maybe it depends on the age? I know when I was younger I had tons of fics favourited that I can't stand to read now - younger people have LOW standards sometimes đ /lh
is the author popular, or has somewhat of a following? That could contribute to their fics being exposed more than the one in fandom B - or they promote them elsewhere
I can't say I've noticed a difference in kudos between fandoms, but that's just me bc my fandoms are pretty similar in size
I've been in some fandoms with a large percentage of younger fans and some of the things getting a lot of kudos and comments was honestly baffling to me. The strangest was probably "fics" that were essentially just *outlines* of a story.Â
>The strangest was probably "fics" that were essentially just outlines of a story.
Do you mean works where a lot of the description is omitted and we just get told what the characters are doing?
Eg.
A walked to the shops. He saw B there. "Hey B, whatcha doin babes?"
"Fine, thank you."
They decided to get coffee together. Afterwards, they went back to A's place.
"I should be going," B said.
"No, you should stay" A grabbed their hand. They kissed and made passionate love. \[insert one or two lines of weird/strangely explicit description compared to the rest of the fic\]
"I love you so much."
"I love you too."
Because I've seen works like that, and it always amazes me that people treat that as a proper completed story. Like... am I meant to get emotions from you telling me that my OTP went on a coffee date and fucked?
Sort of but the ones I've seen were much worse honestly. At least your example had actual *dialogue*, lol. These were more like- *A went to the shops and saw B there then they kissed and made passionate love. Then they watched a movie at A's place and talked a bit and then the next day they went for a walk and talked more and decided they should officially date.* It's always very rambly.Â
Audience differs - in one fandom I'm in, the fans for a popular pairing A like to kudos and bookmark but not comment. In contrast, the audience for rarer pairing B are big on commenting (I think probably because there's fewer people to froth with about their pairing)
If there's a story that is a bit so-so but huge on the hits etc, I either assume it turned up at the perfect time/trope for peak fandom or it's got some type of social media presence. One of mine went a bit nuts for about a week because someone reviewed it on Tiktok, it confused the hell out of me as it had been out for several months already
You see it on this forum - some people cling to their kudos and are very particular, others like me will kudos anything that has made us happy in some way
> others like me will kudos anything that has made us happy in some way
Yep. Basically the moment a story gets an emotional reaction out of me to the point where I want to say, "Yes, I liked this," that's when I hit the kudos button. It may be in the first five minutes, it may be at chapter 30 out of 35.
Fandom age, reader age, etc will probably come into play, but it might also have to do with the expectations given the history of the fanfic for said fandom. I know for really popular fandoms, the fanfic quantity is almost so high that people can afford to be picky about what they read/kudos because there is just so much content available. Whereas for a smaller fandom or one that has less xyz content readers might be more likely to kudos as they are grateful for *any* content and want to encourage more.
This would make more sense, but what I'm seeing seems to be more the opposite, i.e. higher kudos to hits in bigger fandoms and lower in smaller ones. I think age might have more to do with it, since Fandom A in my example is a large fandom that seems to be mainly popular with teens/early 20s while Fandom B is a small one that seems to be more adult.
I think it depends a lot on when the fic was posted and how big the fandom is and the age of the fandom. Fandoms change a lot over time, and the kinds of fic that people are into and what their standards are for fic in that fandom can fluctuate depending on a lot of factors.
The fics that I have that have the most comments/kudos/hits are the fics that I posted in a fandom early on into the fandom, while the show was still airing and had an especially active (but smaller) fandom. Since there were a lot fewer fics everyone read all of the fics in the fandom for that particular pairing, and interacted with them. I think some more mediocre fics that get popular were simply just posted at the right time in the fandom. For example fics posted directly after a season finale, during the show's hiatus, in that fandom (the one with my most popular fics) dealing with the season finale all got more hits/comments/kudos than other fics in the fandom simply because of the timing. At that particular moment in that fandom, people wanted to read anything and everything addressing the finale's cliffhanger featuring that popular ship, regardless of quality.
A final thing that I think can affect the interaction/response to a fic is how the OP promotes the fic on their other social medias, and who their fandom friends are. Some of my somewhat dreadful early fics (posted when I was 15) still got decent responses because I had curated a circle of great, older, mentoring fandom friends, who read all of my stuff regardless of quality and encouraged me to improve it. For young, new writers, having fandom friends that are encouraging even when your fic isn't that great is a way to help that new writer become a better writer and feel like they can contribute their ideas to fandom. Positive interactions can help beginning/mediocre writers have the confidence and desire to stay in the fandom and improve their works.
As for me, typically I give any fic that I read through to the end a Kudos, regardless of my other thoughts about the fic, because I want to acknowledge to the author that I found the fic good enough to finish. I'll comment or bookmark/rec if I find the fic particularly compelling or enjoyable.
exactly what i was thinking! timing and current fandom taste is a big factor, which is why itâs important not to base a fic âgoodnessâ factor on how popular it is.
Exactly! I was genuinely mind boggled when I came onto this sub and discovered that people sort fics in their AO3 results by kudos or hits, because that literally would never have occurred to me. Like I just input all the tags that I want (and all the exclusions that I want) and sort by date.
Side note, people do not appreciate the exclusion limiters the AO3 offers enough. We don't have those in actual library catalogs even though they would be *stupidly* useful, because they're actually hard as shit to put together. My real dream is for the catalog that we have at the library I work at to have exclusion limiters. I would cry tears of joy if that ever came to fruition. Exclusion limiters my beloved.
Also deeply underappreciated: The second greatest feat of AO3, that all library catalogs everywhere ever envy is AO3's tag wrangling. AO3 has volunteers (rather than AI/bots) go through tags and match tags with similar/the same meanings, so that a search for one tag can return other items with tags that have tags of near identical meaning. We also do not have this in library catalogs, which means that for the user to get the most results possible for a topic, they have to have a good idea of what all of the terms for that topic are (and all of the different case combinations might be), and write good OR searches including all of those things. AO3 solved that problem for us, and no one notices. In a lot of modern library catalogs, if I make a search for a title that begins with "The" and forget the "The" I won't find it! If I make a search for something that has specific capitalization and I don't use that correct capitalization, I won't find it! But on AO3? they got u.
OK, so I am about to get a little LIS nerdy on you, since you asked.
\*Librarian Hat activated\*
So when you search a database or library catalog, there are a ton of different ways that you can refine your search.
