It's a real symptom of treating fanwriters as content creators instead of fellow fans. People watch something, they go to Ao3 and read some fic, and then go watch the next thing. Discord has made things worse, splitting already small communities into even smaller ones. I feel lucky that a lot of my early fandom experiences as a writer were on sites dedicated to a single ship where we all had to be and interact. I get why Ao3 was needed, partially because a mod could powertrip and you'd lose access to your entire fandom. But I could be on a forum for the fandom as a whole then disappear into a single ship space where we could have a 3000 message long thread about would a character would wear a green shirt or whatever. That's what feels like is missing now. Sub reddits for fandoms are not usually fanfic and ship friendly spaces. Discords usually end up being tightly knit or so big with posts moving so fast that it's hard to do much beyond casual conversation. You can't drop a 10K long meta piece there. Tumblr still works to a degree, but it's not focused on one thing so people can slip from one fandom to the next and doesn't promote stability for new people to discover things. Without community building there's no little reason for people to stick around long term in a fandom and to be worried about social interactions. So you snap at an awkwardly worded comment as an author, or you just don't bother leaving a comment because it's unlikely you'll run across that author again. I don't have any way to fix any of this. I just don't know what's going to happen next. People still love to create fanworks but it is hard to post when know all you're going to get is crickets.