ao3some | Meaning of Kudos

Wow, that's so interesting.

+1 to all this. :)

That makes sense. Thanks for explaining!

I love both receiving and leaving kudos. The first because it lets me know that someone read my fic and liked it. The latter because it's my way of telling someone "I liked your fanwork but I: a)might not have the brainpower/spoons to leave a comment; b)I'm reading/watching this on my phone and don't have the patience to type up my (typically long and enthusiastic) comments; c)I'm reading/watching this very late at night. OMG, I ONLY HAVE X AMOUNT OF HOURS LEFT TO CATCH SOME ZZZ'S BEFORE WAKING UP FOR WORK".

FTR, I tend to leave comments solely on fanworks I really liked or loved. For one thing, I've got very limited time (once you factor out work and sleep hours AND add "free time", i.e. when I interact in Fandom/read or write fic/what-have-you) to leave comments on every fanwork I come across (which, when it comes to fic, is a lot.) In a way, I like to think that, because I don't leave comments on everything, those who get a comment from me will get an extra kick from knowing that I was seriously starry-eyed about my rambling on about their fanworks.

If I'm feeling totes \o/ about whatever I've enjoyed, I'll leave a Kudos AND a comment. It's like an additional tip of the hat to the writer/artist/vidder/mixer.

Just found out about this, wish I hadn't missed the poll. Truthfully, I don't give many kudos, because when I receive kudos I feel like they'll always just mean the "I finished this and didn't hate it!" option. Or maybe the "Good job!" option in a sort of condescending way. Because how can you adore something and not spend a minute writing an "I loved this!" review? AO3 could just put a poll like this at the bottom of the fic's page and it would be far better lol

I love how you defenders of this button keep attacking people who dare to not like it the same way you do this viciously.

Way to be inclusive, anon. Way to go.

Why are you so angry that different people see things differently? It doesn't harm anyone.

I am very confused as to why you, an anonymous commenter, are calling me "anon". O_o

Absolute +1 to this, especially the phone thing.

I post them to find out what OTHER PEOPLE thought of my vision.

Yes, sure. Me too. But that doesn't mean I'm going to GET what I want, you know? Or that I'm going to enjoy hearing these thoughts about my vision if the other people do decide to tell me about them. Loquacious praise is only one of a variety of potential responses, after all. Others include loquacious condemnation, very terse praise, ambiguous praise that's actually a veiled insult, confusing comments that might be praise but might as easily be free verse somebody's decided to write in the comment box because it was handy, comments about things you had nothing to do with, corrections of your typos, mockery, flames, spam, silence or (gasp) an automated expression of non-specific appreciation similar to what you've probably unwittingly gotten for years from people who use text replacement utilities to spare themselves from typing commonly used phrases ("I really enjoyed this!!") over and over again.

Putting a story on a public internet space is like signing a waiver that states you understand these risks and would like to venture forward regardless. If you need your readers to reply to you in some specific way (or with a minimum wordcount), I suggest that you clearly state this expectation in your story header, so readers can decide for themselves if they want to enter this sort of feedback contract with you. I think you'll find the expectation is not as universal as you might think, so clarification might be helpful for you and for the people who are about to read your work.

I feel slightly guilty for not having time to read all the comments before I leave a comment (so apologies if this has been said before) but it's this or nothing, so ... I wish there was an anonymous version of kudos. Or for that matter, reviews. There are stories that I want to be able to leave positive feedback on, without having to (potentially) explain having read. This is taking into account the person I was as a teenager, who was a lot less comfortable in fandom and a lot more lurk-inclined than I am now, and it's taking into account the fact that a lot of things, while they aren't downright illegal to be writing or reading, are certainly looked down upon by society at large; feared with an irrational sort of ferocity. For example - I read an excellent story that contained the rape of an underage character. It was well characterized, uncompromisingly portrayed, and thoroughly canon-based (the story acknowledges this happened, it just didn't happen onscreen). Given my physical location, though, I hesitate to give the author feedback about the fact that they wrote an amazing story. Or better said, I hesitate to put my name to such feedback publicly, despite the fact that they deserve support and encouragement for tackling a tough topic and handling it well. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's run into this, in one form or another. Suggestions would be welcome.

If it's a seldom occurrence, you could log out. If you do it more often, you could use a second browser.

You can comment and kudos without being logged in. Caveat is, it doesn't work for works which are restricted to archive users.

I'd quote you but, well, just pretend I'm quoting that entire first paragraph. Since it's a little long.

