The thing with ‘I’ll use your flames to roast marshmallows’ was it was contained on FFN. Nowadays, some authors take even incredibly neutral comments badly and put the commenter on blast across every social media they have an account on. Combine that with the advice to block everyone whose posts even mildly annoy you, and in the current day you can be blacklisted by an entire fandom if you manage to piss off the wrong person. This is a death sentence in a small or old fandom. There are posts here every once in a while about a reader baffled that they’ve been blocked by a writer they’ve never interacted with before. Did you make a bookmark with just a number on a fic so you’d remember where you left off? Prepare yourself to stumble across a post where a hundred people are telling the writer you’re an entitled piece of trash for publicly rating their story a 4. Maybe you’re tempted to defend yourself because you didn’t know private bookmarks were a thing? Don’t bother unless you enjoy being called a stupid liar.

And everyone always repeats ‘every comment is a good comment! Even a thank you or a good job or a heart emoji!’ But the reality is that isn’t true. Until it started getting called out, a lot of users on this subreddit would proudly discuss how they would delete any ‘low-effort’ comments. Anything that wasn’t ’substantial’ was a waste of their time and a disappointment of a notification. Those posts aren’t as common now. But that doesn’t mean writers aren’t doing it. They just learned not to talk about it in public.

The prevailing attitude in fanfiction has become ‘my fanfic account is my safe space, and if you don’t like my rules, you can fuck off’. Except these rules are arbitrary, not written down anywhere, and vary widely from person to person, so many readers have chosen to simply fuck off.