DISCUSSION: Reviews versus Replies

[Gama]

As some of you will know, I used to be extremely active here some years ago and have been quite on/off here since then. Recently I've been more active here than I have been in some time. Since I've been back, I've noticed that things have changed somewhat, generally all for the better.

The chief thing I've noticed is that reviews are very different. They are generally much more methodical, detailed, and break down the fic they're reviewing to a much greater degree.

Now, these of course sound exclusively like good things (and they are!) but it made me think - is that all we're looking for when we post stories here and await comments on them? Personally, I think not. To illustrate why not I'm going to use the terms "reviews" and "replies" to mean different things (though there can be overlap).

Review - a (usually detailed) appraisal of the story you're commenting on, with feedback on what worked and what didn't, usually intended from a fairly objective standpoint and generally with a fair amount of detail, often split into sections (e.g. "plot", "structure", etc.), kind of like a book review - very useful for improvement and understanding how your own writing works and how you can improve it

Reply - a (usually less detailed) comment that generally makes specific comment on one or two of the interesting things about the latest chapter, perhaps makes some predictions about what they hope will be explored or what they predict will happen in future chapters, could be as little as "this is awesome, keep it up!", kind of like talking to a friend about a TV show you both watch - very useful for encouragement and feeling like part of a community

What I'm trying to say is that I think both of things have a really important place in any writing communities if they're going to produce successful writers (as I believe WW can and has) or help people improve a little bit or even just give people the opportunity to have some fun and share some stuff they've come up with. I think since I was last seriously active in WW it's become way better at 'reviews' but I see far fewer 'replies' than I used to.

I'd love to hear if you guys agree with the distinction I've drawn up, what you think of each (bear in mind you don't need to think one is better than the other - I certainly don't!), which you think is more common in WW, which you more often give, and anything else on this topic you might be interested in!

 

[Ambyssin]

I think that's a perfectly reasonable distinction and I'm definitely on the train of "any relevant comment is appreciated no matter the length." I think I tend to switch between saying "review" when referring to this stuff in general... and going with something broader like "comment" or "leaving my thoughts." That's the mindset that I tend to take anyway. I'm not leaving a review... because that implies I have expertise in that field. I don't. I've been looking at fics for, like, a year or so... and only started commenting last July. Instead, I'm just giving the author my thoughts. If something struck me as off enough to give me pause, I let them know. And if there's something I enjoyed, I try to let them know, too. I'd like to think that's reasonable but I'm so bad at doing words that I tend to ramble in my comments. So, I've definitely gotten ignored plenty of times. ^^;

 

[Gama]

@Ambyssin I totally agree and for the record I have always found your comments extremely helpful so thank you for them

 

[Arkadelphiak]

Hmm. I actually might be in a different camp on this issue.

I've found that "good shite, keep writing"-style reviews (i.e. "replies") are good for the ego, but not much else. Part of what makes the peer-review process so effective is that you allow other perspectives into your work. Take my boi Pavell, for example. He's known for making very in-depths reviews and not holding back. I look forward to his reviews because they really get to the meat of the issues with whatever I've posted. Yes, I do love a good ego boost, but ultimately, I want to improve my writing. Small replies are nice, and people can't be stopped from posting them, but I feel that if someone has read the fic already, it's not much effort to give a play-by-play of your thoughts. It's all a labor of love, you know?

 

[Persephone]

@Arkadelphiak

Could you perhaps post a review to give us an example?

 

[Arkadelphiak]

@Arkadelphiak

Could you perhaps post a review to give us an example?

fite me agenda

 

[Gama]

@Arkadelphiak I think "good for the ego but not much else" is a bit of an oversimplification, but even so - is that really a problem? I think it takes a lot of courage and vulnerability to share your creative work and a quick comment that essentially tells you "hey, this was worth sharing" can mean a lot. I'm certainly not saying that's better than a more in-depth review, but I think it has its place too.

Moreover, I don't think it's just about ego, as such. I think it lets you know that people are engaged and interested. Sometimes people who don't have a huge amount to say (and that's OK!) but it's still great to know they're there and to get a vague idea of what's interesting them. I think that community side of what I've termed "replies" can be really valuable.

Again, I think detailed, in-depth reviews are utterly invaluable and some that I've received in the past have changed my writing for the better forever and I will never forget them. I just think they are not the only value we can share with our comments within a writing community.

 

[Arkadelphiak]

@Gama you do make an excellent point there; lots of newcomers get nervous about posting on a forum. I feel like we don't get enough simple validation here on the WW (e.g. "replies"), which does cause people to question the quality of their work. I get what you're saying!