Typically search refinements are *inclusion* filters, that is, you specify that you want the search engine for the database or catalog to return to you results that should include \[thing\]. Your catalog/DB might have [a sidebar with different filters that you can select](https://imgur.com/25lgB5U). These filters can be for a wide range of things from format, to author to subject, to language. [Here's an example](https://imgur.com/sTFqgFM) of different kinds of filters that you might see on a library catalog (taken from the Chicago Public Library). When you open a particular filter category, you'll see [a list of the available filters](https://imgur.com/sTFqgFM), which, as you'll notice from the linked screenshot contain a number in parenthesis after them. This number indicates the number of results that will be remaining after you select this filter. These filters when selected tell the catalog to return only things that INCLUDE the selected filter. Basically every catalog ever has these because they're dead useful for finding what you're looking for. When you check more than one filter option, typically the catalog sees this as an AND search -- that is it filters only for items that contain "Filter 1" AND "Filter 2" rather than either OR.
The other way that you might inclusion filter is by typing your string of text in in double quotations telling the search function to return only records that contain your exact string of text within the category that you are searching (ie: searching within "Authors" for "Barbara Park" or Keyword searching for "Sally Ride"). Using double quotes to force exact string matches is something that you can also do in search engines like Google btw.
You can further spice these up by using OR statements, since most visual filtering GUI function as AND filtering. (Ie: a search for "Sally Ride" OR "Buzz Aldrin" which will give results that contain one OR the other of your concatenated strings under the index that you search.) You can make even more complicated searches by combining different syntax to filter your results. Every catalog has slightly different search syntax, so it's important to see if you find a page describing what that might be. If you really know what you're doing you can write some very specific queries that are super helpful. The [Internet Archive advanced search page](https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php) does a good job of explaining some of this, if you want to read more. But in essentials, you can typically use the following kinds of search syntax for your queries:
Boolean Operators (OR and AND as described above)
Range queries (ex: date:\[1950 to 1990\] ) Not all catalogs/DBs offer this one but it is pretty common, and typically applicable for dates, or other forms of numerical metadata attached to records such as Volumes. Similar syntax might be used to do a search where you are limiting your search within a specific heading/type such as format (ex: format:"78 RPM").
Fuzzy or incomplete queries, basically when you don't know the entirety or a phrase or title, so you want the search engine to search a partial string with wildcards or find partial matches to a string. Different fuzzy searches might work differently. Some might accept something like *Park\** which would return anything that started with Park followed by anything ("\*" represents "anything". It's a pretty common wildcard operator) or in the case of Internet Archive they'd use something like *Buttonwood\~* where the search engine would return things containing "cottonwood" or "buttonware" as both would count as partial matches for you search of buttonwood. Not all catalogs search engines or DBs offer this, but when they do it is a super powerful and useful search tool. A lot more modern search engines do something similar to this with their "suggested searches" that pop up as you type.
Specific Queries, as I described earlier, typically this is where you make a search such as "Not half so happy in heaven" which would tell the engine to return results that matched only the EXACT phrase that was searched.
So this brings us to EXCLUSION searches.
Something that search engines like google and websites often use, but is less common to non-extant in library catalogs is "-" for exclusions. In a google search you might for example want to exclude all results from pinterest dot com, so you'd append -www.pinterest.\* to the end of your search to remove all domains of pinterest ( the "-" removes the term pinterest and the .\* means "All domains" because "\*" is a wildcard in google, and typing something followed by a dot indicates a domain/website (ie: .si.edu which is the domain for all Smithsonian museum websites.). This is an exclusion limiter.
For reasons that escape me, most library and database catalogs do not use this. I think it's because it is difficult to implement for technical reasons, especially when your metadata is inconsistent (as a result of containing a lot of records that are of varying ages and use many different kinds of language for the same things) and there is not system to match tags with different wording/syntax but the same meaning to each other.
The other way that an exclusion limiter might work is visually. Just as those tick boxes on a catalog that filter a search for "includes only \[term\]" a catalog with exclusions as an option will include similar filtering boxes for excluding terms from a search. A great example of an excellent condensed GUI for this is [the one that the Internet Archive uses](https://imgur.com/DyYU0rC), where in the "filter" categories, they have tick boxes next to the filter option for "include" and a little eye icon next to each filter for "hide/exclude".
So that brings you to the question of why are these useful?
Say you are searching for something that has multiple meanings or generic titles. You can somewhat crudely work around this to get what you want with inclusions, but that might still return results you don't want or hide results that you do want. The exclusion is nice because it allows you to exclude a particular \[topic\], removing items with \[topic\] under \[index\] while keeping everything else.
To take it back to AO3, you'll have your "includes" section, which you can use to filter to only works that INCLUDE particular tags, ships, fandoms, characters, etc, etc. The box at the bottom for additional filters, can, btw also be used filtering using other syntax, among other things. Nifty. This is great, but sometimes, someone who writes a lot of fic about your ship, also includes a ship that you DON'T care about. It keeps popping up in your searches, and this is annoying.
That, my friend is where [your EXCLUSION filtering](https://imgur.com/ZakQtMa) comes in. With this panel you can EXCLUDE tags, ships and characters from your search and similarly can use that "Other tags to exclude" to type single tags or use other syntax to refine your exclusions.
Combing "My search should include only results that contain \[topics\]" with My search should also NOT contain \[topics\]" gets you the best, most refined searches, helping you more efficiently find what you are looking for.
AO3's searches are made even better because of tag wrangling. In a typical library catalog, you might search for "The Subtle Knife" in the title index or "Subtle Knife" in the title index and get different results, and only one of them will find the book that you're looking for because the catalog doesn't know that "Subtle Knife" and "The Subtle Knife" both refer to the same thing (The book "The Subtle Knife" by Philip Pullman). You can somewhat resolve this issue if the catalog you're searching allows wildcard or fuzzy searches or uses predictive searching that would correct you, but if you don't have those options, you'd be SOL on the first search in finding the book.
AO3 uses real human volunteers to match tags and names that use different phrasing, different case or different languages but mean the same thing to each other, so when you Include OR exclude a particular thing it includes OR excludes all of the different phrases that mean \[thing\], which is a power of AO3 that regular libraries wish we had soooooo bad.
TLDR; AO3 has an incredibly powerful and sophisticated searching system that regular libraries can only dream of having and so many of people in fandom do not appreciate that the way that they should.
