User blog comment:Mister.. E./Themes on Featured Character/@comment-1874924-20130211150847

Another possible reason why nobody's voted is that we have only three nominees, and they all come from stories that relatively few people have read. Theme or not, people aren't going to vote for a character that they don't know.

I think the lack of FC activity is just a symptom of a deeper problem. Featured Story--which should be the marquee Feature--is scarcely better off, with Owe's story running effectively unopposed. In fact, this month marks the third straight time that a single competition story has faced only token competition. The November ballot (for December's FS) was the last time we had two popular competition stories go head to head.

The problem is that the people who are socially active here aren't reading or voting as much as they used to, the people who still update stories frequently include fewer "big names" (i.e. core users) and the wiki has been increasingly turning into a glorified chatroom. All this adds up to less interest in Features--especially Story and Character. Unlike FI and FQ, where nominees can be judged on their own merits without the context of the story, people aren't going to vote for FS or FC candidates that they don't know. (This last also affect FI and FQ, but mainly in nominating and not so much in voting.) These problems are not new--they go back at least to Sprink's departure, and probably earlier--but we may have come to a "tipping point".