Some people are keen on leaving reviews, others aren't. If I remember right, Araeph even had a policy where she would leave concrit on a fic she was considering for a mission, and if the author responded positively, she'd leave the fic alone; if they responded negatively, she'd mission it. Not sure about no response.

As for me, I used to be more of an active reviewer when I had more energy for fanfic in general. Sometimes I still do, though not on anything I'd mission, since per my current policy, anything I'd mission these days is old enough that there would be little point in reviewing.

I couldn't tell you exactly when the community in general slowed down. I have a hypothesis, though: it happened about the same time we stopped being mostly Lord of the Rings fans. The PPC at that time was a subset of the larger Tolkien fandom, with members being active in other fan communities where bad fanfic was suddenly on the rise in the wake of the films. I didn't experience this myself, because I wasn't part of any other Tolkien groups, but I suspect that there really was a sense, as hS alluded to, that fans had to protect their fandom from the invasion of crud. I don't know that it was an unprecedented phenomenon, but it may have been an unprecedented confluence of factors all coming together to create the zeitgeist that made the PPC take off.

... I digress. Returning to the point, without the sense of being part of a larger fanfic community, there can be no sense that reviewing is part of the social contract where giving reviews = getting reviews, so there's no incentive to participate in community activity like providing feedback on other people's work. I mean, we're not even very good at that within the PPC itself. Reviewing takes effort, and there's often little reward for it, especially if you're not a writer yourself and can't even expect reciprocal feedback on your own stuff.

That's a whole lot of words to say, ultimately, I don't know. Times change; people change; the world has changed. Maybe that's just the way it is.

~Neshomeh

For my Driftwood missions, I always post Agent Kaitlyn's Concrit as a review, anonymised and with any references to the PPC excised. Giving concrit is good!

Telling people you've executed their character is not. That's how the DOGA website got taken down the first time, with at least one story being lost forever. It was never a great idea, and the modern "kinder, gentler PPC" definitely shouldn't do it. We recognise now that we're not actually a force that will Fix Fanfic - we're just here to have fun, and maybe do a bit of concrit along the way.

hS