rivers_bend

I love discussing it, too! It's super interesting to me. I've always loved sociology, and all this stuff is fascinating. But yes. people do sometimes choose to wank about it.

Based on some of the fics I've read that do have hit counters, I think for a lot of people, for every one person commenting there are 100 who don't. Or more. for others I think the ratio is a lot lower. And that is something that really fascinates me. But there is no way to study that at all without creating wank and bad feelings.

When I first came to LJ I got involved with a beta who was OBSESSIVE to a truly terrifying degree with marketing her (and as an extension my) fanfic. strict rules about days and times of posting, where/how to crosspost, and re-pimping in her own journal. A lot of it I didn't agree with, because there is a big difference between marketing and pushing yourself on people. But the result is that while I have a straightforward confidence about my skills as a writer (and I think a pretty good idea of where my strengths and weaknesses lie in that regard), I have no confidence at all in my skills as a poster. To the point that if I do not get an "expected" number of comments on a fic, my thought is never that it is not well-written, but that I should have posted a different day, time of day, to different comms. It's kind of insane. (or a lot insane)