"Review Plz? Feedback Behavior in the Tolkien Fanfic Community" by Dawn Felagund

[dawn_felagund]

B2MeM Prompt and Path: Meta on Fandom and Multimedia (orange/nonfiction path)
Format: essay
Genre: nonfiction/meta
Rating: General
Warnings: n/a
Characters: n/a
Pairings: n/a
Summary: A look at Tolkien Fan Fiction Survey data on who leaves feedback and how often, and how many readers wish they did more.

Review Plz? Feedback Behavior in the Tolkien Fanfic Community

A little over a year ago, I ran an online survey about Tolkien fan fiction as part of my ongoing research on the history and culture of the Tolkien fan fiction community. (Read more about the Tolkien Fan Fiction survey here.) I have been slowly posting the results of the survey over the last year or so. For the orange/nonfiction path prompt "Meta on Fandom," I decided to dig into a topic from the survey based on what other B2MeM participants would like to know more about. People who answer my poll wanted to know more about, "How many readers comment or give feedback on stories? Why do they do this?" I will eventually investigate the other topics as well, most likely over the summer while I'm on break from school.

This essay seeks to answer some basic questions on feedback behavior in the Tolkien fanfic community. Who leaves feedback? How often? I will also begin to look at why people leave feedback, specifically at social pressure to do so. This will be the first post in a series looking at feedback behavior; the series will in all likelihood extent beyond B2MeM; follow heretic_lore, my Twitter, or the Tumblr tag #tolkien fan fiction survey for updates related to the survey.

Probably the first question to answer when thinking about commenting is: How often do people comment? I asked the question, "Do you leave comments or other feedback on Tolkien-based fan fiction stories?" Of the 1040 people who answered that question, 75.9% of them said YES.

Now it's important to note the "or other feedback" in the statement. This didn't ask just about comments or reviews; it could have included one-click feedback like kudos or likes as well. If I could go back and do this survey over, I'd likely change this question to distinguish between the two. For now, though, it's what I have to work with.

Who Leaves Feedback?

When we break down this question by the participant's role, the results become more interesting. I looked at the responses of writers versus readers only to this question. Writers were far, far more likely to leave feedback on what they read: 86.5% of writers (n = 635) answered YES compared to 59.3% of readers-only (n = 393). My initial reaction to this information is, "Well, of course, writers would best understand how much feedback matters to other writers." I think that's part of it, but there are probably other factors involved as well.

• Writers are more likely to belong to the sites where they read. Many sites (SWG and MPTT, for example) do not allow comments from anonymous users.


• Writers are more likely to be comfortable enough with English (or the language the story is written in) to be able to write a comment. I can read tolerably in Spanish, for example, but would never dare attempt to comment on something written in Spanish.


• Writers are more likely to simply know what to say in a comment. They know what they like to hear on their own stories. They know what goes into crafting a story and are possibly more accustomed to noticing a characterization detail or a particularly good turn of phrase: the kind of thing you'd mention in a comment.

Interestingly, 13.5% of writers responded that they did not leave feedback on stories that they read. I find this group intensely interesting, and a future post will look specifically at this group of participants.

How Often Do Readers Leave Feedback?

Of course, a participant could have left a single comment or liked one story posted on Tumblr and answered YES to the above. Any author can tell you that three-fourths of their readers do not leave feedback on a specific story; many of my stories, based on click counts, would have hundreds of comments, and it is rare for me to exceed ten comments, and I receive more comments than most authors. (The highest percentage of kudos-per-click on my AO3 stories is about 19%.) So what percentage of stories do readers leave comments on?

I asked participants to "Estimate the percentage of Tolkien-based fan fiction stories that you leave comments or other feedback on." Those who responded with a number greater than zero left comments on a median average of 30% of stories.

Breaking down the data a little further also shows that readers willing to leave feedback tend to leave it relatively infrequently. More than half of participants (54.7%) left feedback on one out of three stories, or less. The graph below shows the number of participants who left different amounts of feedback. The numbers drop steadily until spiking briefly around 50%--likely because someone is more likely to respond with 50% rather than dithering slightly to either side of that number; after the 50% mark, the numbers hang rather steadily. There is a small resurgence among the participants that, in my mind as I worked on these numbers, I termed "unicorns": those who left feedback on almost everything they read.



It's important to note that these numbers are likely slightly inflated. Even in anonymous surveys, like this one, there is a tendency to overstate positive behaviors, like one's habit of leaving feedback on the fiction one reads for free. To support this point in this particular survey, several participants left brief comments on their answers, suggesting that they'd recently increased their feedback due to growing awareness of its value to authors or that they felt they needed to do more; some participants offered excuses (such as English as a second language) or responded to a perceived low number with self-effacing humor (like a :P emoticon). In addition, numbers were potentially inflated because one is more likely to remember the stories one takes time to leave feedback on, especially comments. A ficlet skimmed quickly on Tumblr, for instance, is more likely to be forgotten than the same ficlet on AO3 where the reader leaves a one-sentence comment or even clicks a kudos; especially the comment requires more careful reading.

