Note: Probably reinventing the wheel here. Heavily skewed to my areas of interest. Your results may vary.

  1. Feedback can be decomposed into motivational ("Keep doing what you're doing!") and directional ("Here's what you should do differently . . .").
    1. There's also material support ("I like your work, please accept this job offer / some money / my hand in marriage / etc."), which isn't really a type of feedback; I mention it because it can come packaged with the other two or be mistaken for them. (Consider a famous director whose movie gets a rave review from a popular critic: they might not derive any more encouragement from this than their fans already give them, and they're unlikely to let the content of the review change the way they shoot their next movie, but will still appreciate it because of the extra tickets it causes people to buy.)
    2. Demotivational feedback ("This isn't working, give up!") exists, but I'd say that's just motivational feedback with a flipped sign.
  2. People don't reliably self-report or consistently scale; this is particularly important for motivational feedback. "This is great!" might mean the commenter really enjoyed something, or they're a perennially polite and/or positive person who didn't actively dislike it. One way to handle this is with the human-brain-equivalent of proof-of-work computing: a long, thoughtful comment will have more of an impact than a single sentence - even if they're saying the same things for the same reasons - and fan[art|fiction|whatever] provides further evidence.
    1. Visibly voluntarily consuming a work is a (weak, valid) form of feedback. And if a work is more difficult to consume, that makes this signal stronger: "I read the whole book" is more meaningful than "I watched the whole video", etc.[1]
    2. "I just subscribed to your Patreon!" is - in addition to the obvious material effects - another form of hard evidence that what you're doing matters.
  3. From a purely directional view, "I loved your game, especially level 7!", "7th level best level, you should make the entire game like that", "just fyi level 7 was more fun than the rest of them put together" and "Your game was terrible, except for level 7, which was merely bad." are all effectively the same review.
    1. This isn't quite true. If you're making something which someone might assign as required reading (or equivalent), it behooves you to prioritize making the worst user experiences least bad; if you're creating in almost any other context, it makes more sense to prioritize people who already like your work, since everyone else can just stop reading/watching/playing . . . and, from a business standpoint, you were never going to get money out of those ones anyway. (Implication: there's an important sense in which refusing to acknowledge criticism unless it's sandwiched between compliments is healthy and adaptive behavior.)
    2. It's been said (I forget where) that feedback is almost always right when telling you what's wrong, and almost always wrong when telling you how to fix it; I think this is broadly correct. (Note that this doesn't mean that you should discount feedback which comes with solutions - if nothing else, the kinds of solutions which get proposed provide valuable evidence about how the problem feels to the person experiencing it - just that they shouldn't be surprised when you ignore their suggestions and invent your own fix.)
  4. There are a lot of precious and impressive amateur creators who are chronically under-feedback-ed. There's a phenomenal web-novelist for whom I spent some time being the only person reviewing chapters as they came out; there's a fascinating blogger whom I helped to understand important things about their own writing style. The bar is on the floor!
    1. Amateur creators don't usually get significant amounts of money, fame, or career advancement from what they do. Feedback is their main - and frequently only - extrinsic reward: if you want there to be good art made by people who aren't professional artists (won't somebody please think of the selection biases?), it makes sense to provide it.
  5. People vary greatly in what feedback they want and will benefit from. Some creators have already settled on a heading, and just want fuel (motivational > directional); some will be fanatically committed to their task but open to any form of advice regarding how they achieve it (directional > motivational).
    1. People also vary greatly regarding the preferred format of their feedback. An extreme hypothetical: "I liked that story so much I used AI to draw your characters having sex!" might get reactions ranging from horror to bemusement to glee depending on how the author feels about AI, and pornography, and their characters.
    2. In general, more established and/or professional creators will prefer different forms of feedback; conventions learned here will therefore be skewed when dealing with amateurs. In particular, I think professionals tend to like motivational and/or material responses over directional: they have beta readers/playtesters/etc already, so unsolicited advice from the unwashed masses can come off as redundant and presumptuous, but everyone can always use another dollar and/or nice comment.
    3. Everyone is convinced that their preferred form and format of feedback is the objectively correct kind.

Saying The Quiet Parts Out Loud

  • I'm personally very grateful for any feedback, especially directional. I tend not to reply, because I find it mildly uncomfortable when I see other creators do that, and I don't want to make people who say nice and/or useful things to me mildly uncomfortable; also, I think people are less likely to offer criticism if they think it might start a conversation/argument. But if you've shared an opinion about any of my work - publicly or otherwise - please know that I appreciate it. (Especially if it was somewhat-but-not-entirely-negative!)
  • I tend to do unto others as I would have them do unto me: accordingly, I try to find something to criticize and something to praise in everything I offer opinions about. If this habit led me to feeding you some feedback you didn't like, mea culpa.
  • If you want my feedback on anything, let me know. This goes double for any inference-y project, and dectuple for any D&D.Sci-ish project: however, "I want your opinion in particular on this thing in particular" is reason enough for me to take a look.

 

  1. ^

    On the extreme end, I'm perpetually amazed and gratified that I can assign strangers homework and some of them will A) do it and B) be grateful for it.

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If you want [abstractapplic]'s feedback on anything, let me know.

I have received creative feedback from abstractapplic. It was useful and made me happy. This is an endorsement.

"I loved your game, especially level 7!", "7th level best level, you should make the entire game like that", "just fyi level 7 was more fun than the rest of them put together" and "Your game was terrible, except for level 7, which was merely bad." are all effectively the same review.

 

Interesting, I always thought that singleing out one particular component of a work was a shibboleth that you did notice it and did enjoy it. While as you said in point 2 - longer comments that are more thoughtful tend to signal authenticity of the feedback, particularity when positive. However, compare two concise pieces of feedback

"I love the cinematography in your film, it was so beautiful and I think it really did a very good job of matching the story and enchancing it"

compare to:

"I loved the way you captured the dawn over her brother's house, the shadows set the mood for their confrontation."

Both are compliments about cinematography and about the same length, but the first you could say about any film, the second you can only say about a film which has a brother-and-sister confrontation preceded by a shot of the dawn with foreboding shadows.

Now some meta, and hopefully directional feedback about your specific post- I'd like you to be ever clearer than you were about the intention of this post.

Because I don't think you're looking for directional feedback for the sake of getting feedback - but I can't tell if this post is a request for more feedback for you in future, or trying to open a more general discussion about what norms and conventions exist around giving feedback, or if it's about you wanting to see people give more love to other creators. Maybe all my assumptions are wrong?

Without that intention being slap-in-the-face clear to me, I can't give you directional feedback other than this frustratingly reflexive advice to make your intention clear from the offset. 

I can't tell if this post is a request for more feedback for you in future, or trying to open a more general discussion about what norms and conventions exist around giving feedback, or if it's about you wanting to see people give more love to other creators.

I was trying to do all of these things simultaneously.