I think we need to re-evaluate our review system, namely, that reviews get proper points/credit (ex. the Review League), and replies get appreciated for what they're worth (maybe a small amount of points in the Review League?). Writing is a near-thankless job in itself, so I think we need to foster a community that prefers reviews over replies. You know?

 

[kintsugi]

Hmmmm! This is actually an issue I’ve mulled over quite a bit—I naturally write waaaay too much, so I apologize if I’ve stepped on any toes by being in the “review” camp without much help to the “reply” camp.

@Arkadelphiak I think "good for the ego but not much else" is a bit of an oversimplification, but even so - is that really a problem? I think it takes a lot of courage and vulnerability to share your creative work and a quick comment that essentially tells you "hey, this was worth sharing" can mean a lot. I'm certainly not saying that's better than a more in-depth review, but I think it has its place too.

I agree with your point on constructive ness/making the writer feel valuable (vs the intimidation of having half a page of text dropped on a prologue that you slaved over).

That being said, on the other side of the grass that is just as green, I crosspost on ff.net and pretty much all of the reviews are one-liners and “hey this is good”. Which, okay, felt good the first few times, but for all the people who didn’t bother reading or put the story down, how can I be better? I have a handful of critical readers on ff.net and I cherish them SO MUCH because at some point you can’t get full on “good shite”*. Heck, I introduced a lag between my updates here and my updates there so that I can post here, get all the kinks ironed out, and then post edited chapters there because the feedback I get here is much more comprehensive and robust.

*incidentally, this concept is also under fire at ff.net with massive debate over if you should post reviews or if that’s just being a flaming troll, but it’s a bit less of a nuanced discussion here

Again, I think detailed, in-depth reviews are utterly invaluable and some that I've received in the past have changed my writing for the better forever and I will never forget them. I just think they are not the only value we can share with our comments within a writing community.

I agree! I think the trick is just... who? Our community is small. Advantages that a community like ff.net would have is that with OVER 9(0),000 (!!!!) fanfics for just pokemon and lord knows how many readers, if even just 10% of them are the “reply” crowd, you can get a ton of that. Here, 10% of our active reviewers is probably Pav before breakfast + Pav after lunch. And I don’t know if you can really have it both ways—to introduce a bit of an extreme, I wouldn’t be able to take myself seriously if my first post was solely “this is great, keep it up” and my second post was back to my usual dissections of concrit (or vice versa), and I don’t know if the author would follow, either.

Maybe a bit of meeting in the middle? I try to put gentle gloves on for newer faces (although I’ve fallen off the bus a few times there too) and people whose work I’m less familiar with, but I can’t say that’s a perfect solution to the problem you’ve posed. At some point, I feel disingenuous in my encouragement if I’m posting the same thing for everyone, and when that’s the case, I usually just don’t reply at all.

 

[Ambyssin]

I think something that needs to be kept in mind is also a potential difference in user base. Speaking personally, my (possibly incorrect) assumption is that the vast majority of folks who leave short little comments on FFN may not be the types of people who can offer much in the way of feedback. I.e. they're a lot younger and they're not reading your fic with a critical eye so much as consuming it like one watches a move or TV show. It's entirely possible that they don't have all that great a grasp of writing mechanics but, to them, your stuff is more enjoyable than reading an actual literary classic because they don't have to write essays about it for grades and it's more easily accessible to them than grabbing a book.

On the flip side, forums are a bit antiquated in the grand scheme of the internet. We probably skew a bit older as far as members go... so that may, in turn, effect not only what kinds of comments we leave but how often we leave them. We're all busy... we've got lives to live... etc. I suppose as a middle ground to the whole reply vs. review, you could leave a short reply saying something like, "Hey, I just started reading X chapter and I'm liking it so far! I'm a bit busy at the moment, but I hope to come back and give you more detailed thoughts," and then later on leave concrete feedback. Maybe that'd help? *shrug*

... I think I just managed to confuse myself. I guess what I was trying to say is that I feel like fics posted on forums like this one are, on the whole, a lot different than what you'd find on FFN as far as subject matter goes. And I say that as someone who wrote a fic that, content-wise, is far more appropriate for FFN, but I focus my energy on putting it to forums. Which, with the way my brain works, makes me believe most reviews I get will lean on the harsher side. So, I'm always surprised when they're not harsh.