Looking at actual feedback numbers supports that 30% is likely inflated. I chose ten stories on AO3 from the section "The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-earth -- J.R.R. Tolkien." The stories had been posted just over a week ago and were on the sixth page of results, so they had likely received the first heavy wave of readership. Since most AO3 readers who leave comments, in my experience, also leave a kudos (and since comment counts on AO3 also include author replies and further conversation on a story), then I looked just at kudos. For those ten stories, the kudos-per-click percentage was a median average of 9.2%, spanning a range of 1.7% to 26.2%: nowhere near the self-reported 30% rate from the survey.

Do Readers Want to Leave More Feedback?

As implied above, there is a degree of social pressure to leave feedback on stories. I was curious if readers felt they needed to do this more, or if they were happy with the current amount of feedback they left, so I looked at responses to the statement "I want to leave comments and other feedback more often on the stories I read." Participants had five options to choose from: Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, and No Opinion/Not Sure.

Overwhelmingly, participants wanted to leave more feedback: 77.6% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement. In other words, three out of four readers think they need to leave more feedback. Fewer than one in ten (8.89%) disagreed or strongly disagreed. Of the latter category, a mere eight participants chose this option.



I looked closer at that group: participants who strongly disagreed that they wanted to leave feedback more often. Of those eight participants, three were part of the unicorn group that left feedback on almost everything they read; it's understandable why they felt they didn't need to do more! One participant left feedback a reported 70% of the time--still a relatively high number--so about half responded with Strongly Disagree because they really can't do much more than they already are. One person did not provide a response for the amount of feedback they left but answered NO to the question "Do you leave comments or other feedback on Tolkien-based fan fiction stories?" Three entered "zero" for the amount of feedback they left; these four responses felt somewhat defiant to me given how contrary to correct fandom etiquette it was. (I would say that this etiquette demands that one either leave feedback or feel badly for not doing so.)

I was also curious about the unicorn group: those who left feedback a reported 90 to 100% of the time. Despite leaving feedback on just about everything they read, 65% still agreed or strongly agreed that they wanted to do more. (Including those who reported that they left feedback 100% of the time: 67% of these participants still wanted to do more, including five who strongly agreed with the statement.)

Of the unicorn group, 21.7% chose No Opinion/Not Sure, a percentage much higher than the 13.5% of all participants who chose this option for this statement. I generally avoid making inferences about the No Opinion/Not Sure participants--there are a lot of reasons why people might choose this option, including that they truly do not understand what the statement is asking--but this discrepancy is too interesting to pass up hypothesizing about a little. I suspect that these respondents know that they are going above and beyond the majority of fandom but still feel uncomfortable stating directly that they don't think they need to do more. Choosing No Opinion/Not Sure is quite possibly the more socially acceptable option: a way to circumspectly admit that one really can't do much more.

The unicorns are an interesting group. Why do so many of them--about two out of three--feel that they need to do more? It is possible that the feedback they are leaving is mostly or entirely kudos or other one-click feedback, and they feel they should be writing more comments. (Readers who leave kudos on everything they read are a well-reported phenomenon on AO3; one participant even commented that they "kudos" everything they read.) It is also possible that social norms in fandom dictate that one should always be striving to improve on how much feedback one leaves on stories, and these readers feel that guilty gnawing even though they already are leaving feedback on almost everything they pick up. Here, I can turn to personal experience: I am in the unicorn group myself, leaving feedback on everything I read (in the form of comments) except when I regularly have to skim stories as part of my mod duties on the sites I run. (Sometimes even then I get sucked into a story and comment.) Despite the number of comments I leave, despite the hours of work I do in the fandom each week, I still feel guilty over not commenting on more of those stories skimmed in the course of daily site business. (I also feel guilty for not reading more, period.)

Conclusion

From this data, it is possible to draw a few conclusions:

• Most readers of Tolkien fan fiction leave feedback, but most readers leave feedback on a relatively low number of the stories they read.


• Self reports of the number of stories a reader feedback on appear to be significantly inflated. This doesn't have to mean that participants wanted to deliberately mislead in their responses--there are a number of reasons why self reports might be inaccurate, discussed above--but it is worth keeping in mind for other items on the survey where self-reported and actual behavior are more difficult to compare.


• Authors are significantly more likely than readers-only to leave feedback on a story.


• The vast majority of readers express that they want to leave feedback more often on stories they read. This includes the so-called "unicorns": readers who leave feedback on almost everything they read. This suggests, to me, that there is enough social pressure to leave feedback that participants may have felt uncomfortable stating that they felt they were doing enough. If you have an alternate explanation, please share in the comments!