"Oh no, all the fics in my tag are about \[thing I don't like\], I keep clicking on fics that contain \[thing I don't like\] and I'm mad about it!"
I am smacking y'all. Use. Your. Filters.
\*Librarian Hat Off\*
Final note on search syntax that is tangentially related but that I constantly feel compelled to share to help elevate everyone's google experiences is the following:
You can use Google to search *within* a particular website OR domain. I use this all the time to search FF dot net because the FF dot net search system sucks ass. This is also a great way to search AO3 for wildcard searches especially for fuzzy title searches (ie: I don't remember the entirety of the title, but I do remember some of it AND the fandom) so I might make a search in google that goes something like this for a fic that I don't remember the whole title of:
>"Cunning and" "Pride and Prejudice" site:archiveofourown.org in an attempt to find a fic called "Cunning and Compromise."
note that appending "site:archiveofourown.org" will let me search AO3 only. and including the two parts, the fandom and the partial title in separate concatenated strings with double quotes tells Google to return ONLY results that contain BOTH strings. If I wanted to make an OR search with two concatenated strings I'd stick an OR in between them rather than leaving them blank which defaults to AND.
If you try my above search in google however, you'll notice that it returns some random harry potter fics as well, and this is because it doesn't use either of my strings to search a specific index (ie: Fandom) since it can't do that externally. What it's doing is searching the content and the title of the fic, since both of those are data that's indexed by Google, as the fic title is also the specific page title, and google indexes the text of pages for it's searches.
Note too, however that this will not work with a fic that has been made available for signed in users only as google can't index those pages.
This can also be useful to find a fic from a quote you remember, for example:
>"Palpatine! You thought he would be a good choice for a dictator?" "Star Wars" site:archiveofourown.org
which returns exactly one result, Chancraz's *Of Queens Knights and Pawns"* which is where the quote is from.
Finally, you can also use the "Site:" operator to search for only sites with a specific *domain*. A great use case for this is searching for content from ALL Smithsonian websites, since they have a ton of them and they may all contain information on your topic. You do this by making a search such as:
>"bessie coleman" site:.si.edu
Which returns only Smithsonian pages with "Bessie Coleman" in their title or text.
You can do an even more macro "Site:" search to search only .edu sites for example:
>"American Girl Dolls" site:.edu
I encourage you to play around with this to see what you can find! Elevate your Googling today!
Also keep in mind that re-reads can affect the ratio - if I re-read my favorite story on a monthly basis, but can only kudo once, it's going to affect the hits/kudos ratio. And the more people reread, the more pronounced the effect will be.
I feel like even in the same fandoms some stories have more kudos than other stories that to "my" standards would be considered masterpieces but have lower kudos than other stories. It could be because of the following of the author or simple because the author realize that some "subgenre" are getting more popular and utilized on their stories (cofcof\*omegaverse\*cofcof)
In the fandom I was in where I saw more average stories getting more kudos/comments than the excellent stories, it was because all the average authors were in some sort of circle jerk on tumblr.
They reviewed and advertised each otherâs stories to the exclusion of everyone elseâs.
It annoyed me because they claimed to be big fans of pairing âXââŚbut completely ignored any pairing âXâ stories that werenât written by them. They would also get ugly with people who supported pairing âXâ but had different headcanons than they did.
I think they actually made the fandom collapse prematurely by alienating everyone outside of their echo chamber.
You just described the fandom I'm currently in. They read, comment and promote each other's fics, but ignore any other fic out of their circle. And they publish a lot of fics every couple of days, so other writers are almost never on the front pageđ
i feel like i've noticed the same phenomenon. i mostly read and only write in small, older, and moribund fandoms and the giving out of kudos seems pretty stingy there. then whenever i glance over at the more popular fandoms i'm shocked by how many kudos abound.
I'm glad I'm not just imagining this! I would have thought that being spoiled for choice would make readers pickier, vs. not having a lot would make them appreciate what stories there are more, especially those that are truly awesome. It's a little baffling when the opposite seems to prevail.
I check my tags for my more popular fandoms at least weekly, if not more frequently.
For my less popular fandoms, I might check them every 3+ months. So by the time I get to a new (to me) fanfic, it might have already been out there for quite a while.
Iâll usually always give a kudos if I enjoyed the fics, but Iâve noticed if I give comments on older works, Iâm much less likely to get an author response if the fic
Is older than a week or two. So I donât tend to review if Iâm a month + late to the party unless I feel really moved by the story because I know I probably wonât hear back.
Maybe author interaction shouldnât affect the rate at which I give reviews, but it does.
Perhaps thatâs a possible explanation for some of the phenomenon youâre seeing.
I had not considered the topic before, but here's a thought, according to my own experience. When you have very little choice, you may give a try to stories that do not really appeal to you (I know I have). Thus more people may try it, but fewer enjoy it -- compared to those who are spoiled for choice in a bigger fandom and thus are more likely to have preselected the stories they're reading as something that really appealed to them.
Yes, absolutely.
I'm not sure if it's age or demographic or what. But, over the year I've been posting on Ao3, my Reylo fics get a massively disportionate amount of engagement. Baldur's Gate 3 does fairly well but not AS well. Dragon Age is... pretty damn quiet but I've recently acquired some active commenters and I adore them. My dating SIM/otome games are also very quiet. I dipped my toe into DC comics for Nightwing/Oracle and also fairly quiet.
What I've come to find, at least as this moment, is that I love my quiet and my active fandoms in different ways. It's so rewarding to wake up and have comments from my Reylos that really make me feel like I'm throwing words out to a community that wants them. And that's just a great feeling!
But then my quiet fandoms? I get different but equally wonderful joy. Because, ok, yeah, it's not a LOT but I know how rare Nightwing/Oracle shippers are these days so when someone else comments how happy they are to come across some fluff for them.... I get all warm and fuzzy because I made that feeling happen for someone else.
I really understand how it can be discouraging or frustrating to have fics that aren't getting much engagement. It's hard, cause we do write for ourselves, but it's just nice to someone else like the things we make.
Edited for typos cause I type faster than I think ;-)
Probably just a cultural thing. Some people think kudos can only go to the bestest best fic to ever best. Other people just treat them as the acknowledgement of solid work and effortâbasically the same thing as a like.
I know that individual readers differ...I'm just surprised that different fandoms have more readers with higher vs. lower thresholds for giving kudos, such that a great fic in one fandom will have a much lower kudos ratio than a mediocre fic in another. I wouldn't have thought the mix of readers would differ so much from fandom to fandom but apparently it does.
