A few weeks ago in the blog section silent readers were a hot topic. This is not a new discussion. I've been on AFF since 2014 and can recall this being a popular topic every other year or so. Fanfic writers post their works online for free and want to see interaction on their fics and for writers who really care about their story and characters and plotline, they get hype over comments because it shows them that their story was really taken in by someone enough to where they decided to respond to it through a comment. 

When I first started on here, I posted a werewolf shifter romance that I was inspired to write from reading another werewolf shifter romance I really enjoyed but I wished somethings were different, so I made those differences in my story. It was a Got7 x oc story with Jinyoung as the lead. A decently popular idol. Exo were (and still somewhat are) the big dogs on AFF. I love Exo but I wanted to write about Got7 so I did. That story got like two subs each time I updated and rarely received a comment. But I had a lot of fun writing it, so while I wished I had a ton of subs and comments and votes like the featured stories, I still wrote until I got tired of the story and decided on something new. 

With that new story, I MADE SURE people read it lol. It was a Jackson x oc story, so I would look at other Jackson x oc fics, click on the subscribers, and leave them a pm saying "Hey I saw you read a Jackson x oc story, maybe you'll like mine!". I did that to like...thousands of users. And that mixed with using my kp to advertise the story, like a year after I finished it, it got featured! I worked really hard to get eyes on it and loved the story and was so happy!

I also added random users as friends as well as friend requesting everyone subscribed to my fics, building up who would see my blogposts (since you get a notif from a new blogpost being posted by a friend) and these days we have the feed, so when you add someone as a friend they automatically follow your feed posts. That's why I always post new stories in the feed and in blogs to get eyes on them.

Then one time I made a blog asking for one-shot ideas. Someone commented a cute BaekYeol concept where Chanyeol was an elf prince, and they had all these story details and I thought it was super precious so I wrote it. And because it was Baekyeol, which at the time was the ship constantly being featured on the front page, it POPPED OFF! I added a second chapter because I wanted to keep writing in that cute world, and soon enough the story got featured! I didn't even have to spam it, people just loved baekyeol and the concept lol. 

Then earlier this year I was looking at popular ships and was bored and wanted to write some short stories. I timed myself and wrote a Tao x kris "story" in a minute. It got like 10 subs, currently has like 80. Then I wrote a seulgi x irene story, my first one ever, and marketed it as , even tho the story itself was so short it never got to that point bc I wrote it in 2 minutes, so it was more like a poem than a story. 

Bruh.

That story got like 1k subs in a day. Insane. 

So I wrote more futa seulrene! Lmfao. 

All that goes to say, these days, I write stuff just for fun and what I see people enjoy the most. Versus when I first started, I really wrote what I wanted to read and targeted others who I thought would enjoy it as well. On my chaptered fics, I love getting comments! On my shorts, I don't really care! That's more so because it is and my shorts are so short there's not much to comment on, but I still appreciate comments nonetheless.

As for me reading stories, I have slowed down a lot on reading on here not gonna lie. These days I just work, play on my phone and watch youtube, I don't really do a whole lot on aff consistently. But when I do read a fic, I always comment on every chapter. Even if it's "Oh wow xyz was crazy, I wonder if that was foreshadowing" or "I see so and so in the tags...I wonder what their character is gonna be like" I just always find something to comment on. Because I myself really enjoy reading people's reactions to what I wrote, so I make sure to provide that for the authors I read. 

But I will say, if you want "more" from your stories, as in getting some kind of interaction to make you feel more justified in posting it online, make your stories subscribers only. Not only is this good for seeing who is actually reading your stuff, but when someone subs to your fic, you gain a karma point. And when you get a couple of thousand, you can bid on ads to promote your story. And the more people who see it, the more likely you'll get new subs, votes, and comments. That's just marketing, that's for anything, any social media or even physical products. You're not selfish or scummy for wanting attention for your work. You spent hours on it and really enjoy it and want others to see it, so doing what you can to make sure others see it is justified. 

Also, make sure your stories have covers. These days I don't care about making a story cover, I just google the idol(s) and find a cute pic and set it as my story cover. If your story has no cover, people might think it's "unfinished" or that you "don't care" or something. It's more of an instinct than them being harsh, but just put a pic of your featured idol as the story cover if you don't feel like editing something together, it works perfectly fine. 

Now for the title of this blogpost, the #EmptyDiscover. As I said earlier, this whole "silent readers' discourse is not new. Even the owner of the site Nichiren has created a system to provoke people to comment on stories. There is a section of the site under the Stories tab called Discover. 

 When I click on it, this is at the top of the page :

Undiscovered Stories ^{(6,937 fanfics)}

Possibly under-appreciated stories that may need more love from the community. These are stories with 5000 words or greater that have been updated within the last year but have a low comment to word count ratio. Commenting on these stories will help them gain more exposure and encourages their authors while making way for new stories to be discovered!

These are stories that have a lot of words but little to no comments. Not only that, but I'm pretty sure when you comment on them, you gain double kp. So usually when you comment on a story, you gain one karma point for each comment. but to entice readers to comment on these "undiscovered stories" Nichiren made it where you gain two karma points for each comment until the story has a good balance of comments to word count, then It's just one kp. 

So I thought a cool little community project would be focusing on these fics and trying to get the number of undiscovered fics down to zero by the end of the year. 

When I was in high school there was this other site I used to post my creative writing assignments on called "young writers society" and they would have annual events to try and make sure every story/chapter/poem on there had a comment on it. It really helped build the community and made it a fun place to read and write. Even when I joined, all of my poems got comments and as a young writer, it really made me feel validated and like I was doing something that not only I enjoyed but others found valuable. 

Therefore, when I heard about the silent reader discourse being brought up again, I remembered this section of the site. 

I want to encourage everyone to make it a goal, whether once a day once a week or whenever you can, to pick a story from the discover section and read it and comment on every chapter. Here is the link to the discover section : https://www.asianfanfics.com/browse/undiscovered?filter=undiscovered&sort=latest&pageNum=1

And another fun feature Nichiren added to encourage commenting was comment streaks. You may have noticed them on your profile under your username. If you comment on any story everyday, you get a comment streak, and once your comment streak hits 10 days, then I think you get like double karma for your commenting, then once it hits 100 days, I believe you get three karma for every comment. There is even a leaderboard for comment streaks, here is the link : https://www.asianfanfics.com/browse/streak_rankings

Why should you care about karma? Especially if you don't write stories, just read them? Because sometimes people have little advertisement shops or story cover shops, as well as the on-site ad bidding system. So these are all things that you can spend your karma earned from commenting (or gaining subs and votes if your an author). So if you're just a reader, but you really love a story, you can ask the author if they're okay with you advertising their story. And that can be a very nice way to give back to an author. Or you can just directly send them your karma for them to spend however they please. Or if you ever do want to write stories on here, then you'll have karma to promote it or "buy" a nice cover for it. 

This being said. I know going forward I'm going to make it my goal to comment on a discover story every day. I personally am not picky about what I read, but if you are, just scroll through the pages, and I'm sure eventually you'll find something that sounds interesting. Hopefully getting in the habit of commenting on undiscovered stories will encourage you to comment more on the other stories you already read and enjoy. 

Currently the number of undiscovered stories is : 6,937.

Every weekend I'll make a new blogpost updating the number of undiscovered stories. I myself may not be the most consistent story writer, but I love typing up these blogs so you bet my lil is gonna be spearheading this campaign haha. Let's make 2021 a fun year, even if we have to force it to be better than last year :)