And, um. Yes? [confused] I want all of that. I enjoy all of that. I love people correcting my typos, I'm probably not smart enough to undestand the veiled insult so I'll just cheerfully accept the praise, I don't care if "I really enjoyed this" is C&Ped into fifteen stories in a row because hey I'm perfectly willing to take them at their literal stated word every single time (if the Kudos button said "I really enjoyed this!" or "I read this!" or "This sucked!" at least 93% of my issues with it would go away, since that's a rather clear-cut statement of feedback right there--which is also why it'll never change because it's quite clear that people use that Kudos button for way more than a clear-cut statement of feedback and would object to making it more specific). And if someone actually decided to write free verse as a feedback to my story I would read the SHIT out of that. Feedback is feedback. I enjoy feedback. Praise is awesome, obviously, but feedback is why I post rather than just declaiming my stories to my mice in dramatic reenactments accompanied by interpretive dance and periodic heavy breathing. I like writing, I like being good at it even more. I like people noticing my writing, and I like to see their reactions to it. I'm not exactly sure how this makes me unusual.

[whole second paragraph quoted here]

...um, you really do take a legalistic approach to this, don't you? I need to have people sign a waiver, or no wait, I sign a waiver by posting, and people need to sign off on it, or there's this contract that I've put out there with expectations that you have to meet, and you can only read if...or maybe it's I can't post if you don't agree, and there's gotta be a formal signing a contract with me--okay, no, I don't get it.

I mean. Seriously, this is fandom. This is what we DO. We post stories. We post reactions to stories. We post reactions to reactions to stories. We post reactions to reactions to reactions to stories (which I think is where you and I are up to). I am one hundred percent positive that I am not the only writer in fandom who wants to know what their readers have said about their work, who checks email and LJ/DW obsessively in the hours and days after posting a story to see what people have said, who looks hopefully at their friends so they can get pre-reads and betas and suggestions of what works and what doesn't, who eagerly offers pre-reads and betas to their friends and types up all of their suggestions and satisfactions in email and chat and twitter. I'll grant you that I'm possibly one of the stupidest writers in fandom for actually, you know, coming right out and saying it. Especially I'm starting to get the impression from all of this discussion (not just with you, I mean more from reading the reams of comments that these couple of posts have generated) that a lot of people feel that...I'm not sure, maybe writers are doing it for A Love Of The Craft/Fandom/whatever and feedback is really more about the feedbacker than the writer and even could be just one of those incidental things that doesn't enter the picture except on special occasions? As I said, I don't get it. And maybe I'm beating a dead horse, and, well, being stupid. But I gotta be me. [wry]

So. In case this was honestly ambiguous for you before, please let me state that regarding the fics you're reading, and based on 15 years of writing and knowing writers and talking to writers about writing in my various little corners of fandom, I can say with complete confidence that writers--take your pick of some, most, all, any--want feedback. That's why they post to places that have comment options like LJ and DW and AO3. That's why no one that I've ever seen disables comments on a fic post. I can think of a few people who do specifically state that they're only interested in positive feedback, since this is a hobby that they do for fun, and no writer likes being told that they suck, but basically every writer knows that it could happen and, yes, accepts it. Fen can be rather blunt, and I suspect many writers get comments that make them blush and want to hide under the bed.

You can have every single reason in the world not to give that feedback, and they're all valid because the world is a sucky place and people have lives (me) and distractions (me) and hero worship (also me) shitty brain chemistry (SO me) and comment performance anxiety (...actually, not so much me, but this seems to be pretty common), but the one thing I've yet to see is someone posting "I don't comment." Full stop. Period.

People give a reason because, in a way, people feel they NEED to give a reason. So far as I have ever experienced, and I've got 15 years of history informing this statement, giving feedback--at least sometimes, at least a little bit, at least WANTING TO even if the world doesn't let you for any of a number of utterly valid reasons--is the expectation and even the norm in fandom. It's an ideal to aspire to, and like most ideals the vast majority fail at achieving it in true form. But in my opinion, my expectation that if you have something to say about my fic then you're going to say it is not quite the dramatic departure from the norm that you seem to assume. And as I've said before, and will continue to say again, although with less and less hope that anyone actually cares to understand what I mean, my problem with the Kudo button is not that someone gave me feedback I didn't like. It's that someone gave me feedback I didn't UNDERSTAND. Did I win brownie points for courage for posting that ridiculous zombie parasitic wasp larva MCR fic? Did I write a decently spelled and plotted story that didn't make any major errors? Did I write the best story that person's ever read in their entire lives and they're going to fannishly follow me wherever I go? It's the equivalent of a gift of a live goldfish. It's nice to look at, and if you get a bunch of them in a row it feels kinda nice, and it's also nice to think someone cared enough to give me a pet goldfish, but ultimately it doesn't really FEED BACK any information about what I wrote, not even really that they liked it. It's a button used to say everything, and hence (for me) ends up saying...well, nothing.

FYI, the H key on my keyboard is a bit dodgy, I think I caught all the skipped Hs but if I missed one I apologize. And if you want to continue this discussion in my LJ I'd be happy to, I don't want to keep spamming LittleMouseling's LJ so this'll pretty much be my last comment here.