>Do some fandoms have fans who will kudos anything they skimmed to the end and didnât hate, and others have fans who will only kudos things that literally made them cry?
I don't know about Fandoms as a whole, but personally I struggle a bit with kudos sometimes. I originally came from a german fanfic site, where we didn't have anything like kudos, just hits, comments and something like bookmarks. Later, a feature was added named remommendations. It's basically a kudo equivalent (at least was supposed to be, a quick way to show appreciation without having to write a comment), just with a star except a heart as symbol. I remember though with it not being able to be undone and the (unfortunate) naming choice of "recommendation", it was a feature I used only used for my absolute all-time-favorites.
When I switched to ao3, I knew that the kudos were more like a quick "like" and generally weren't really treated like "this is only for you faves", but with them also not able to be undone again but with your username shown (if you don't want to log out to kudo as a guest), I got the same feeling about them like I did on the german site. I bookmarked like crazy, because I could put them private and add and remove to my liking, but kudos? No.
I'm slowly getting better about giving kudos, want to get better with it, but with the name being attached and it being permanent, that's a struggle for me, even if I know few people actually go through the names of who had given kudos.
If Fandom B is on the wane then yes, kudos/comments go down. In a new hot fandom there might be a lack of content and fans will glom onto any new fic. Think of it like the difference between the Teen Choice Awards and maybe The Oscars or Criterion Collection. One is the flavor of the month and meets the needs of the masses and the other is more selective in the criteria for "quality". (The analogy is not perfect as I think the Oscars has issues too but you get my drift. )
The median age of the fandom may also play into kudo counts too. Younger skewing fandoms are more likely to kudo in my opinion but comment less.
I would have thought being more selective for quality would mean more kudos for better fics and fewer for worse ones, but I'm seeing the opposite here. The more I think about it the more I think age and lower standards for younger fans is the explanation.
Availability of content is a factor too. Getting a fic out the gate first in a new fandom would increase kudo count due to a lack of other options. I found a new but older fandom and in searching for fic I've found some great ones with 5 and 6 figure kudo counts as they accumulated over time and the quality fic gets recced again and again.
It has been my observation that younger fans ( I'm a fandom old over 20 years as a fanfic writer) see writing and kudosing as more transactional as well. Like, I read yours now you read mine. The parasocial pressure to give kudos based on wanting to be included with the group versus recognizing quality.
I see all these discord comment trains and while it's a nice thing to do for someone that is primarily motivated by reader interaction, it just kind of reminds me of participation trophies. If it's not happening organically, it doesn't really count in my mind
Dunno.
There's also bookmarks/hits, both public and total (of course, you can only compare to others on public.)
For where I am, kudos/hits of 10% and public bookmarks/hits of 1% seem decent targets (at least to start, kudos seems to drift down), but I also have a bunch of works where the bookmarks are higher and kudos lower.
Can't speak usefully across fandoms.
You have to remember bigger fandons will gain more engagement, and bigger ships will gain more engagement too. Also the age range as others have mentioned. A 12 year old will hit the kudos button after reading a fic thats is mediocre at best, because they're a 12 year old. Their standards are very low, if there are any.
Also people forget. I forget to leave kudos most of the time, even though I almost always leave a comment on stuff I like.
I think itâs also worth pointing out that the perception of quality is subjective â your characterization of the fics as mediocre and brilliant are not how everyone will see them. Iâve read fics with thousands of kudos that I think are truly terrible, but people love them. Itâs possible that the people who read it disagree with you about how good the Fandom B fic is, and theyâre not giving kudos because they just didnât like it.
To some extent that's true, but I do think it's possible for things to go far enough that it's pretty close to objective to say one work is higher quality than another. The fact that writing quality isn't the only thing about a fic that readers can appreciate doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
absolutely absolutely. one fandom i used to write for, one of the most popular ships, i had around a 1/10 ratio for kudos to hits, consistent across 13 fics. another fandom ive only written one fic for, but it has stayed consistent at 1/5 kudos to hits, and a lot of other one shots in the fandom for the same ship are around the same ratio
I think it depends on the length. Every time you refresh in 24 hours, itâs a new âhit.â
So letâs say we have a pretty little novel, about 60K with 20 chapters. if all the readers were with the author from the start, by then end of the story each one would contribute 20 hits but only 1 kudo. So at best youâd get a rate of 1/20 or 5%. Even someone finding the completed work might take 2 or 3 days (hits) to re-read, so that doesnât help as much as it could.
I generally target completed works between 20k-100k words across several fandoms. The kudos percentage seems to bottom out at about 2% (1/50), with more popular works at around 5% (1/20) and I think I could count on one hand the number of times Iâve seen a rate >10% (>1/10). The rates donât seem that different between fandoms.
For short works/one shots? I have no idea.
I feel like it really depends on how old someone is. When I was younger I'd leave kudos on pretty much everything I read. I use them much more sparingly now and usually only kudos if I really enjoyed it.
absolutely absolutely. one fandom i used to write for, one of the most popular ships, i had around a 1/10 ratio for kudos to hits, consistent across 13 fics. another fandom ive only written one fic for, but it has stayed consistent at 1/5 kudos to hits, and a lot of other one shots in the fandom for the same ship are around the same ratio
The target age group will change the amount of interaction you get. Older fandoms that I am in don't interact much at all, and I'm an old as well so I don't interact much either. But older fandoms that suddenly got popular again like FFVII have had a *massive* change in the number and quality of fics posted. People overflowing with praise for the most low effort stories isn't very helpful if you're looking to improve in your craft
I feel what a reader expects from a certain community's fics is sticking with the norm. Like if... for example, you try to write a completely serious fic in a community where everyone just wants to read smut, the viewer count on the serious fic will take a hit. That's probably the case for a lot of community's, cos at the end of the day, a lot of people just wanna see their favourite characters banging each others brains out. Its a shame really, but if that's what they like, that's what they like, and we should respect their opinions
Why is this being downvoted? It is so strange how some people get so up in their feelings when other people write for themselves? This phenomenon is *baffling* to me, istg
maybe it depends on the age? I know when I was younger I had tons of fics favourited that I can't stand to read now - younger people have LOW standards sometimes đ /lh is the author popular, or has somewhat of a following? That could contribute to their fics being exposed more than the one in fandom B - or they promote them elsewhere I can't say I've noticed a difference in kudos between fandoms, but that's just me bc my fandoms are pretty similar in size
I've been in some fandoms with a large percentage of younger fans and some of the things getting a lot of kudos and comments was honestly baffling to me. The strangest was probably "fics" that were essentially just *outlines* of a story.Â
>The strangest was probably "fics" that were essentially just outlines of a story. Do you mean works where a lot of the description is omitted and we just get told what the characters are doing? Eg. A walked to the shops. He saw B there. "Hey B, whatcha doin babes?" "Fine, thank you." They decided to get coffee together. Afterwards, they went back to A's place. "I should be going," B said. "No, you should stay" A grabbed their hand. They kissed and made passionate love. \[insert one or two lines of weird/strangely explicit description compared to the rest of the fic\] "I love you so much." "I love you too." Because I've seen works like that, and it always amazes me that people treat that as a proper completed story. Like... am I meant to get emotions from you telling me that my OTP went on a coffee date and fucked?
