"No comment"

[LargoKitt]

Bit of a puzzle: My new Daughter of Lilith series is getting zippity comments. Not really important, but the series seems to be liked. Got high ratings. People favorited it. Non-human category. Don't know if that counts for anything. I have noticed a 'sort of' phenomenon and that is several of my highest rated stories get no comments. Of course most comments anywhere are: "Looking forward to more." or something like "Disappointed in how it went." I figure if people click in, don't get the rise they want, and click out they are certainly not going to comment. "How To stories" get comments because people want to share their wisdom, endorse the POV, or say I've got it all wrong. Of course the most frequent comments are on 'cheating wives' themes with a redundanta chorus of 'fuck the bitch'. (Hmmm, I need to write a cheating husband story and see how many 'fuck the bastard' comments I get.)

 

[THBGato]

I'm wondering if there is something going on with comments at the moment, similar to the pending-purgatory story-side i.e. comments getting stuck in moderation.

No real evidence, just a hunch.

 

[PennameWombat]

I have five stories in NonHuman. They have a combined total of 14 comments (max for any one of them is five comments), but all range in ratings from 4.5 to over 4.8.

Most categories seem to engender few comments, at least my readers are definitely not effusive. Of my 56 stores, my two with the most comments are in First Time and Fetish, both with 10. I have no stories in LW nor I/T, which seem to draw the most.

 

[RocketGrunt]

Comments in general are down. Some is that they are taking longer to process for a lot of people, but I think a huge part is that the new categories page doesn't have a "recent comments" section at all, and it isn't updating the "most talked about stories this week."

In the Sci-fi Fantasy section, for over a month it's been telling me that the "Most Talked About Sci-Fi and Fantasy Stories This Week" include a story with just nine comments. Now first of all, the story has 12 comments, not 9. But importantly the story came out on October 7th and hasn't had any new comments in three weeks. The second lowest reported actually does have only 11 comments, but again it was posted on the 7th of October. The highest is listed as 248 comments, but the story is up to 303 comments now, and it's a story that went live on 02/27/2025.

In short, the "most talked about" section of the page is stuck giving us a snapshot of whatever comments were going live on one day in early October and hasn't updated since. Not only are comments not shown, but the stories that are getting comments are not shown. This almost certainly has a suppression effect on comments, because people don't see other comments happening. When there were new comments being displayed on the category page it would spark conversations between commenters. People would agree and disagree with other commenters. People would notice comments that were intriguing and they would read the stories to see what the excitement was about. Obviously that's all going to happen less now.

TL;DR: New Comments are now hidden from most readers, so it's not really a surprise that readers are making less comments.

 

[MrPixel]

I see sort of the same situation. Comments on my stuff, mostly in GS, are excruciatingly rare. And brief, but almost always positive. I'll take it.

 

[onehitwanda]

So many of the site's "window" functions appear to be inaccurate at the moment. Some are farcical.