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We talk a lot about the decline of comment culture in fandom spaces these days, and I recently saw a post that reminded me of my prevailing theory about why that started.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I know that I personally stopped commenting on people’s art and fic on tumblr specifically when I saw the culture shift toward creators berating and publicly shaming the people who reblogged their work for any kind of comments or tags that the creator didn’t like.
I stopped commenting art when I saw prominent posts going around ranting about how awful it was to see comments like “I don’t usually like x but your work…” and “don’t ever ever compare an artist’s work to another thing you like” and “don’t tag as kin/don’t tag as your OC’s name.”
And then came the era of artists starting to investigate the blogs of people who reblogged their work, and shame/mock/harass/block anyone who reblogged their art who appeared to have a fandom opinion they didn’t agree with.
And I am not saying there were even a lot of artists, writers etc DOING this.
But there was enough, and it was visible enough, to make the idea of commenting or leaving a tag on someone’s work seem daunting.
Because you never knew if that creator was going to explode on you for some harmless comment wanting to be nice and share your thoughts about it, or even just because you reblogged their art and they decided they didn’t like you.
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