To play Devil's Advocate here for a second, those kudos that come really quickly may be from people who will read but want to show support, and then they mark it for later so they can read it at a better time. My friend does this: she kudoses my work first, then reads when she has a chance. But that may not be the case in every situation so I would take that with a grain of salt.
Limiting guest comments helps, and it does show there are real readers, at least to me. As for the dip in engagement, I think it's less "people getting bored" and more "people moving on to the next big thing." I cannot tell you how many posts I've seen across socials where new authors are going, "hey, how can I get more engagement and become popular? I started writing for [insert big popular fandom as of late], but I'm not getting enough hits". Nowadays, more kudos and comments have become "indicators" of story quality, which is just not true. Didn't use to be that way, but it is now, and there's not much we can do to change it. Social media has convinced people that the more attention something has, the more superior it is, and they come here thinking the same thing, not realizing that AO3 isn't a social media and doesn't have an algorithm. It sucks, but that's the consequence of AO3 becoming more mainstream, as well as fanfic as a whole.
I should have mentioned that I was talking about guests only. If these came from people with an account, I'd have gotten to a similar assumption, as I do know active people around here who generally press kudos before reading for similar reasons. Still a valid point, as there's no way to safely assume the intentions of everyone appearing in my kudos emails unless they also leave comments.
Since I don't use social media and Discord at all (but occasionally read along in the r/AO3 subreddit), I only have a vague idea as to how they influence people's general behavior on this site, but do see where you're coming from. I also believe that much of it comes from folks who move from Wattpad to AO3 (not literally everyone who does so, of course, but a fair amount at least) and think they need to feed some nonexistent algorithm here because that's what they've grown accustomed to, and lurking before signing up seems to have gotten out of fashion in the last couple of years. (One should assume that the waiting period in the queue actually leaves enough time for lurking even after the invitation request, but what do I know.) It's most certainly a combination of either factor, plus the cultural shift in fandom that became evident after the massive influx of newbies from 2020 on as a consequence of the Coof, that leads towards the mistaken assumption that there was a linear correlation between interaction and quality. What this conclusion does tell me is that I'm probably getting too old to care about what the current big thing is. :D And that I've probably been lucky to have timed my reappearance in a way that I've been around when my thing happened to be the current big thing, so I shouldn't worry about sticking to it, even though it isn't any longer.
Ah, I was talking about guests, too. Sorry for not clarifying hahaha.
2020 changed so much, it's almost surreal to see the huge switch-up between 2019 and 2020, and I remember it vividly. And yeah, caring about big trends is something I stopped doing once I started getting into my 20s, and now I'm at the point where I'm completely thrilled about writing a fic for a rarepair that gets hardly any traction hahaha. It's just something that happens as people mature. Sadly, I don't think this new generation of fans will ever get to that point... I mean, they're still making TOS breaking "fics" detailing why, if you ship or write XYZ, then you're a bad person. To any of those who write that currently reading my comment: you can't stop me. I'm the boogeyman. I'm going to continue haunting your tag. BEWARE! XD
And then there's me, getting back into fandom in 2024 after an unexpectedly long hiatus of nine years, finding a completely different world from the one I once left, taking this for the natural course of life until realizing that it was essentially one event that messed everything up beyond repair. Well ... :D One clear symptom of what's been going on could really be the whole "You're a bad person if you don't do what I want you to do!" attitude, something I don't recall being a thing prior to that. Now that I'm thinking about that, this would actually encourage me to keep doing what I want, if only to spite this very sort of people. ^^ But yeah, there's an amazingly slow maturing process among some of them, given that the first wave of COVID has already passed six years ago, which gives me rather little hope for the generation of fans in question ... But then again, growing older also means listening to annoyingly loud voices as little as possible. So go ahead and haunt your fandom! :D
Comment on February 2026 Newsletter, Volume 208
Hakvrei Fri 06 Mar 2026 03:45PM UTC
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MysteriousMihai Fri 06 Mar 2026 05:06PM UTC
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Hakvrei Fri 06 Mar 2026 05:25PM UTC
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MysteriousMihai Fri 06 Mar 2026 06:24PM UTC
Last Edited Fri 06 Mar 2026 09:30PM UTC
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