 

[AceTrainer14]

Ah, the reviews/replies discussion. I cannot count the number of times we have had this on the forum. It seems it comes up almost once a year, and still the question remains around what to actually do about it.

The tricky thing here is what sort of tone you want to give off: do you want to encourage someone to keep writing, or do you want to encourage them to write the best possible story they can? Whenever this topic comes up, I think of my own journey as a writer on the site. When I first started back when Gama was around and the reply-like reviews were more common, I had a lot of generally positive feedback because people were telling me that they liked my story. Obviously, that was extremely gratifying to hear and encouraged me to write more, but fast forward a few years and I really wish I had received more detailed feedback. The transition from 'I love your story' to 'there are some serious flaws here' happened very quickly even if the flaws had been there a while, so when I first got some more critical reviews my mind quickly went 'What are you on about? Everyone loves this!' Then, after several years of arguing, rejecting and fighting back against those claims, I finally realised that there were issues, but by that point I was too far in to simply stop and reboot the story or go back and edit everything naturally.

Do I wish I had never received positive reviews in the first place? Of course not, because if someone had told me my story was shit back in 2010, I probably would have stopped writing out of insecurity. But I do wish someone had said at the time 'Maybe tone down her personality a bit / give her some more purposeful flaws / don't blow up every building, that's a little much'. I have tried to find a balance between the two to be encouraging but also offer some advice, and it can be difficult.

Really though, I first became a moderator in about 2012 or so, and we have been having this conversation since then. I think the main thing I've noticed is less that people are always writing long reviews, but mostly that people tend to read a lot of chapters at once and comment on them in bulk. So really, it's a problem with readership moreso than reviews, and I am not sure how that aspect can change. If I was up to date with a story, read the latest chapter and liked it, I probably would only give a 'reply' in acknowledgement of having read it. However, if I read that chapter and there were issues with it, I'm not going to give the author a thumbs up and hope it all works out, as that doesn't really benefit anyone in the end.

 

[Persephone]

Ok I'm gonna do something more than shitpost here, even if that's maybe antithetical to the point of the thread.

I think of FFN and AO3 as estuaries (or nurseries, for the landlubbers). They have a lot of very new users and very new readers who mostly give each other simplistic feedback. Because encouragement is sort of what's needed for early teenagers (assuming literally no one lies about their age lol) who probably haven't engaged much with literature in their classes and definitely haven't had to do much in the way of writing. In the U.S., at least. So some of the basics of grammar and an encouragement to keep trying and slowly, slowly learning what they like and don't like from reading other stories.

The forums are the open ocean. There are comparatively few organisms and they tend to be much bigger. The minnows that need small little bites and a group to herd with are gonna die because the reviews are meant for the big fish trying to get a little bit bigger and there isn't quite as much opportunity to form informal social networks*. This is great for people who want to weed out the fan fic written by people still figuring out how to write in paragraphs, less so for the people still figuring out how to write in paragraphs.

It can seem a little brutal in the same way a semi-professional sports game is a little bit brutal for a toddler, or even a casual athlete. But I don't think that's inherently a bad thing? The forums have always been a little bit different from FFN and AO3 because they serve different purposes.

*actually not sure on socialization because FFN always felt really impersonal to teenage Athena and this place has a general chat thread and now a discord. Of course all forums have a fairly slow process for acclimating well, especially on a lit forum where some of the same people have been writing the same stories for more than half a decade, but the flip side of that is that I have some real, genuine friends from here. And that's coming from a girl allergic to positive feelings and thus naturally averse to friendship.

And, fine, a lot of people aren't quick to adopt newcomers into their circles but that's because newcomers come and go and it's hard to tell who's going to stay long enough to bother with until they've already stayed for a year+.


***

There's a discussion to be had on whether or not we should actually be an estuary-type community or whether it's possible to keep both models alive at once but that topic's a little bit more serious than I want to delve into at 1 in the morning.

 

[Beth Pavell]

I'm going to approach this from a slightly different angle.

As it happens, replies do earn points in the Review League. If you just so much as post a couple of sentences you earn 3pts. By way of comparison, my reviews usually earn somewhere between 7-11pts, so while reviews do earn more points, there's no reason why you can't steadily accumulate points for replies. If anyone has suggestions for changes to the points, we're willing to entertain them.

As far as forums go, as communities for fanfiction they are certainly not obsolete, though I suspect a lot of people around the internet haven't realised that yet. Modern social media, for all its pretence of community-building, just isn't designed for fanfiction. It's designed to throw up as much activity as possible in the form of little red alerts that pop up on someone's device. It's the slot-machine model. I don't think it's either desirable or useful for a fanfiction community to function like that.

