your hit counter is lying

[zing_och]

Since I'm a lurking lurker who lurks most of the time, I don't really feel qualified to say this, but whatever.

Ok. You want to know who's making you sad by giving you a bad hit-count / comment ratio?

It's me.



I open the story in a new tab. 1 This new tab is now the right-most tab in a row of a-lot-more-than-I-will-read-right-now tabs. I surf on for a while, then I have to go to bed / work / shopping / whatever. I close my browser.

Next time I'm on the computer my browser restores my tabs. 2 I surf the web, starting with my circle, opening yet more tabs, then moving on to all those other tabs.

These steps might be repeated a lot (sometimes I'm dragging around open tabs for weeks). But we'll say -

Ok. I'm getting to the story tab now! It's on an LJ with a layout I can't (or don't want to) read. I click my handy Readability applet. It reloads the page. 3

I read the story. I love it! I want to leave a comment! But Readability doesn't give me a comment link, so I have to reload the original page. 4 I post a comment!

And finally I bookmark your story on delicious because I love it so much. Because I'm an obsessive re-reader (is that a word?) you'll get lots more hits from me if I love the story - but probably no more comments.

So if I liked your story and left a comment, but don't come back to it, the ratio is still not all that great. With every re-read it gets worse. Plus I tend to open links from recs without really checking if I already know the story. Even more hits!

Lots of hits / not many comments doesn't have to mean "people read the story but don't like it".

(Of course that doesn't get into all the comments I don't leave because [list deleted; this is a topic for another post - which I probably won't make. This one's easier! *g*])

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

You know, one thing here that amazes me: you don't *save* the fic you like to your harddrive (and, if you're obsessive like me and had a HD crash in your background, back these all up on DVD?)

Because, while I leave story tabs open in my browser until I get to them sometimes, I save everything I liked even a bit to my HD. Which means that it'll still be there 15 years in the future, when the hosting site may long since been forgotten.

(and yeah, I've been saving fanfic for 15 years. *g*)

[zing_och]

Ha! I do that, too, but unfortunately I have a tendency to break hard drives and lose DVDs / CDs / floppy disks. *g* (Now that I think about it, I started doing this 10 years ago. Hmmm, I wonder what I could still dig up?)

So I took the "logical" next step: I made a gmail account just for fic and email all my favorites to it.

*hangs head in shame*

[ratcreature]

One of my main reasons to comment on fic on journals is actually that with a paid account I'll get copy of my comment with also the entry mailed to me, and have commented to the author and a copy for myself in one easy step. This works very conveniently for single part stories.

[zing_och]

Yes, I love this, too! This is actually the only time I miss my paid LJ account. But I do get them on DW, and I can still cp a fic in an email to myself. *g*