Heh. I knew this was going to show up here sooner than later and the timing makes this impeccable.
I think
this Tumblr post is relevant: what readers and writers know to expect from each other is far from the reality. In general, the very
format of the writing-related section in most web forums, not just the ones Pokémon-related, is very out of touch with the reality of writing (it has to, I feel, but that just exacerbates the problem).
For example, there's complains about the "silence", but the problem is there is in general no good avenue for a writer to communicate that yes they are working; most of the time the silence is broken in a forum-adequate way only when new content is finally posted, which can take months at a time. Threads like the ones in the Author's Café help post
about writing, but not post
on writing. Of course, this follows the nature that during development of a new chapter the writer's interaction is bounded to eg.: their beta reader, but it wouldn't be bad to have
that be known in some way forum-wise, I don't think. The point is, lots of "dead time" is seen which is not. It can take months to write a new chapter; it takes only about 15 minutes to consume it.
Regarding the Completed Fics section and
any other thread index really, they are very inconvenient to use compared to eg.: AOOO or FF.net -not that that's saying much but that's 2010s web development for you. You can only see the titles of the stories and their post/page count,
which is not relevant to progress or update status because story, comments, critiques and reviews are all mixed in the same bag; I've seen a couple of Spanish-community forums try with a newer format where one thread contains the story only and a different tread holds reviews and comments, which TBH I like more for functional reasons and would like to be adopted more widely. Similarly, you can not see summaries which are among the easiest ways to traverse looking for something to read easily when you have in the order of hundreds to thousand of stories to choose from (there's tooltips of the first paragraph or so but that's not indicative and not very navigable, let alone on mobile), there's no tags, and you can not see when the thread
author last posted.
There's also being able to leave Likes/Kudos/+1 to a story, a simple and to-the-point means to communicate that at least someone... well, liked something; but among the problems lie that the Likes are given and quantified per-post, without a per-thread option. And I guess for enough people a Like doesn't "count" the same as a review or commentary post, in particular considering there's no option leave a line behind indicating why the Like was given (eg.: "in this chapter my fave character rulez!"). I seem to remember a very old Serebii, or perhaps a sister forum, used to have the option, but from a time to now those have disappeared. One would think the lack of that option would incite people to leave a few lines-worth comment post but I get the feeling that it actually does the opposite because it might combine (badly) with the factor mentioned a few times above where readers believe they are being expected to write a literary critique when all that's expected from them is a comment.
Yes, a critique, a review and a comment are all different things, require different skills and have different value to a writer. Refusing any one in favor of the other two does the community a disservice because it artificially skews the view of who and why are responding to or consuming a story, which makes it harder to find.
Down the line tho?
All those things only tend to contribute to a deeper issue that is not really a problem but more just a reality of writing:
Writing is a busy activity of its own, reading is also a busy activity of its own even if it produces "faster" results, and their timetables do not intersect nicely. And we writers, at least, are not here on hire.
I'm in a number of communities and sure, I am not actively posting content but I am still writing. That includes planning stage, drafting, etc. Yet I do not really have a means to communicate that in the forums that I'd feel
helps keep the community active. Creating a new thread for each research material subject I want to get input on artificially inflates the conversation count and makes relevant conversations harder to find; using a singular thread makes the subforum as a whole look less used and also makes the relevant conversations harder to find. I feel like it's a lose-lose game; man I would
love to be corrected on that. More recently I've been more present in the Discord side of some of them communities simply because more discussion
on writing tend to take place there, which do mind is its own can of worms that has been subjected to discussion before. Oh and all this? Well, it competes against several other activities and efforts for my
spare time and resources. Sad as it is so long as I'm not on the fanfic writing and worldbuilding stuff for hire I can not give it the attention I would like to. Whatever gods are there they know I would love to leave tech and backend support behind.
Speaking of leaving commentary I feel like that is a thing communities in general need to emphasize more on what the baseline is: are we demanding
literary critique or academic review on a work, or does simple commentary suffice? Is "I liked it" enough? If not, why do we have a "I liked it" button? Look at what the forum interface instructs the reader to do: when a reader comes to a thread to give some input and they see Alice already covered the plot holes, Bob does the grammar check better than I can and Charlie has been discussing the foreshadowing from 12 chapters ago with the beta reader out in the open, that's already a lot of work taken from under the potential new reviewer's feet, limiting them to "me too" because otherwise we are spawning or continuing conversations in a story's main thread, making it
harder for other readers to notice and parse
new content to comment on (see what I said above about separation of threads). That's one of the reasons why my comments tend to all have the same structure: I don't (can't, easily) delve in the work other reviewers have already done and instead focus on what I specifically noticed when I gave a simple reading.
We would hope that if we are okay with the simple commentary, we can communicate to readers general that, considering the above, "yeah, I liked that foreshadowing too" is a good and sufficient comment to post too even if it's only six words long. Heck, we need to communicate that the non-meme equivalent of "I liked, write moar" is
also valid because if we can't the only tools we have left for them is the Like button, which apparently writers don't want to accept as a valid feedback tool. Else? Our readers will just have to pass from leaving feedback because the gap between "nothing" and "acceptable minimum to speak the basics" is too wide.
tl;dr: we writers need to accept that people consume our work in different ways and respond to that in different ways too, which the site does not necessarily reflect.
