Earlier this week, I ran a Twitter poll on comment replies and invited discussion on it. The objective was to find out whether people expect replies to their comments on fics, whether it influences their engagement or opinion with the fic/author, and how/why.
As you can see, I received 154 votes and the results were overwhelmingly in favour of nice, but not necessary…
…but the variety of elaborations really surprised me, and it was very interesting to sift through replies. Here are some of the key points. All quotes are pretty much directly from what people sent me in response to the poll.
1. The bottom line is: most people, as commenters, do not expect comment replies.
Even if they say yeah, it’s nice. They don’t expect it.
This was usually for one of two reasons, the first being that authors are simply not obliged to reply (or to do anything, really).
It’s definitely a no from me. I don’t consider the OP has to take all that time to reply when they already gave us the fic in the first place.
Since authors have their own lives, I wouldn’t know what they’re feeling etc. Getting a reply to a comment is a nice surprise imo.
The author has already done their part in writing and sharing and they don’t owe you anything for enjoying their work. If they want to step away after that then so be it.
this is really cool and worth reading if this is something you worry about (like i do) or even just if you’re interested in fandom etiquette~. i have historically been bad at replying to comments because it makes me anxious (note: everything makes me anxious, and i love receiving comments), but i do like making it so that people don’t just feel like they’re talking to a void when they’re commenting, so i want to get better at it.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 