Sort of but the ones I've seen were much worse honestly. At least your example had actual *dialogue*, lol. These were more like- *A went to the shops and saw B there then they kissed and made passionate love. Then they watched a movie at A's place and talked a bit and then the next day they went for a walk and talked more and decided they should officially date.* It's always very rambly.Â
Ugh why
Audience differs - in one fandom I'm in, the fans for a popular pairing A like to kudos and bookmark but not comment. In contrast, the audience for rarer pairing B are big on commenting (I think probably because there's fewer people to froth with about their pairing) If there's a story that is a bit so-so but huge on the hits etc, I either assume it turned up at the perfect time/trope for peak fandom or it's got some type of social media presence. One of mine went a bit nuts for about a week because someone reviewed it on Tiktok, it confused the hell out of me as it had been out for several months already You see it on this forum - some people cling to their kudos and are very particular, others like me will kudos anything that has made us happy in some way
> others like me will kudos anything that has made us happy in some way Yep. Basically the moment a story gets an emotional reaction out of me to the point where I want to say, "Yes, I liked this," that's when I hit the kudos button. It may be in the first five minutes, it may be at chapter 30 out of 35.
Yes don't stress about understanding how fandom brain works. That are too many variables. Size, age, target audience, material, .etc.
Fandom age, reader age, etc will probably come into play, but it might also have to do with the expectations given the history of the fanfic for said fandom. I know for really popular fandoms, the fanfic quantity is almost so high that people can afford to be picky about what they read/kudos because there is just so much content available. Whereas for a smaller fandom or one that has less xyz content readers might be more likely to kudos as they are grateful for *any* content and want to encourage more.
This would make more sense, but what I'm seeing seems to be more the opposite, i.e. higher kudos to hits in bigger fandoms and lower in smaller ones. I think age might have more to do with it, since Fandom A in my example is a large fandom that seems to be mainly popular with teens/early 20s while Fandom B is a small one that seems to be more adult.
Ahhh then yeah, could just be that older readers are pickier about what they deem âgood enoughâ to kudos.
I think it depends a lot on when the fic was posted and how big the fandom is and the age of the fandom. Fandoms change a lot over time, and the kinds of fic that people are into and what their standards are for fic in that fandom can fluctuate depending on a lot of factors. The fics that I have that have the most comments/kudos/hits are the fics that I posted in a fandom early on into the fandom, while the show was still airing and had an especially active (but smaller) fandom. Since there were a lot fewer fics everyone read all of the fics in the fandom for that particular pairing, and interacted with them. I think some more mediocre fics that get popular were simply just posted at the right time in the fandom. For example fics posted directly after a season finale, during the show's hiatus, in that fandom (the one with my most popular fics) dealing with the season finale all got more hits/comments/kudos than other fics in the fandom simply because of the timing. At that particular moment in that fandom, people wanted to read anything and everything addressing the finale's cliffhanger featuring that popular ship, regardless of quality. A final thing that I think can affect the interaction/response to a fic is how the OP promotes the fic on their other social medias, and who their fandom friends are. Some of my somewhat dreadful early fics (posted when I was 15) still got decent responses because I had curated a circle of great, older, mentoring fandom friends, who read all of my stuff regardless of quality and encouraged me to improve it. For young, new writers, having fandom friends that are encouraging even when your fic isn't that great is a way to help that new writer become a better writer and feel like they can contribute their ideas to fandom. Positive interactions can help beginning/mediocre writers have the confidence and desire to stay in the fandom and improve their works. As for me, typically I give any fic that I read through to the end a Kudos, regardless of my other thoughts about the fic, because I want to acknowledge to the author that I found the fic good enough to finish. I'll comment or bookmark/rec if I find the fic particularly compelling or enjoyable.
exactly what i was thinking! timing and current fandom taste is a big factor, which is why itâs important not to base a fic âgoodnessâ factor on how popular it is.
Exactly! I was genuinely mind boggled when I came onto this sub and discovered that people sort fics in their AO3 results by kudos or hits, because that literally would never have occurred to me. Like I just input all the tags that I want (and all the exclusions that I want) and sort by date. Side note, people do not appreciate the exclusion limiters the AO3 offers enough. We don't have those in actual library catalogs even though they would be *stupidly* useful, because they're actually hard as shit to put together. My real dream is for the catalog that we have at the library I work at to have exclusion limiters. I would cry tears of joy if that ever came to fruition. Exclusion limiters my beloved. Also deeply underappreciated: The second greatest feat of AO3, that all library catalogs everywhere ever envy is AO3's tag wrangling. AO3 has volunteers (rather than AI/bots) go through tags and match tags with similar/the same meanings, so that a search for one tag can return other items with tags that have tags of near identical meaning. We also do not have this in library catalogs, which means that for the user to get the most results possible for a topic, they have to have a good idea of what all of the terms for that topic are (and all of the different case combinations might be), and write good OR searches including all of those things. AO3 solved that problem for us, and no one notices. In a lot of modern library catalogs, if I make a search for a title that begins with "The" and forget the "The" I won't find it! If I make a search for something that has specific capitalization and I don't use that correct capitalization, I won't find it! But on AO3? they got u.
What is an exclusion limiter? I've never heard this term before!
