howlingmoonrise:

ilarual:

makapedia:

kind of tempted to leave a review every time i go through someone’s ff.net/ao3 and reread everything but i also dont want to freak people out with the wave of emails

Please for the love of god do this. In the last… oh, I don’t know, seven-ish years since I first discovered fandom, the culture has made a huge shift. It used to be that, whether you yourself wrote any fic or not, you reviewed every goddamn chapter of every goddamn fic that you read. Usually in detail. And plenty of people (myself included, at times) would leave a review on every chapter even if there were already twenty or thirty chapters in the fic before I ever stumbled upon it.

But we’ve moved away from that. Now, plenty of authors (particularly those who aren’t Big Name Fans) practically have to beg for reviews to get even a small amount of acknowledgement, and that’s not fair. The SE fandom is better about it than plenty of others I’ve been in, but we’re not immune either.

So if you wanna go all out and leave ALL OF THE REVIEWS… I say do it.

i’m deeply with laura here. back when i started writing fic almost a decade ago – in english, a language i didn’t know very well yet – i was lucky to be in a fandom that had the kind of culture where you reviewed everything. even shitty super-ooc fics with terrible grammar like mine were back then, and that’s what encouraged me to keep writing. 

flash-forward to a decade later, and just the other day a BNF from another fandom reposted her fic – which she had removed due to the lack of hits/feedback – that everyone loved and i keep getting told how amazing the fic is and how it’s so good that they reread it twice in the same day!! but. but. i checked just today and there are still only two people who left reviews – and one of them was me. if even a BNF can’t get people to comment how the hell are new writers supposed to be encouraged to get better? how the hell is that one writer you love that is writing an epic fic going to get the fuel they need to keep going? kudos don’t mean shit, this isn’t facebook where you get validation from the number of wordless likes. it’s like walking into a party where people trade nods when you come in but no one bothers to talk to you, and you’re left in a corner by yourself wondering why the hell you even came. it’s not hard to write “hey i really liked this, thank you for posting!” if you don’t know what to say or don’t have the energy for more, and it means so much to writers!

lack of feedback gets writers to stop. lack of feedback kills fics.

for heaven’s sake, if y’all like a fic, let the writer know.