Thread by @chromaberrant

oh. OH. a thought occurred.

there's all this discourse like "give writers comments uwu they mean a lot and make them write more! ur silence is ~killing the fanfic industry~" and it's never resonated with me bc 1) no matter how it's worded it makes you feel guilty,

2) the craving for comments and glorifying their value is not universal for all writers, but i never see anyone saying "i don't care if you just read and go, that's your business". partly bc maybe people who think that don't feel the need to say it,

partly because on social media it's very hard to genuinely not care, when everything is about getting more clicks. it's the nature of the platform when the number-crunching algorithms curate what gets seen.

i'm not saying *i* don't care for the whole getting engagement thing. (i'm just not happy that i care. i want to derive joy from putting a thing out there, not getting funny numbers spat at the thing, but i am a terminally online creachur and changing thise is hard. :p)

i kind of think this whole call to engage with creators isn't ideal, either. it can build community, but it can also reinforce a culture of expectation - of entitlement, even, to a back-and-forth that not everyone is willing to give just to get to feel good about their work.

i guess all this is a long-winded way of saying that besides "writing for yourself" and "writing for clicks/feedback", there's maybe a third and equally valid type of goal for a fanwriter? writing to... be seen? pay it forward? i'm not sure what to call it.

it's just a kind of "writing for clicks", in the broad strokes, bc clicks is the only measure of being seen on the internet, but without the expectation of paying *back*.

i sometimes write for myself to work through things, and don't want to work through them again in comments.

"one and done, baby. death of the author. nut & bolt. i put this thing on the internet and now you clicked it so it's your problem. you can tell me about it, but i'd rather you tell your friends, unless i'm one of those friends" sums it up, really, esp about porn w/ feelings lol

tl;dr yea getting comments is cool, but for me the realest rush of dopamine is stumbling upon a rec of my works in the wild, not involving me as a person at all

nobody owes me anything for writing, comments/shares aren't an obligation, dont feel bad for not "paying back" writers