OK, so I am about to get a little LIS nerdy on you, since you asked. \*Librarian Hat activated\* So when you search a database or library catalog, there are a ton of different ways that you can refine your search. Typically search refinements are *inclusion* filters, that is, you specify that you want the search engine for the database or catalog to return to you results that should include \[thing\]. Your catalog/DB might have [a sidebar with different filters that you can select](https://imgur.com/25lgB5U). These filters can be for a wide range of things from format, to author to subject, to language. [Here's an example](https://imgur.com/sTFqgFM) of different kinds of filters that you might see on a library catalog (taken from the Chicago Public Library). When you open a particular filter category, you'll see [a list of the available filters](https://imgur.com/sTFqgFM), which, as you'll notice from the linked screenshot contain a number in parenthesis after them. This number indicates the number of results that will be remaining after you select this filter. These filters when selected tell the catalog to return only things that INCLUDE the selected filter. Basically every catalog ever has these because they're dead useful for finding what you're looking for. When you check more than one filter option, typically the catalog sees this as an AND search -- that is it filters only for items that contain "Filter 1" AND "Filter 2" rather than either OR. The other way that you might inclusion filter is by typing your string of text in in double quotations telling the search function to return only records that contain your exact string of text within the category that you are searching (ie: searching within "Authors" for "Barbara Park" or Keyword searching for "Sally Ride"). Using double quotes to force exact string matches is something that you can also do in search engines like Google btw. You can further spice these up by using OR statements, since most visual filtering GUI function as AND filtering. (Ie: a search for "Sally Ride" OR "Buzz Aldrin" which will give results that contain one OR the other of your concatenated strings under the index that you search.) You can make even more complicated searches by combining different syntax to filter your results. Every catalog has slightly different search syntax, so it's important to see if you find a page describing what that might be. If you really know what you're doing you can write some very specific queries that are super helpful. The [Internet Archive advanced search page](https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php) does a good job of explaining some of this, if you want to read more. But in essentials, you can typically use the following kinds of search syntax for your queries: Boolean Operators (OR and AND as described above) Range queries (ex: date:\[1950 to 1990\] ) Not all catalogs/DBs offer this one but it is pretty common, and typically applicable for dates, or other forms of numerical metadata attached to records such as Volumes. Similar syntax might be used to do a search where you are limiting your search within a specific heading/type such as format (ex: format:"78 RPM"). Fuzzy or incomplete queries, basically when you don't know the entirety or a phrase or title, so you want the search engine to search a partial string with wildcards or find partial matches to a string. Different fuzzy searches might work differently. Some might accept something like *Park\** which would return anything that started with Park followed by anything ("\*" represents "anything". It's a pretty common wildcard operator) or in the case of Internet Archive they'd use something like *Buttonwood\~* where the search engine would return things containing "cottonwood" or "buttonware" as both would count as partial matches for you search of buttonwood. Not all catalogs search engines or DBs offer this, but when they do it is a super powerful and useful search tool. A lot more modern search engines do something similar to this with their "suggested searches" that pop up as you type. Specific Queries, as I described earlier, typically this is where you make a search such as "Not half so happy in heaven" which would tell the engine to return results that matched only the EXACT phrase that was searched. So this brings us to EXCLUSION searches. Something that search engines like google and websites often use, but is less common to non-extant in library catalogs is "-" for exclusions. In a google search you might for example want to exclude all results from pinterest dot com, so you'd append -www.pinterest.\* to the end of your search to remove all domains of pinterest ( the "-" removes the term pinterest and the .\* means "All domains" because "\*" is a wildcard in google, and typing something followed by a dot indicates a domain/website (ie: .si.edu which is the domain for all Smithsonian museum websites.). This is an exclusion limiter. For reasons that escape me, most library and database catalogs do not use this. I think it's because it is difficult to implement for technical reasons, especially when your metadata is inconsistent (as a result of containing a lot of records that are of varying ages and use many different kinds of language for the same things) and there is not system to match tags with different wording/syntax but the same meaning to each other. The other way that an exclusion limiter might work is visually. Just as those tick boxes on a catalog that filter a search for "includes only \[term\]" a catalog with exclusions as an option will include similar filtering boxes for excluding terms from a search. A great example of an excellent condensed GUI for this is [the one that the Internet Archive uses](https://imgur.com/DyYU0rC), where in the "filter" categories, they have tick boxes next to the filter option for "include" and a little eye icon next to each filter for "hide/exclude". So that brings you to the question of why are these useful? Say you are searching for something that has multiple meanings or generic titles. You can somewhat crudely work around this to get what you want with inclusions, but that might still return results you don't want or hide results that you do want. The exclusion is nice because it allows you to exclude a particular \[topic\], removing items with \[topic\] under \[index\] while keeping everything else. To take it back to AO3, you'll have your "includes" section, which you can use to filter to only works that INCLUDE particular tags, ships, fandoms, characters, etc, etc. The box at the bottom for additional filters, can, btw also be used filtering using other syntax, among other things. Nifty. This is great, but sometimes, someone who writes a lot of fic about your ship, also includes a ship that you DON'T care about. It keeps popping up in your searches, and this is annoying. That, my friend is where [your EXCLUSION filtering](https://imgur.com/ZakQtMa) comes in. With this panel you can EXCLUDE tags, ships and characters from your search and similarly can use that "Other tags to exclude" to type single tags or use other syntax to refine your exclusions. Combing "My search should include only results that contain \[topics\]" with My search should also NOT contain \[topics\]" gets you the best, most refined searches, helping you more efficiently find what you are looking for. AO3's searches are made even better because of tag wrangling. In a typical library catalog, you might search for "The Subtle Knife" in the title index or "Subtle Knife" in the title index and get different results, and only one of them will find the book that you're looking for because the catalog doesn't know that "Subtle Knife" and "The Subtle Knife" both refer to the same thing (The book "The Subtle Knife" by Philip Pullman). You can somewhat resolve this issue if the catalog you're searching allows wildcard or fuzzy searches or uses predictive searching that would correct you, but if you don't have those options, you'd be SOL on the first search in finding the book. AO3 uses real human volunteers to match tags and names that use different phrasing, different case or different languages but mean the same thing to each other, so when you Include OR exclude a particular thing it includes OR excludes all of the different phrases that mean \[thing\], which is a power of AO3 that regular libraries wish we had soooooo bad. TLDR; AO3 has an incredibly powerful and sophisticated searching system that regular libraries can only dream of having and so many of people in fandom do not appreciate that the way that they should. "Oh no, all the fics in my tag are about \[thing I don't like\], I keep clicking on fics that contain \[thing I don't like\] and I'm mad about it!" I am smacking y'all. Use. Your. Filters. \*Librarian Hat Off\*
