Communities Do Comment: Expanding the 3C's of Commenting with SWG Data by Dawn Walls-Thumma  

More than a year and a half ago, I posted a revised and updated version of my 2018 article Why People Don't Comment: Data and History From the Tolkienfic Fandom, which included commenting data from FanFiction.net and Archive of Our Own (AO3). I was supposed to follow it up the next month with commenting data from the Silmarillion Writers' Guild (SWG), which is ostensibly easier to come by, seeing as I have access to the entire database and don't have to use various janky methodologies to coax data out of Wayback Machine captures. However, in September 2024, planning for Mereth Aderthad 2025 got seriously underway, and "next month" became "next month" became … until Mereth Aderthad was over, and then I kept Cultus Dispatches on hiatus until the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data was in. Well, May 2026 and it is "next month" at last!

I have been involved in the Tolkien fanfiction fandom for twenty-two years now, and I have never known a time when authors haven't angsted over comments. "Why People Don't Comment" was spurred by a moment in 2018 when evidence pointed to a drop-off in comments—cue deepening despair. And rightly so! I often say that I write for myself, but I post for you, my readers. Posting is a hassle, and if my work isn't being read, I might as well skip that part.

The commenting situation seems to have since improved but, at the time, many wondered, including me, why people weren't commenting. It seems such a small action that meant so much to the writers who received it. "Why People Don't Comment" was my attempt to use Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data to uncover the answer to the eponymous question.

The theory where I landed was summed up as "the 3C's": community, confidence, and commenting as a learned skill. As I investigated site data, I considered adding a fourth C—challenges—but quickly realized that what I was seeing in these data can likely be subsumed under community, which looms large as a factor that encourages people to comment.

A Brief History of Tolkien Fanfic Communities

Tolkien-based fanworks have existed since at least the late 1950s, and online Tolkien fanworks communities since at least the 1990s. However, as I have written before, it was the early 2000s that brought the Tolkien fanworks boom: the confluence of the Lord of the Rings films, increased access to home internet, and the advent of the participatory internet, or Web 2.0. I call this the first-wave online fandom. Fans were very eager to hang out together online, but for most of us, the rules for how to do that were being written. (Google Ngrams show the the word "netiquette" rapidly peaked in 1998, then tailed off for the next two decades.) There were not a lot of options for platforms that could be used to fan communities. Building something online required a measure of tech skill.

The second wave of Tolkien fanworks communities arose in the first years of the 2000s. Fan communities began adopting platforms like LiveJournal, Yahoo! Groups, and ProBoards. eFiction debuted in 2003. These made it possible for people without a lot of tech expertise—I am raising my hand here—to start fan communities. This was an era of proliferation of communities and sites. During the first and second waves, fanworks arose from community interaction: people socializing fannishly and producing fanworks, much of the time, at least partly in response to those interactions.

The third wave began in the 2010s as many of those independent groups and sites began to close down or die of inactivity. Fan-unfriendly decisions by platforms like LiveJournal and the demise of eFiction made it harder to start an independent community, ushering in an era of consolidation as a lack of options pushed fans toward large, multifandom platforms. AO3 opened in 2008. Tumblr became a central Tolkien fandom space in 2012. These would become the Two Towers of Tolkien fandom with most fans using both. What set Tumblr and AO3 apart from earlier platforms, however, was that they did not arise from fan communities. They were more like the agora: open to everyone and reaching a vast audience but without offering much in the way of more affable connections.

In my "Why People Don't Comment" article, I suggested that shifts to platforms disconnected from fan communities—Tumblr and AO3, mostly—are part of the reason why comments dropped off in the first part of the 2010s. When fanworks archives—and I use that term loosely to include any platform used to share fanworks—were associated with fan communities, creators often knew (or were at least familiar with) each other. The agora-like vastness of Tumblr and AO3 offered a potential audience size inconceivable to that point but with a catch: much like approaching a stranger in a big city feels uncomfortable—even risky—commenting on a large site where most people were unknowns likewise felt more difficult.

