re: Kudos and Bookmarks
My thing is, sometimes that's not always an indicator in that there are good fics that get overlooked. It can help, mind you. But something like, say a 50 kudos fic can still be good as a 200+ kudos one.
Factors like rarepairs can be a huge factor. Source: me, the one dorkus writing multichapter stuff w/ RiKai in it. Granted, my main series is also intimidatingly long. Hurricane Heartbeat did p. well.
Interestingly, my stuff did meet his standards, but he still got offended that Riku was an awkward teenager for like. Two sentences that I wrote five years ago and honestly forgot about.
I usually use Kudos as a way to order what I should read. Go from the top down until I get into the lowest numbers.
I also use them to sort of weed through tags that are overloaded with new fic daily because it is harder to keep with the pagination on popular tags. The fic are always moving, so you might have been going through page 1 pics and now 5 hours later there are 10 new fic and you gotta find where you left off again...