It's true that we are a small community, and we have been as long as I have been here. We don't have many, if any, readers who are just readers and not also authors. And it's also true that we tend to have a lot of older members - members who usually get swamped with Uni work at some point, or swamped with work. So I absolutely agree that we can't dismiss short-form replies/reviews as being inferior to a "proper" review.

Ultimately as moderators, we can read member's views and debate them all day ... but the community lives and dies by its members. I'm quite happy for everyone to respond to stories the way they want to.

 

[AceTrainer14]

As it happens, replies do earn points in the Review League.

So I absolutely agree that we can't dismiss short-form replies/reviews as being inferior to a "proper" review.

This basically sums up any potential discussion around the original comment - people can post 'replies', people don't actively object or complain about them (I don't think I've had a review for 8ES since the awards, so if anyone wants to pop in say hey, I ain't going to bite your head off and demand a thesis). The issue is not whether they are allowed or acceptable or not, as, every time this discussion has come up over the last six years, it always gets pointed out that you can write short reviews/'replies' and no one is ultimately that bothered by them.

I don't think either one is better or inferior to the other. There is a question I suppose around which of these approaches is better for fostering a feeling of community, which I feel may be the real question being asked here (correct me if I'm wrong)

 

[canisaries]

An ideal review for me (both to give and to receive) is one that is constructive and polite. Constructive to help the writer improve and to stay honest, polite to let them down easy, encourage them to actually listen to the reviewer, motivate them to improve and generally just to not be a dick.

Replies more have the role of making the writer happy or even just aware that people are reading and interested. I feel like we could use more of those over here (I mean, unlike some other sites, short replies with not much more than "wow this is cool" are actually allowed) as I have a hard time believing they would take away from the actual reviews.

I have to confess, though, that I've been a lot more reply than review. I don't necessarily want it to be that way, but it's not that easy for me to find overarching issues or things done well to comment on them. This, and I can't really do a separate "review" in the traditional sense for all chapters of the same story, as the prose and characters are very likely to stay the same and I'd just be writing "yea what I said last time" over and over.

Lately I've also been struggling to find positive things to say for anyone and I don't know why. They must be there, or otherwise I wouldn't be reading, but I can't pinpoint them. Maybe it's got to do with my worse mood lately, I don't know.

 

[Gama]

I'm really pleased that this has generated such a discussion!

For the record, I don't think there is anything that can "be done" from an overall, structural point of view, and certainly not by the mods. (I was a WW mod once upon a time and as @AceTrainer14 has pointed out we certainly had this discussion a few times.)

I think it's healthy for us, as a community, to check in and think about what it is we want to each other and what we can give to each other. The main thing I've got from this thread (as I suspected I would) is that both reviews and replies have value to people.

One more point though is that often replies are easier to give out since they don't require you to read a story with such a critical eye (and is that really necessary anyway?) - I think giving out a reply (or obviously a review) is unambiguously better than giving out nothing!

 

[AceTrainer14]

(and is that really necessary anyway?

Yes, if you are hoping to improve and get better. If you are writing for fun, perhaps not, but if you are writing for fun, do you need a reply anyway? Are you still writing for fun and a good time if you need people to tell you they like your story to keep you going?

Replies are easy, and there is nothing to stop anyone from doing them. The fact that we don't get them goes back to my main point earlier that the problem here is reading, not reviewing. We have long had people say "I can't write long, critical reviews, I never know what to say!" To them, we have always said "Just tell them you like the story." The fact that has never happened despite this oft-repeated back and forth shows that the problem is not a review one but a laziness/motivation one. One could blame the fact that lengthy reviews becoming the norm perhaps makes people feel self-conscious about posting replies, but I think that's putting the blame on people who have actually made the effort to read and comment a lot. Everything I read, I comment on. I don't read with the aim to criticise, I read to enjoy, but that includes noticing flaws. If something doesn't make sense, if a character is a lazy caricature, if the dialogue makes me cringe, it's noticeable, and I'm not going to get to the end of that and say 'Great story!' for the sake of being nice. I wouldn't want someone to do that to me.

Often, when people complain about not having reviews, when they actually get them and they tend to point out issues, they either ignore them or respond negatively. There are a lot of people who don't want 'reviews', they want acknowledgement and praise, and ultimately I don't think a forum is the place to go for that.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

Hey, Gama - I'm continuously active on the forum for the first time since my stint in 2012 because you kept in touch and made the jump to come back yourself. For that, I will always write responses to your work. I'm glad that you're invested in the community again and posting threads like this. Stick around!