I'm not arguing that writers do not want feedback, though. What I'm saying is a) so what? Our wanting feedback on our work doesn't mean anyone has a moral prerogative to provide it to us (good lord, if ONLY the world worked like that!); and also b) Kudos ARE, in fact, feedback. The word means "honour; glory; acclaim", actually, so they are (at least nominally) pretty high praise. They may also be a little rote and generic and non-specific, but so are a lot of supposedly handwritten comments. C'est la vie, you know? At least it's not silence, which is by far the most lackadaisical, most ambiguous, least helpful most common feedback writers tend to get on their work.

I'm not a fan of the feature at all. It gives me too many mixed signals.

At the very least, if there's going to be no way to disable them altogether, I'd like to have some sort of toggle so only registered users can leave them, like signed reviews on FFNet.

The idea behind this poll was exactly that: to find out just how "mixed" a Kudos is, as a symbol. Given that 90% of respondents most often use it to mean "I liked this" (and half to say "I adored this!")--it doesn't seem very mixed to me, actually. It seems to be a pretty universal positive.

It seems to me like a lot of the dislike around Kudos is based on 2 premises, neither of which appear to me to be supported by any data:

1. The one you've debunked with this poll (that Kudos mean so many different things that they're meaningless).

2. Kudos "replace" comments, because people who otherwise would have commented leave comments instead (in fact, the data I've seen from AO3 indicates that people have left MORE comments since the Kudos feature was introduced.

I doubt debunking these notions is going to suddenly change the way people feel about Kudos, but I wish they'd stop using these ideas as rationalization for their dislike. . .

That's really helpful, thanks! I didn't know I could do that.

Just turn kudos alerts off then.

I do. But I still would like a feature to turn off anonymous kudos, though. =/

For what it's worth, half the time I _do_ check out an author if they leave a kudos while signed in.

Do you dislike guest Kudos because you interpret Kudos as something other than praise, or for another reason? I'm not sure I've seen your POV before, and I'd like to understand it better.

I admit I used to believe uploading my fic to AO3 would lead to NO MORE COMMENTS EVER, because sometimes I use kudos as "the easy way out". The fact is that I think I'm a pretty good feedbacker, generally, and I tend to comment on most things I read on LJ/DW, even if to say "Hey I liked this, thanks for writing," or "this was hot, well done!" But those are the comments that I replace with kudos on AO3. When a fic blows my mind or really hits a kink/trope/button for me, I will leave a comment, no matter if it's on AO3 or on journals.

I still upload my fic to journals FIRST though, to get that first flush of comments. Then I upload to AO3, and it's true that fics on AO3 get many more kudos than comments. But that might be a self-fulfilling thing, since people most likely to comment - my friends and people who know me - might have read the fic already.

It's really interesting to read this poll because I had no idea how differently people interpret their Kudos. To me, as an author, they were always taken as "thanks for writing" / "I liked this but didn't love it". I can understand why this uncertainty as regards the "intensity" of feedback intended in Kudos might make some people dislike them. I wouldn't interpret Kudos as "heyyy clicky" or "I hated this" or whatever, and there's a consensus from the poll that Kudos express something positive. But there's no way of knowing HOW positive it is. Depending on the person it could be "I read this, thanks!" or "I liked this" or "I adored this" and you have no way of knowing.

Then it becomes a matter of knowing whether you as an author prefer knowing people have generally (but vague) positive feelings towards your story, or if you'd rather hear nothing from people who read but don't want to/can't comment for whatever reason.

Hmm, I keep thinking about this and now I'm wondering if the people who say "kudos = my story wasn't even worth a comment??" are people who usually have the time/spoons to leave "I liked this" comments. And might just not be aware of how many people are simply not able to do that, thus transcribing "I don't have the spoons but I liked this" to "I don't even like your story enough to comment 'properly'".

It really comes down to realizing that yeah, 5 of the kudos might replace "yay, read this" comments you would have otherwise gotten, but they add a greater number of "I read this and probably liked it at least a little" from people you wouldn't have heard of anyway. So there IS a loss, somewhere in there. To me, the gain is greater though. (And yet I'm willing to go without those "yay" reactions from spoonless people when I first post to journal without crossposting to AO3. Comments still feel like a greater reward to me, something that I think is inscribed in our fannish culture right now. I never said I was coherent in my feelings on the subject >.>)

I use it as a "like" button à la facebook. I'll never leave kudos on a story I didn't much care for, and certainly not on a story I outright disliked. I usually leave kudos (rather than a comment) if I'm pressed for time, low-energy, or don't have any thoughts about the story that could be communicated better than "I REALLY ENJOYED THIS."

I'm more likely to comment on stories at livejournal or dreamwidth, simply because I'm more used to the journal environment, but I've left comments on stories at AO3.

I only leave kudos if I liked and enjoyed the fic. I do try to comment on fics I adore madly, but sadly I don't always read on platforms that make it easy for me to comment, and so kudos spill over to things I adore as well.

There also seems to be this premise that, unlike kudos, if someone leaves a comment, the author will know exactly what they really thought of the story, because comments are a source of inerrant truth.

And that's so inaccurate I don't even really know where to start with debunking it.

Meaning of Kudos

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject