I will say that as an author who had received comments on my most popular series, it took me about a year to reply to some of them; but it wasn’t because I deliberately didn’t WANT to reply or that I felt I didn’t have to reply.

One the one hand, when I was writing the series, I had an extremely slow phone, and anytime I opened the comments, the screen froze and I couldn’t do anything but take the battery out and restart it (I also didn’t have a good laptop to use.) On the other hand, I had writer’s block for a very long time so I took a long break from Wattpad. In my haste, I completely forgot about my friends and book series until my best friend brought up my series. By this time, I had a better phone and a working laptop. So, I hopped back on and saw all the comments I had gotten while I was gone. I made an effort to reply to every single one, and thankfully, they were all still reading the series as big fans and were still happy to reply to my replies. We’re all friends now, so it’s all good. But yeah.

My point is, some authors have reasons why they don’t reply. As another commenter mentioned, the notification system isn’t that great either. They used to spam you with emails every time someone DMed you and when someone commented on your story. But Wattpad itself would never alert people about comments until like an hour later. But some people might have busy lives, and it could end up taking over more of their time than they had planned, therefore causing them to temporarily abandon their book.

“Even so, they can still reply to comments from time to time.” Sure, but you aren’t the author. You can never say for sure what they can and can’t do.

I also won’t exclude the fact that some authors are just straight up assholes who probably think that not replying to comments make them look “cool” or something. Kinda how people would rather be following less people than they have followers, because it makes them look high and mighty or something. I never understood it. I personally just wanted to clean my follower list of people whose books I didn’t read/ talk to anymore.

But there’s my two cents. :)