Warning: this went long while I wrote it. Oh dear.

I'm not sure of the utility or sense in dividing reader responses into 'replies' and 'reviews', but I have to say that I value both critical analysis and encouraging praise very much. Any demonstration of invested readership is a big deal for me, it always has been. If this distinction led to an uptick in active engagement by the invisible casual readership, then the consequentialist in me would advocate it strongly.

I see that people in this thread are generally taking the attitude that responses of any kind are welcome, but there's some comments about the importance of particular kinds. I think those comments might be informed by people's experience with receiving reader responses, and what they felt were lacking. After all, it's difficult to improve as a writer without honest, incisive critique, and it's difficult to stay motivated without sufficient evidence that people are reading and enjoying your work.

I don't think that the desire for validation and attention is an unreasonable one. Writing, particularly good writing, is hard work and takes time. Positive comments are often the only compensation for one's effort. It's all very well to suggest that fanfic authors should be entirely motivated by the purity of their devotion to the craft or the sheer joy of creating prose fiction, but in real terms your average content creator needs to feel like their work is worth the effort by way of evident readership. Not only that, but 'civil' criticism can be perceived harshly by insecure writers - it's one thing to be sternly polite, it's another thing to be gentle. I think perhaps the motivation for people who are encouraging 'replies' is a feeling that reviews are scarce rather than lacking in substance, whereas the opposite camp are satiated with insubstantial reviews and want more significant feedback.

I also think that there's something to be said for toughening one's skin and welcoming critical commentary. I believe I'm a seriously competent author at this point and I developed my skill largely through intensive workshopping and accepting critical advice, even blisteringly harsh criticism at times. Without that criticism, I expect I'd still have dry as dirt narration, large exposition dumps would be rife in every chapter, and my characters would stare evenly and smirk at each other every other damn sentence. Obviously, even though I'm not writing fanfiction for profit, this improvement is in my best interests purely from the perspective of wanting more readers who enjoy my work more. I also want to note that reviews take effort as well, and they also demonstrate that the reviewer has not just skimmed the story, but read it carefully - of course some people are just like that, but I say one should consider critical reviews to demonstrate interest and regard for your work.

I sometimes struggle balancing the two, as I'm loathe to leave people discouraged from writing, but I'm also uncomfortable leaving technical flaws or storytelling weaknesses unmentioned. I think it's just best practice for reader responses to be both honest and kind, and that's what I try to do. Something else I think is good etiquette though is approaching creative works on the author's terms. What I mean by that is that you can be as critical of the execution of a story as you like, but it's not reasonable to denigrate the story's reason for existence. A specific example would be leaving a comment critical of the premise or genre, or less obviously, a comment suggesting that a story doesn't serve a purpose.

My experience with reader responses has been mixed. During my first stint on FFN, I mostly got daft little replies and a couple flames rather than anything useful, and that made me sensitive to later, real criticism. I was very young at the time, and my writing was garbage, so perhaps that had something to do with it. In 2012 I was there again and active here for the first time, and I mostly got proper 'reviews' that time around. I made good use of the critique I got but I had a tendency to defend myself unnecessarily. I found the praise incredibly motivating. (I actually haven't received so much criticism this time around, which I believe has more to do with the effort put into my work than any laxness in reviewers.)

However, in conjunction with a couple of really bad days for me, I had something of a scuffle on FFN with a clique of especially ungenerous readers, and that was enough to knock me out of active writing and posting almost indefinitely. I'd won "best story" on Bulbagarden just recently before, and yet I might never have come back due to how upset I was by the incident on FFN. That's how much of an effect hostile feedback can have on a young person with an external locus of worth. Now, that's a simplification of what happened, and I'm ashamed of my own weakness in abandoning my fanfiction so easily when on Bulbagarden I'd received such acclaim, but it's still a caution against unmitigated and indiscriminate criticism. (It's interesting to me that others here have said they get all their careful analysis on Bulbagarden and not on FFN, in light of my experience!)

There's no systemic fix that I can think of that would resolve the issue of scarce casual comments. The review league and review game already do a lot to encourage both more frequent and more substantial reviews, as the current minimum points reward for any 'reply' is almost 50% of the average 'review' despite costing the reader much less effort. I suspect that the issue had by 'shy readers' is as much to do with nerves as with laziness, but it's simply true that for whatever reason, there are ten times as many lurking readers as ones that review/reply in any capacity. (Maybe some of those hits are bots or eager page-refreshers? Who knows?) It's not as if any of us can do anything to encourage user sign-ups or user retention besides doing our best to create a positive and worthwhile community.

