the fans might only see each other at panels, conventions, and the like, and even then, there's still the stage-audience distinction. Essentially, the creator gets to choose how much interaction they want to have with the fandom. (And the fandom gets to do the same. I suspect there are more than enough creators out there who have been shunned by the fandom for their works for awful behavior or not knowing when to leave well enough alone or other things. Death of the Author is definitely a thing in fandom.

A lot of the fans of a work or creator are content to consume and enjoy the material and not really feel like they need to say anything about it. Lurkers exist for everyone, and it's a relatively safe and anonymous way of doing your fandom. There nobody to say that your reading is wrong or against the grain or otherwise try to gatekeep you or tell you why you couldn't possibly fit their impossible definitions of Proper Fandom. (But seriously, Fuck Those Guys. Not literally.) Sometimes you end up as a lurker in a fandom because there's an outsize group that's incessantly toxic and taking up all the public space and oxygen in the discussion area. So much so that the creators make a character specifically for the purpose of making fun of those fans, and they get Patton Oswalt to voice him.

As I was saying. Lurkers exist, and for many works and creators, the lurkers would like to participate meaningfully, but they don't feel like they can create something that expresses their feelings or enjoyment or thinking that a work helped them do. This is another space where You Are Already Good Enough applies, but also the Ira Glass segment about taste and practice. The kudos system, or something similar, allows for a low-pressure interaction to signal "hey, I liked this!" There aren't any details attached, but kudos at least show a registering of a like or enjoyment.

Kudos are a bit difficult to gauge, though. Seanan McGuire's panel at GeekGirlCon this year mentioned that after the anonymity period of an exchange like Yuletide, her kudo count skyrockets on a work because now it's attached to the pseud(onym) of someone very famous. The implication was "we read and like this because Seanan wrote it, not necessarily because it's good in its own merits." (Being Seanan, though, I suspect it is good on its own merits.) I'm sure there are metrics that creators use to gauge the popularity of their work by counting interactions versus hits (which are also imprecise counts), and that the ratios are different for each one.

Bookmarking can sometimes be an indicator of something, if the bookmarks can be differentiated between "Things I want to read" and "things I recommended", as AO3 does. I suspect a lot of recommending gets done away from that platform, and so it's not easy to capture, unless you happen to be subscribed to someone doing the recommending, or one of your people is also one of their people and points you at it. So that's not as useful a thing as I thought it might be when I started.

So if lurkers never say hi, kudos can sometimes get skewed, and recommendations happen mostly out of my sight, then there's really only one form of interaction, as a creator, that I can rely on for people to tell me what they think about the work -- comments. And comments are the scariest form of interaction for a pretty significant number of fans.

Comments make it possible for a dialogue to start between creator and fans, and if it's someone that you like and want to like you, it's like trying to make a new friendship. The potential for awkward and embarrassing things is really high, there's a certain amount of worry that you're going to trip over your own words, or worse, the words are going to fly away completely, and it's entirely possible that what you say will be taken negatively, even though it wasn't meant that way, and the whole interaction will fall apart. It that you'll speak up and there will be silence from the other end. No acknowledgement, no thanks, not even a form letter in reply.

With as much potential for disaster as there is, it's a wonder there are any comments at all. Beyond that, though, there's also the part where you have to translate all the feels into something relatively coherent. There's certainly a place for "asdfghjkl FEELS OH WOW FEELS AWESOME." kinds of comments, but creators like it a lot more when you can talk about the specifics of what's giving you the feels. Because it's nice to know whether we've found the character's voice correctly, or whether the action flows very nicely, or if a particular line has all the feelings wrapped up in it. Sometimes we even try for those moments to happen, and we want to know whether it's landed correctly for the audience, or even just for the person who the work was written for. Without comment feedback, it's very hard to know what happened when someone was reading. And for commenters, that sometimes means having to learn an entirely new set of words and descriptions and use them correctly.

So, commenting is definitely a learned skill. dawnfelagund talks about what environmental and personal factors are in play when people do or don't comment, with statistics of a particular sample, for example, and acknowledges that the way we do fandom sometimes prioritizes some forms of interaction over others, and sometimes certain platforms make it easier or harder to participate in that fandom, or using a particular expression of participation. A platform that focuses on ease of kudos and reposting lowers the barrier to entry and makes it easier to build an identity without having to necessarily do a lot of writing yourself, for example.

Also, tools can sometimes help reduce the cognitive barrier. longlivefeedback recently unveiled a comment builder application, using macros and data contributed from the community to allow someone to type the things they're experiencing, or copy in particular lines and paragraphs from a work and build a comment about what makes those parts standout. The application itself intends to be a scaffold, taking care of a lot of the cognitive load of building the frame of the comment and allowing someone to then customize the internals and the finished product before posting it in. momijizukamori posted the announcement a few days ago, and it was a conveniently-timed thing, given the exodus of Tumblr users to more fan-friendly spaces, and the subsequent adjustment to a new style of interaction. I'm not sure the comment builder will help with posts on Dreamwidth, unless it's a fic post, but skills learned and scaffolded for one purpose often translate into another setting, so comment skills learned in giving feedback for fic can be put to use leaving feedback for other works, too.

You're good enough, and creators (usually) like feedback, and there's a community that's easier to build if less people are lurkers, including building one that wants to push back against toxic elements. There are tools available to help you craft and start and finish your comments. And like everything else, it will take practice before your skills are up to your taste. Please leave comments, if you want to.

The Holiday Correspondence Post

It's taken me this long to get up the energy to post it, and the desire to do it, but it did eventually come through. Not because I don't enjoy sending cards, but this particular season has apparently been rougher than a few before it.

All comments screened, contact by PM if you prefer, but I will send a holiday correspondence card out to any and all requesters. Let me know if you would like a card without imagery of the Vague Early Winter Possibly Religious Festival, or without the more secular celebration. Otherwise, you'll probably get what I have in stock or something that I find at the next feast of Saint Mark(down).

It will not likely arrive before Boxing Day. Or even necessarily before the new year, but it'll get there. If I had my holiday equilibrium beforehand, they might have, but that's on me, not you.