as i was catching on the bajillion reviews that have been left to me over the last couple of years it got me thinking about author responses to reviews. do many of you on the site go back and look at the author responses to your reviews that you've left or are you the kind of reader where you drop the review and never bother to revisit it (unless of course there was a question in your review that you want to see an answer to or something of the sort)?

personally myself, i'm more of the latter than the former. it's not because i don't value the response that the writer has to the comment that i've left them but just because i read a lot of things or i always have something to do that it completely slips my mind the majority of the time. and i know that the author has seen the review and was likely excited  and appreciated it and i guess that's good enough for me as a reader. and i also tend to leave the kind of reviews where i can see how it would be difficult to respond to with anything other than an "i'm glad you enjoyed it thanks so much for reviewing." unless of course i have many many thoughts and write a whole essay to express them, then i can see where there would actually be stuff to respond to.

i think this trend of mine might've been something from my early days of writing fanfiction because i was leaving so many reviews and when i say so many reviews i mean like,,,,,,so many reviews that there just wouldn't have been any way for me to go through all the reviews that i had left and read every response especially when there was something else that i needed to be doing. for the most part i assumed that most people don't read author responses to reviews but i am starting to realize that this is likely not true and it could be one of the reasons why i take so long to respond to reviews myself: because i assume no one will bother reading what my response will be.

and if you do read author responses, typically, how long would you wait for a response or check to see if there's been a response before you stop checking for it? A couple of weeks? months? years? and do your thoughts on author responses depend on which site you're leaving reviews/comments on?  i know that for ffnet you can't really reply to reviews because it'll just send a private message so i kind of stopped responding to reviews there even though every time i get an email about one i do read it and it does put a smile on my face. i used to respond to every comment on ao3 but it felt like a lot of the time i was repeating myself a lot so i kind of save responses for when i have something of actual substance to say (but i also assume that every reader knows i'm grateful for taking the time to leave a comment or a kudos).

with all that being said, if you have left me a review ever (especially circa 2018) i am responding to them as fast as possible so if you still care, there will be responses coming to those soon(ish).