If you have a question you'd like to see data on, please do share! Next time, I will likely look at why readers decide to leave feedback on a story, but if there's a topic or question you're interested in seeing analyzed and discussed in greater depth, let me know!

Comments

[samtyr.livejournal.com]

I know that I used to be a lot better about leaving feedback. I'd try and leave 'detailed' fb, such as "I really liked this because... etc. etc." and felt like I was contributing and part of the dialog.

But then, in one of my older fandoms (where most of the stories/posts were here, on lj rather than a site), about four different authors left in the span of approximately six months. All of them said basically the same thing: I'm leaving. So long, it's been great but I'm done and my work will be gone in another week or so.

Now, I could have understood if one author did that, or maybe two. But after the first one, it seemed like it was every few weeks where someone else did the same thing. (I really hope they weren't sock puppets but weirder things have happened right?) and I just felt devastated. To me (and because yes, it was my 'fandom' life, and my life is all about me), it seemed there was one common thread -- it was, somehow, my fault. Now granted, I was hardly the only reader/follower but still. (And none of them claimed to leave because of school, serious illness, new job, marriage, etc. -- all of which would make sense.) Clearly, I was being too demanding or putting too much stress on them or something of the sort -- in other words, my fault. And me, being clueless as usual, had not realized it until it was too late.

That was when I started pulling back and not leaving much feedback. In Tolkien fandom, I like to think I've done a bit better but it's very hard. Even now, I have the feeling that merely writing this will somehow cause a jinx. I guess I'd rather leave little fb rather than see people I really like leave. (Yes, I would feel that I had somehow driven them off.)

As for AO3: I like being able to leave kudos. I only wish I could leave it more than once (which is why some of my comments on longer fics read: kudos again.) And I love being able to download fics in pdf or whatever format. But it doesn't have the same sense of community there as other fan sites do, which is too bad.

Ok, that's all for now. (And I apologise for being such a drama queen.)

[dawn_felagund]

I have to admit that I'm curious: Why would you assume that leaving feedback on their stories would have somehow been demanding or stress-inducing? Did they say that: that there was too much pressure from readers to update, too much criticism (direct or implied), etc? (If this is too personal, pretend I didn't ask, of course. :)

Is it possible there was some drama going on behind the scenes? I've seen several fans leave at once because of a spat where I often didn't know what exactly was going on.

I've never, in twelve years in fandom, seen someone leave because of too much feedback. Because of bullying or flames? Yes, but that's a different animal. I have seen people leave--or stop posting on a site, or posting as widely--because they don't get much or any feedback. They see clicks but the response to their story is echoing silence. I can understand why these people feel frustrated or sad by this. It in turn makes me sad because it seems such a little thing to say to someone, "Hey, I really liked this," or something along those lines.

Heck, I've done it myself: I stopped posting to Tolkien Fan Fiction because I received one lonely comment there. Granted--it was a pretty awesome comment! It was how I met pandemonium_213! But it became clear to me very quickly that my work wasn't to the liking of most of the readers there, so I stopped wasting my time. Even today, I post last to MPTT, even though I'm a mod on that site and support their existence, because I get little to no feedback. It takes a lot of effort to prepare a story for posting, as I'm sure you know, and if I'm not going to be rewarded for making the effort, I'll do something else with my time.

[ladybrooke]

Not the one you asked, but to back it up, I can recall a couple of times in the HP fandom where somebody stopped posting because there were too many reviews asking questions or such that they felt like they needed to answer to avoid drama about how they were stuck up, but at the same time, there were so many of them that it would have been a second job to reply to them all. Some of them ended up in a damned if they did, damned if they didn't - if they asked people to not leave long feedback and expect responses to it, they were called stuck up (and worse things). If they didn't ask people to not leave it, then they were expected to respond to it, and if they didn't they were called stuck up. If they did respond to it in detail, they didn't have time to write as much and they got bitched at for not posting enough.

The HP fandom at that time could be demanding and drama filled at times within certain sites/subsets of fans. I haven't seen the same thing in the Silm fandom, but I can get still getting scared - it wouldn't surprise me if there were people in The Hobbit film fandom in the same situation as big HP writers used to be (actually, I've witnessed some overly demanding reviewers in there. Thankfully so far the writers have mostly just ignored them).

I don't think samtyr's reviews were in that category (and I don't know which fandom they were in), but I could see being burned by it all the same if you were leaving detailed feedback and they didn't bother to say exactly which were the problem when they left.

[dawn_felagund]

I've never seen that in Silm fandom, but we're much smaller and have that small-town everyone-knows-everyone feel, so I think there's a tendency to assume good intentions that maybe isn't present in a larger fandom. (We are also, on a whole, older than "fandom in general," and I think many of us understand that jobs/classes/family/lives outside of fandom sometimes thwart even the best intentions. I can't imagine having the gall to assume that a question I asked of an author should somehow take precedence of whatever else is going on in their lives!)