Nevertheless, I have a few small suggestions. The first is my only systemic idea: to give an example of a minimalist 'reply' worth 3 points in the review league, to encourage people to participate who don't have much to say. My other ideas are individual rather than community oriented: I might add author's notes to the effect of "all responses welcome no matter how short or long, every comment makes my day," and I will do my best to reply thoughtfully to any reader comments to ensure they feel like their participation is worthwhile.

Lastly, it's on us to set the example. I will be trying harder to leave more reviews in the future, as I am committed to this community now, and I've no intention of soaking up reviews without reciprocation! I hope that as I do, my feedback is both useful and encouraging.

 

[lucarioknight56]

I never really received frequent reviews until I started writing Unequivocant. Until that point, I had written two original works that never garnered much attention, and my two previous PMD works that only started receiving reviews toward the tail end of their life span. Throughout that time, I often found it difficult to be writing because of the seeming lack of viewership, despite the views going up. I simply wanted attention, and the reply type of review would have been great for me then.

With Legends Unraveled, I got more the in-depth sort, but I unfortunately never acted on it. I simply received the reviews too late to really matter, and considering the already-positive nature of the reviews, I didn't see a need. At most, they gave me good emotional support, similar to a reply review. I thought my writing was just fine.

Then I got a rude awakening with Forgotten Isles. I never really received much attention, and receiving those large reviews that struck hard against the mistakes I had made really shook me. Now, I had already been writing for several years, and I had no intention of back away. but getting those reviews made me realize how much I needed to change. It was too late for me to save Forgotten Isles without a complete rewrite, but I definitely resolved to do better with Unequivocant.

Now I get reviews every week from one or two devoted users, and I always appreciate the feedback from it. And with those reviews, I finally got to revising my work in the middle of my writing process, making a continually better produce--thanks to in-depth reviews. I always try to leave that kind due to how much they helped me, but given that I've been so busy with writing and life in general, I just haven't found the time. Once I'm finished, I'm definitely going to go reviewing in-depth to make it feel like I left meaningful input, while also praising certain part of the story. Best of both worlds, right?

 

[Gama]

Yes, if you are hoping to improve and get better. If you are writing for fun, perhaps not, but if you are writing for fun, do you need a reply anyway? Are you still writing for fun and a good time if you need people to tell you they like your story to keep you going?

But who's to say that everyone is posting just to improve and get better... or that they even should be? Perhaps they just have something to share and they're interested in what people think. I think being encouraged by people letting you know they're reading and enjoying is perfectly reasonable and consistent with writing for fun, and I also think it's perfectly normal to feel discouraged and disillusioned if you feel that after taking the difficult step of sharing something it's largely ignored.

I also think I disagree with you that it's that widely spread or communicated a notion that it's fine to leave shorter replies (and I think threads like this are useful for making that clear) so it's not really fair to suggest it's laziness, or that it's common for people who want reviews to ignore/reject them. Even so, I think it's perfectly reasonable for people to be after a little bit of encouragement and community in trying something that may be new to them.

Also, I've noticed several people now say that if you're going to post work on a forum rather than somewhere like FF.net you should expect things more towards the "review" side than the "reply" side. That seems quite bizarre to me. Forums are designed primarily as community building tools - to me it feels quite natural that posts whose primary function is simple engagement with the author should be common here. Indeed, I am sure that they used to be much moreso than they are now.

I should also be clear that I certainly don't advocate false platitudes. I don't think "replies" need to be that.

@unrepentantAuthor You're quite right that the dichotomy I've created is slightly oversimplified and unrepresentative. It's certainly more of a spectrum than one or the other, and the best comments will include elements of both. I think one thing the dichotomy is useful for (and has been borne out within this thread) is identifying what the underlying purpose of the comment is: is it engagement or is it critical analysis? I think underlying that is how and why you are even reading the story in question: are you doing so as a reviewer or as a casual consumer? Are you reading it with the mindset you'd read a published book? If not, why not? (Either answer to any of those questions is fine - it's just worth considering!)

@lucarioknight56 I think your story illustrates what I'm saying really well - it would have probably been easier to take if you'd had a mix of in-depth and less in-depth responses to the stories you posted. I've always thought that anyway.

In-depth reviews are absolutely the most useful thing for improving your writing but I really don't think that is the only reason people share their work, nor should it be.