Comment Whoring
Everybody hates comment whoring, y/y? I've often tried to figure out why this particular kind of trollish behavior is so despised in fandom, and I think I might have just found another aspect.
You only comment whore if you are in the habit of comparing comment counts and using comments to judge the quality of someone's writing. In short, comment whores make fanfiction into a competition.
Thing is, anything gets comments. People might give something a lot of comments because it's really that good, or they might give it a lot of comments because it provides mindless distraction on the quality level of daily talk shows. Comment counts are one of the most unreliable factoids to consult when it comes to judging the quality of someone's writing.
By making it about comment counts, though, comment whores enable the mindset of 'It doesn't matter how good my fic is, as long as I get comments!'. Writing stuff that provides mindless distraction is easier than actually producing something well-written, so due to this mindset, the badfic count increases. So does the number of unfinished, never-ending WIPs - because what better way to get comments than to post each chapter separately and make people beg for the next part? - and so does the number of thoughtless and pointless less-than-500-words fic(*). In short, if getting comments is more important than minding and increasing the quality of the writing, fandom gets spammed with badfic. Therefore, people who make it about comment counts are met with a lot of hostility in fandom.
Do you agree? Disagree? Were you going 'well, duh!' reading this? Let me hear your thoughts on yaoi! :)
(*)Please don't interpret this as me saying that anything under 500 words is badly written, or that people who post their fic in several installments are always out to get more comments. That would simply not be true. There are people who do it to get more comments, though, and in my experience, good drabbles and vignettes are a rarity.
You only comment whore if you are in the habit of comparing comment counts and using comments to judge the quality of someone's writing. In short, comment whores make fanfiction into a competition.
Thing is, anything gets comments. People might give something a lot of comments because it's really that good, or they might give it a lot of comments because it provides mindless distraction on the quality level of daily talk shows. Comment counts are one of the most unreliable factoids to consult when it comes to judging the quality of someone's writing.
By making it about comment counts, though, comment whores enable the mindset of 'It doesn't matter how good my fic is, as long as I get comments!'. Writing stuff that provides mindless distraction is easier than actually producing something well-written, so due to this mindset, the badfic count increases. So does the number of unfinished, never-ending WIPs - because what better way to get comments than to post each chapter separately and make people beg for the next part? - and so does the number of thoughtless and pointless less-than-500-words fic(*). In short, if getting comments is more important than minding and increasing the quality of the writing, fandom gets spammed with badfic. Therefore, people who make it about comment counts are met with a lot of hostility in fandom.
Do you agree? Disagree? Were you going 'well, duh!' reading this? Let me hear your thoughts on yaoi! :)
(*)Please don't interpret this as me saying that anything under 500 words is badly written, or that people who post their fic in several installments are always out to get more comments. That would simply not be true. There are people who do it to get more comments, though, and in my experience, good drabbles and vignettes are a rarity.