Changes in Commenting Behavior Over Time

Looking at comment counts over time corroborates that access to communities potentially influences commenting behavior. In the original article, I looked at comment counts for AO3; this time, I expanded that to the SWG as well.

I looked at comments on single-chapter, English-language written fanworks posted on the SWG and AO3 July 22 for each year that the archive's Silmarillion section was open (2007 for the SWG and 2011 for AO3 through 2025 for both). I chose July 22 because it was unremarkable, without regular holidays in the English-speaking world and little overlap with the school calendar in Anglophone countries. There are also no major fandom events happening at this time, such as the Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang, that might produce changes in commenting behavior (though Mereth Aderthad in 2025 possibly explains the SWG's data that year). I counted only top-level comments beginning on July 22 until I had at least ten data points. If I had to proceed forward on the calendar beyond July 22, I counted comments on all eligible works posted on that date. All averages are median.

The graph above shows an overall trend where comments on the SWG tended to be high for the first few years of the archive's existence before plateauing in the 2010s through present. AO3 shows the opposite trend: a low number of comments (especially considering that hit counts on fanworks tend to be much higher on AO3 than the SWG) that have gradually trended upward in the last several years.

Where the graph becomes interesting is when considering other fandom history alongside it. 2010 was the last year that the SWG had significant amounts of activity in its Yahoo! Group, the initial platform used by the group for most of its community interactions. Commenting drops off at this point as well. Was this because of a lack of participation in the group's community space? Or did the dropoff on both the archive (in terms of comments) and the Yahoo! Group show diminishing activity in the Silmarillion fic fandom overall?

In 2012, two important things happened: the first Hobbit film was released in theaters, and Tolkien fandom migrated to Tumblr. These were the years that provoked the original "Why People Don't Comment" article, where people accustomed to the higher comment counts of the 2000s were wondering what happened. Certainly, with the Hobbit films, interest in the Tolkien fandom was spiking; why weren't comment counts keeping pace with more clicks, more readers, more interest?

Discord started in 2015. I have not found research documenting the fandom migration to Discord as I have for Tumblr (it probably exists), but the SWG opened its Discord in 2018, which means that the platform had achieved a critical mass in the Tolkien fic fandom (we don't open "social satellites" lightly), and toward the end of the year, Tumblr issued its ban on adult content, which was likely to further drive fandom activity toward Discord. This is around the time when comments on AO3 begin to trend upward.

There are certainly many ways to read this (and the possibility that the sampling method I've used is still too small to smooth out the leaps and troughs that remain obvious on the graph. Data analysis rarely has a terminus, and adding additional "unremarkable" dates to the methodology would be valuable moving forward.) What I see, through the lens of my 3C's theory, is that when platforms for building fandom communities are in widespread use, comments increase. When those platforms are not widely used—the years between the demise of Yahoo! Groups and the rise of Discord—comments decrease.

Challenges and Community

I was curious if people's commenting behavior changed on the SWG when the fanwork was created as part of our site challenges. The SWG has run a regular challenge since September 2005, making it one of the longest-enduring features of our group. To wit, challenges are older even than the website—part of the highly community-centric second-wave fic fandom.

To analyze how commenting behavior changes (or doesn't) for challenge fanworks, I pulled comment data for all fanworks posted to the SWG archive beginning on 15 April 2021, when the Queens of the Quill challenge began. On 9 April, we had reopened our archive after rebuilding it in Drupal, and Queens of the Quill was the first challenge to run in its entirety on the rebuilt site. While we migrated all comment data from the earlier eFiction site, I decided not to include it because the possibility of error was too high. Before running the data, I reviewed it to eliminate comments posted on challenges and new items and comments posted as part of moderator documentation. I pulled the data on 27 April 2026.

In those just-over-five years, readers posted 4,415 top-level comments to the archive. The rebuilt SWG archive allows for threaded comments, so any comment can be replied to by anyone, allowing for conversations in the comments. A top-level comment is written in response to the fanwork, not as a reply to another comment.

