How do you find the current AFF community?

(The main message of this post is the last paragraph in bold. You can skip straight to it but i would really appreciate if you read the whole thing. <3 )

Well I've lingering around this website for close to 3 years now and I personally feel that this little site which I once loved so dearly has changed so drastically. I'm aware that there's many blogs here that rants about this change and authors leaving and all. Mine may not be much of a difference. But I assure you these are really my innermost, heartfelt thoughts.

The biggest change I feel about this community is the general lack of effort on the part of readers to leave comments.

I remember I used to hate writing so damn much before I joined this community three years ago. But somehow or another, due to a friend's influence, I tried posting up a random oneshot that I wrote onto this website. The response that I got from readers was instantaneous. Within a day, I got a fair amount of subs and lovely comments even though my story wasn't particularly outstanding. But man, those comments and response from readers changed my life. People were asking for sequels, and I felt obliged to give it to them due to the heartwarming encouragement they have given me on my first ever fanfiction. It helped me develop a strong passion for wrtitng and language in general. Because of all these support from these wonderful people on the aff community, it fueled my love for english and my english grades improved tremendously in school. I jumped from a D to an A, and even topped my class for the subject. And I owe all these to AFF really. 

So you see, don't ever underestimate how much your feedback means to a writer. They're really magical. 

However, I noticed that its getting harder to get feedback from readers nowadays. Writers are of course grateful for subscribers, but if all we get are subscribers and not any feedback for the work that we've toiled hard on, we might feel really discouraged. Honestly, sometimes when I post something out and receive minimal feedback, I really wonder if people have even read my work. The communitity feels much colder now as compared to the past. Interation between readers and authors seem to have dropped signifiacantly. And now that AFF has expanded so much, I don't feel that its as tight-knitted as it was in the past. It doesnt feel like a big family anymore. 

I really want this community to be more warm and welcoming to aspiring new writers. Recently, I've been hoping that my sister can get the chance to experience the magic that I once experienced on this very platfom. I genuinely wanted her to develop and interest for writing because its such a beautiful thing. Crafting out an original work and having people from all across the world to read them is really magical. However, apart from subs and pageviews, my sister received not the slightest form of feedback from her readers. I spent so much effort trying to convince her to post something up here but the response was so cold. My sister wasn't really affected actually, cos she doesn't have much interest in writing so she couldnt care less of the response. But man I'm sure if the response she got was similar to the one i got three years ago, things would have been different. 

Well the reason why I'm posting this is not because I want more comments/subs or whatever, I just hope that this community can change for the better for the younger generation here. AFF reallly has the potential to help young writers discover their potential and the magic of writing. I myself have once experienced this when I was younger and it really changed my life. Currently, I'm really busy and I dont spend much time on AFF anymore. But I'm sure many young aspiring writers love AFF to bits. So i really hope that they get the chance to experience the magic I experienced here three years ago. Leaving a comment is not hard. Even a comment like - 'lovely chapter. i really enjoy your story.' - is enough to create magic for writers. So I'm hoping for whatever story you guys read, leave a short comment to let the author know that you're actually reading his/her creation. You never know how much it changes a writer's life. :)