Be BRAVE and TRUE

so i read some meta about how kudos devalue reader interaction with fan work.  fan work is being taken for granted, these essays posited.  possibly, even, readers were lazy and entitled.  an idea was floated: instead of letting people click an I Liked That button, maybe getting rid of the junk food version of feedback would force encourage people to eat healthy and leave long, thoughtful comments.

setting aside the question of would removing kudos on AO3 lead to more comments (no, it would not), i'd like to talk about the value of my hit counter and my kudos number for me.  and i'm going to start with a digression.

when i was in College, i hung my senior art thesis in the Smith Gallery, which was a small room right by the entrance to the cafeteria.  the show was eight big charcoal drawings (6 feet high, more or less) and a handful of smaller ones.  they represented a huge amount of work.  i remember locking myself in the semi-private studio for eight hour stretches, blasting ceremonials by florence and the machine, working until my hands were covered wrist to fingertip with black.  the concrete floor underneath where i was drawing would collect a pile of broken charcoal pieces and bits of eraser and fine black dust.  it was freezing in there.  i put soul into that project.

an absolute maximum of 1,500 people walked through the gallery while my show was up; probably significantly fewer, but that's how many it would have been if every student had come to visit.  it was, and is, one of the most important things i've done with my art.

5,000 copies is a respectable number of sales for a debut novel.  10,000 is a very good sign for your career.

videogames aren't considered a success until sales cap 5,000,000.

it's hard to keep large numbers straight.  it's very easy to look at 1,500 compared to 5,000,000 and think, good grief, 1,500 is nothing! practically zero!  but -- 1,500 is every person at my school.

my fanfiction isn't a big deal, certainly not by BNF standards.  i've got a couple fics with more than 5,000 hits; more hovering between one and two thousand.  i get about a 100:10:1 hits:kudos:comments ratio, which gives me a warm feeling of accomplishment.  i love the comments!  i go back and re-read them when i'm sad; i do an embarrassing wiggle of excitement when i see [AO3] Comment on... in my inbox; I show them to my wife all "look, look, someone liked the fingerbanging one!"  but the hits and kudos are important to me too, because i imagine the 1,500 students, or the 5,000 books, and i think "my fic has been seen by so many people."

maybe it feels different if you are more fandom famous than i am.  maybe the less personal quantitative feedback becomes a dull background roar.  but i know what it's like to publish stories into the void where you don't see how many people clicked on and quietly enjoyed your story.  professional short story markets don't have kudos or hit counters, and tell you what, i convince myself every time that the only people who've read the story are the people who've commented on it.  so i don't get to imagine the auditorium full of 300 people and think "i got a chance to talk to all those folks for 4,000 words."  i imagine the dude who writes reviews for rocket stack rank sitting in an empty cafe, rolling his eyes and putting me down for another three out of five stars.

frankly, the fandom feedback experience is better now than it was a decade and a half ago.  still no money, granted, and it's still easy to forget that 2,500 isn't zero even when 250,000 exists, but better.