In that same timeframe, 1,443 fanworks were posted to the SWG archive. Of them, 738 were challenge fanworks—or 51%, just over half. Presumably, if challenges don't impact people's commenting behavior, then roughly half of comments would be made on challenge fanworks as well. Instead, readers and viewers comment much more frequently on challenge fanworks than they do non-challenge fanworks: 69% of comments were left on challenge fanworks. In terms of stats that creators look for, the average fanwork on the SWG that was not created for a challenge receives just under two comments, but the average challenge fanwork receives more than twice that, with four comments.

The easiest explanation for why challenge fanworks receive more comments is the stamps we give out as a "reward" for commenting on challenge fanworks. However, if the long history comment angst shows anything, it is that readers cannot be easily goaded into leaving comments, i.e., I doubt that a tiny graphic on a member's profile is going to serve as that much of an incentive, especially since—as my research has demonstrated—commenting is also a product of confidence and skill. Neither magically appears because we offer a PNG postage stamp.

Challenges are a manifestation of community. First, by participating in a challenge, a creator signals that they are interested in joining a community activity. The SWG archive is, after all, just that: an archive. People can and do use it simply as a place to post fanworks without engaging in the community beyond that. (Especially when AO3 is receiving bad press, we see an uptick in registrations where members explicitly state that they are looking for a second site in which to backup their Tolkien fanworks.) When a creator participates in a challenge, however, they are engaging with the group as more than just an archive. They are signaling their awareness of community activities and their interest in creating fanworks alongside other SWG members.

Beyond that, the challenge process remains communal. Participants often request prompts in a communal setting. Then the time-delimited process of making a fanwork begins for everyone. If a challenge is proving difficult or if the words just pour out as though already written, these experiences are often shared with the community; people commiserate because many of them are completing the same challenge. It is the same reason people get together to do any endeavor that could just as easily be completed solo. Finally, creators share their challenge fanworks with the community. The creative process—one that is typically independent, even lonely—becomes communal through challenges. And to wind the process up, challenge fanworks are tagged as such on the archive, and creators receive a stamp on their profile for each challenge they complete, providing small but meaningful symbols of community membership.

Challenge creators are also more likely to be involved in other community endeavors. For instance, they are frequently participants in discussions on the Discord. They are often volunteers on the SWG or for other fandom events. They often join for communal events like instadrabbling or live readings. All of these things help dissolve the awkwardness that arises when a reader stares at the comment box on a fanwork by an author they don't know.

Conclusion … or How to Get More Comments

I used to tell people who wanted more comments that they had to leave comments to receive comments. I was wrong. This was much too simple, as many people who commented hundreds of times to rarely receive anything in reply can attest.

The truth is that what makes a reader pick up a story to read is complicated, and what makes that person reach out to the author with a comment is more complicated still. As I begin analyzing data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, I hope to shine light on what causes someone to choose one story over another another.

The original "Why People Don't Comment" article is eight years old. Two Tolkien Fanfiction Surveys have passed since I wrote it, and I've done a lot more thinking and analysis of why people do what they do in the Tolkien fanfiction fandom. Generally, I stand by my conclusions there, the 3C's: community, confidence, and commenting as a skill. Increasingly, however, evidence points to the prominence of community as a factor. Community, it seems, would alleviate at least somewhat the other two. Even a reader who lacks the confidence to comment would possibly feel comfortable telling a friend that they enjoyed a story. Likewise, "commenting as a skill" broadens to include a variety of different responses other than literary analysis, which is sometimes viewed as the default when commenting to an unknown author. For instance, a comment to a friend might mention shared interests, allude to previous discussions, or simply celebrate the fanwork as an achievement—no literary analysis required.

I wish there was One Weird Trick that would double your comments overnight. Alas, the solution seems to be much bigger than even commenting: building and sustaining fandom communities. When people feel comfortable interacting with each other and know each other as people, they talk more, including about their fanworks. The good news is that vibrant communities are a reward in their own right.