User blog comment:Jkl9817/Uh... hi there/@comment-1874924-20130826062429/@comment-1874924-20130829143117

It's also possible that people are still reading stories but aren't inclined to give feedback. We don't have the visit counter for individual pages anymore (and when we did, it wasn't working half the time) but from that I learned that up to 80% of the people viewing a story page don't even visit the talk page, let alone edit it. We still have a page view counter for the wiki as a whole, though, and its numbers are still strong. Another factor that's arisen recently is that readers who don't have accounts can't leave comments even if they're inclined to.

Unfortunately, the "silent readership" problem isn't unique to the wiki. I started porting my stories to fanfiction.net in April, and my experience there is instructive. Legacy, which has been up the longest, has only 8 mostly one- or two-sentence reviews, including 3 by the same reader, despite almost 900 page views. (Page view number get inflated on ff.net because each chapter of a story usually has its own page, but they also provide user stats, and it looks like about 75 people have read the whole story.) Legacy has more favoriters (9) than reviewers (6). Two of the reviewers mentioned having previously read Legacy here on the wiki (possibly discovering it through its TV Tropes page) but didn't comment here because they didn't have accounts.

My experience with LTDI has been similar. I posted Fourth Night last weekend, and almost 50 people have read at least part of it. The story has a whole recently hit 1,000 page views. LTDI currently has 8 favoriters and 13 followers. And how many reviews does it have? Six, including four by one guy. Only one of LTDI's reviews is more than two sentences long.

CatVoD, which has always lived in the shadow of my larger works, has managed over 650 views for its 8 chapters, with about 30 people having read the whole story. It has only 3 reviews, all by the same person, although another viewer combined a CatVoD review with a Legacy review on the latter's page. (That's currently Legacy's only long review.)

All in all, the new crop of TD fanfic readers just doesn't seem inclined to share their thoughts.