In general, the idea that authors should cater to the whims of readers (not just in this issue but others as well, i.e., the detailed warnings that were once demanded of authors in Tolkien fandom) irritates me. We are producing entertainment for free. If my free entertainment is somehow not up to a person's standards, they're welcome to return to buying their books and stories, where they have the right to make some demands as a customer if the story/author does not meet their standards. But as long as they're reading my work, they are not a customer and have no right to make demands of me. It's strictly take-it-or-leave-it on my terms.

[ladybrooke]

I've never seen someone leave in the Silm fandom either, though I have seen a couple of reviewers being considered pushy (but I also hang out in younger crowds, probably, since I'm active on multiple sites like Ao3 and DeviantArt). I mean, I know I've had a couple of people that seemed to assume that because I was in college/on break/now work from home freelance and therefore am always on my computer, I should be able to respond automatically and without them having to wait, and never miss seeing a review...but it won't drive me out of fandom for good, because I've deal with students and classmates who thought the same thing. Maybe I just attract people like that.

Yeah, I am not getting paid for this. The only people that get to complain are people that I write a story for, who are my friends, and we are doing this as part of an art/story trade, and that's only because I know how much some of them sell art for - but unless you're giving me a piece of artwork that if you had instead been working on something that you would have sold for $50 or you're my friend who has supported me for years...nope. If you don't like how I write Maglor/Orodreth/slash/femslash//Nimloth/my grammar/my vocabulary/whatever else there is that people have complained to me about, there are thousands upon thousands of other stories that they can read and leave me alone to continue writing fics.

[hhimring]

Are you taking into account that one of the reasons for the low MPTT feedback might be that anyone who was going to comment has already commented somewhere else?
(I know your statistics say that MPTT has its own character, but my own observations suggest to me that quite a high proportion of users of MPTT are using it as a second archive for fic that they first posted somewhere else.)

[dawn_felagund]

That's always a possibility, but there does not seem to be a huge overlap between the membership of SWG and MPTT, nor between AO3 and MPTT. (I actually see a lot more potential for overlap between SWG and AO3.) MPTT is so culturally different from those other two sites; in addition, there are not a lot of "Silmfic only" people there. So basically, I see MPTT as my chance to present my work to general Tolkien fans (versus Silm fans) and people who aren't part of the "heretic" crowd.

It was the same on TFF, which my research has showed also has a very conservative (in terms of canon interpretation and purpose for writing fanfic) membership. So I really have to conclude that that is the reason. My work just doesn't play well with those readers.

I also have to acknowledge that I don't do a lot of reviewing myself on MPTT (which is often a factor), although I would think that years and years of being a webmaster and mod there would help dispel the impression that I'm only interested in the site as an archive for my own work and not giving back in any way. :)

[hhimring]

In the Tree & Flower Awards, when they were still running, your fics always placed really well. Of course, the categories they were divided into meant you were chiefly competing against other Silm fic.
(It can be easy to forget, I've noticed when I've stayed in my Silm bubble for a while, how many Tolkien fans just don't read Silm fic because they don't have a clue who the characters are.)

[samtyr.livejournal.com]

It's very possible that there were a lot of issues going on behind the scenes but I never knew of it. But then, I seldom if ever hear of such things until they are over and no one wants to talk about it anymore. But it just seemed strange that so many people said essentially the same thing when they left with no real explanation. And each time, it seemed to just come out of left field. I looked for the common denominator and decided that somehow, I must have been that final straw. (No idea how, though.) So I began to pull back. If it was my fault, I'd just remain on the sidelines and hopefully not create as much drama in the other fandoms. And there is a distinct fear that an author I like and enjoy will decide to leave without any explanation -- so better just to stay low-key.

I've always been told irl that I was "too demanding, too high-strung, too annoying, and put too much pressure on people, etc. etc." by quite a few people. They simply cannot put up with my' nonsense' and the next thing I know -- I'm out or at best, on a waiting list for calls that seldom come. Apparently I am a spoiled, special little snowflake who excels at being a jinx. (There may well be some truth to that as I was an indulged only child, and the youngest of the grandchildren by at least ten years.)

As for kudos and other fb: I really do try to leave comments but the last few years have been a major headache and there are times when I just cannot seem to write anything at all and as a result, my comments/fb have suffered. Even just hitting kudos can be an effort.

Ok, shutting up now.

[dawn_felagund]

*hugs you* As an outsider looking at the situation and with minimal knowledge, I really have to say that I don't think it was you. If you had told me that four major authors left within a short span of each other, I would have offered any number of theories as to why, but being pushed by "too much feedback"--much less from you particularly!--would never have crossed my mind. I've known you a while in fandom and never known you to be pushy or demanding but always a pleasant person to interact with.