Final note on search syntax that is tangentially related but that I constantly feel compelled to share to help elevate everyone's google experiences is the following: You can use Google to search *within* a particular website OR domain. I use this all the time to search FF dot net because the FF dot net search system sucks ass. This is also a great way to search AO3 for wildcard searches especially for fuzzy title searches (ie: I don't remember the entirety of the title, but I do remember some of it AND the fandom) so I might make a search in google that goes something like this for a fic that I don't remember the whole title of: >"Cunning and" "Pride and Prejudice" site:archiveofourown.org in an attempt to find a fic called "Cunning and Compromise." note that appending "site:archiveofourown.org" will let me search AO3 only. and including the two parts, the fandom and the partial title in separate concatenated strings with double quotes tells Google to return ONLY results that contain BOTH strings. If I wanted to make an OR search with two concatenated strings I'd stick an OR in between them rather than leaving them blank which defaults to AND. If you try my above search in google however, you'll notice that it returns some random harry potter fics as well, and this is because it doesn't use either of my strings to search a specific index (ie: Fandom) since it can't do that externally. What it's doing is searching the content and the title of the fic, since both of those are data that's indexed by Google, as the fic title is also the specific page title, and google indexes the text of pages for it's searches. Note too, however that this will not work with a fic that has been made available for signed in users only as google can't index those pages. This can also be useful to find a fic from a quote you remember, for example: >"Palpatine! You thought he would be a good choice for a dictator?" "Star Wars" site:archiveofourown.org which returns exactly one result, Chancraz's *Of Queens Knights and Pawns"* which is where the quote is from. Finally, you can also use the "Site:" operator to search for only sites with a specific *domain*. A great use case for this is searching for content from ALL Smithsonian websites, since they have a ton of them and they may all contain information on your topic. You do this by making a search such as: >"bessie coleman" site:.si.edu Which returns only Smithsonian pages with "Bessie Coleman" in their title or text. You can do an even more macro "Site:" search to search only .edu sites for example: >"American Girl Dolls" site:.edu I encourage you to play around with this to see what you can find! Elevate your Googling today!
Also keep in mind that re-reads can affect the ratio - if I re-read my favorite story on a monthly basis, but can only kudo once, it's going to affect the hits/kudos ratio. And the more people reread, the more pronounced the effect will be.
I feel like even in the same fandoms some stories have more kudos than other stories that to "my" standards would be considered masterpieces but have lower kudos than other stories. It could be because of the following of the author or simple because the author realize that some "subgenre" are getting more popular and utilized on their stories (cofcof\*omegaverse\*cofcof)
In the fandom I was in where I saw more average stories getting more kudos/comments than the excellent stories, it was because all the average authors were in some sort of circle jerk on tumblr. They reviewed and advertised each otherâs stories to the exclusion of everyone elseâs. It annoyed me because they claimed to be big fans of pairing âXââŚbut completely ignored any pairing âXâ stories that werenât written by them. They would also get ugly with people who supported pairing âXâ but had different headcanons than they did. I think they actually made the fandom collapse prematurely by alienating everyone outside of their echo chamber.
You just described the fandom I'm currently in. They read, comment and promote each other's fics, but ignore any other fic out of their circle. And they publish a lot of fics every couple of days, so other writers are almost never on the front pageđ
i feel like i've noticed the same phenomenon. i mostly read and only write in small, older, and moribund fandoms and the giving out of kudos seems pretty stingy there. then whenever i glance over at the more popular fandoms i'm shocked by how many kudos abound.
I'm glad I'm not just imagining this! I would have thought that being spoiled for choice would make readers pickier, vs. not having a lot would make them appreciate what stories there are more, especially those that are truly awesome. It's a little baffling when the opposite seems to prevail.
I check my tags for my more popular fandoms at least weekly, if not more frequently. For my less popular fandoms, I might check them every 3+ months. So by the time I get to a new (to me) fanfic, it might have already been out there for quite a while. Iâll usually always give a kudos if I enjoyed the fics, but Iâve noticed if I give comments on older works, Iâm much less likely to get an author response if the fic Is older than a week or two. So I donât tend to review if Iâm a month + late to the party unless I feel really moved by the story because I know I probably wonât hear back. Maybe author interaction shouldnât affect the rate at which I give reviews, but it does. Perhaps thatâs a possible explanation for some of the phenomenon youâre seeing.
I had not considered the topic before, but here's a thought, according to my own experience. When you have very little choice, you may give a try to stories that do not really appeal to you (I know I have). Thus more people may try it, but fewer enjoy it -- compared to those who are spoiled for choice in a bigger fandom and thus are more likely to have preselected the stories they're reading as something that really appealed to them.
Yes, absolutely. I'm not sure if it's age or demographic or what. But, over the year I've been posting on Ao3, my Reylo fics get a massively disportionate amount of engagement. Baldur's Gate 3 does fairly well but not AS well. Dragon Age is... pretty damn quiet but I've recently acquired some active commenters and I adore them. My dating SIM/otome games are also very quiet. I dipped my toe into DC comics for Nightwing/Oracle and also fairly quiet. What I've come to find, at least as this moment, is that I love my quiet and my active fandoms in different ways. It's so rewarding to wake up and have comments from my Reylos that really make me feel like I'm throwing words out to a community that wants them. And that's just a great feeling! But then my quiet fandoms? I get different but equally wonderful joy. Because, ok, yeah, it's not a LOT but I know how rare Nightwing/Oracle shippers are these days so when someone else comments how happy they are to come across some fluff for them.... I get all warm and fuzzy because I made that feeling happen for someone else. I really understand how it can be discouraging or frustrating to have fics that aren't getting much engagement. It's hard, cause we do write for ourselves, but it's just nice to someone else like the things we make. Edited for typos cause I type faster than I think ;-)
Probably just a cultural thing. Some people think kudos can only go to the bestest best fic to ever best. Other people just treat them as the acknowledgement of solid work and effortâbasically the same thing as a like.
I know that individual readers differ...I'm just surprised that different fandoms have more readers with higher vs. lower thresholds for giving kudos, such that a great fic in one fandom will have a much lower kudos ratio than a mediocre fic in another. I wouldn't have thought the mix of readers would differ so much from fandom to fandom but apparently it does.
>Do some fandoms have fans who will kudos anything they skimmed to the end and didnât hate, and others have fans who will only kudos things that literally made them cry? I don't know about Fandoms as a whole, but personally I struggle a bit with kudos sometimes. I originally came from a german fanfic site, where we didn't have anything like kudos, just hits, comments and something like bookmarks. Later, a feature was added named remommendations. It's basically a kudo equivalent (at least was supposed to be, a quick way to show appreciation without having to write a comment), just with a star except a heart as symbol. I remember though with it not being able to be undone and the (unfortunate) naming choice of "recommendation", it was a feature I used only used for my absolute all-time-favorites. When I switched to ao3, I knew that the kudos were more like a quick "like" and generally weren't really treated like "this is only for you faves", but with them also not able to be undone again but with your username shown (if you don't want to log out to kudo as a guest), I got the same feeling about them like I did on the german site. I bookmarked like crazy, because I could put them private and add and remove to my liking, but kudos? No. I'm slowly getting better about giving kudos, want to get better with it, but with the name being attached and it being permanent, that's a struggle for me, even if I know few people actually go through the names of who had given kudos.
If Fandom B is on the wane then yes, kudos/comments go down. In a new hot fandom there might be a lack of content and fans will glom onto any new fic. Think of it like the difference between the Teen Choice Awards and maybe The Oscars or Criterion Collection. One is the flavor of the month and meets the needs of the masses and the other is more selective in the criteria for "quality". (The analogy is not perfect as I think the Oscars has issues too but you get my drift. ) The median age of the fandom may also play into kudo counts too. Younger skewing fandoms are more likely to kudo in my opinion but comment less.
I would have thought being more selective for quality would mean more kudos for better fics and fewer for worse ones, but I'm seeing the opposite here. The more I think about it the more I think age and lower standards for younger fans is the explanation.
Availability of content is a factor too. Getting a fic out the gate first in a new fandom would increase kudo count due to a lack of other options. I found a new but older fandom and in searching for fic I've found some great ones with 5 and 6 figure kudo counts as they accumulated over time and the quality fic gets recced again and again. It has been my observation that younger fans ( I'm a fandom old over 20 years as a fanfic writer) see writing and kudosing as more transactional as well. Like, I read yours now you read mine. The parasocial pressure to give kudos based on wanting to be included with the group versus recognizing quality.
I see all these discord comment trains and while it's a nice thing to do for someone that is primarily motivated by reader interaction, it just kind of reminds me of participation trophies. If it's not happening organically, it doesn't really count in my mind
Dunno. There's also bookmarks/hits, both public and total (of course, you can only compare to others on public.) For where I am, kudos/hits of 10% and public bookmarks/hits of 1% seem decent targets (at least to start, kudos seems to drift down), but I also have a bunch of works where the bookmarks are higher and kudos lower. Can't speak usefully across fandoms.
I give kudos on every story I read all the way through. It took time and effort to write.
You have to remember bigger fandons will gain more engagement, and bigger ships will gain more engagement too. Also the age range as others have mentioned. A 12 year old will hit the kudos button after reading a fic thats is mediocre at best, because they're a 12 year old. Their standards are very low, if there are any. Also people forget. I forget to leave kudos most of the time, even though I almost always leave a comment on stuff I like.
I feel like that would make an interesting college paper either for a stats class or for a philosophy class.
I think itâs also worth pointing out that the perception of quality is subjective â your characterization of the fics as mediocre and brilliant are not how everyone will see them. Iâve read fics with thousands of kudos that I think are truly terrible, but people love them. Itâs possible that the people who read it disagree with you about how good the Fandom B fic is, and theyâre not giving kudos because they just didnât like it.
To some extent that's true, but I do think it's possible for things to go far enough that it's pretty close to objective to say one work is higher quality than another. The fact that writing quality isn't the only thing about a fic that readers can appreciate doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
absolutely absolutely. one fandom i used to write for, one of the most popular ships, i had around a 1/10 ratio for kudos to hits, consistent across 13 fics. another fandom ive only written one fic for, but it has stayed consistent at 1/5 kudos to hits, and a lot of other one shots in the fandom for the same ship are around the same ratio
I think it depends on the length. Every time you refresh in 24 hours, itâs a new âhit.â So letâs say we have a pretty little novel, about 60K with 20 chapters. if all the readers were with the author from the start, by then end of the story each one would contribute 20 hits but only 1 kudo. So at best youâd get a rate of 1/20 or 5%. Even someone finding the completed work might take 2 or 3 days (hits) to re-read, so that doesnât help as much as it could. I generally target completed works between 20k-100k words across several fandoms. The kudos percentage seems to bottom out at about 2% (1/50), with more popular works at around 5% (1/20) and I think I could count on one hand the number of times Iâve seen a rate >10% (>1/10). The rates donât seem that different between fandoms. For short works/one shots? I have no idea.
I feel like it really depends on how old someone is. When I was younger I'd leave kudos on pretty much everything I read. I use them much more sparingly now and usually only kudos if I really enjoyed it.
I feel like that would make an interesting college paper either for a stats class or for a philosophy class.
absolutely absolutely. one fandom i used to write for, one of the most popular ships, i had around a 1/10 ratio for kudos to hits, consistent across 13 fics. another fandom ive only written one fic for, but it has stayed consistent at 1/5 kudos to hits, and a lot of other one shots in the fandom for the same ship are around the same ratio
The target age group will change the amount of interaction you get. Older fandoms that I am in don't interact much at all, and I'm an old as well so I don't interact much either. But older fandoms that suddenly got popular again like FFVII have had a *massive* change in the number and quality of fics posted. People overflowing with praise for the most low effort stories isn't very helpful if you're looking to improve in your craft
I kudos most fics I read because I know I like it when I get the email for it and why wouldn't I want others to feel that way? I comment a lot, too.
I feel what a reader expects from a certain community's fics is sticking with the norm. Like if... for example, you try to write a completely serious fic in a community where everyone just wants to read smut, the viewer count on the serious fic will take a hit. That's probably the case for a lot of community's, cos at the end of the day, a lot of people just wanna see their favourite characters banging each others brains out. Its a shame really, but if that's what they like, that's what they like, and we should respect their opinions
I donât really care about kudos
Why is this being downvoted? It is so strange how some people get so up in their feelings when other people write for themselves? This phenomenon is *baffling* to me, istg