Thanks. This is helpful, and I believe it to be accurate. I do disagree with this part, though:
where the reaction is positive, it’s usually not useful to express it
When I only get negative feedback, and yet my posts are upvoted, I don’t know which parts are connecting with people. I only know which parts of my posts are upsetting to people, and which parts are wrong and need to be fixed.
What kind of protocol do you envision? Detailed review is way too much work in most cases, a single perceived flaw is easy to point out, and parts that seem correct usually both cover most of the essay and are expected to be seen as correct by most readers.
(More detailed feedback could be gathered using a new software tool, I suspect, like voting on sections of the text, and then summarizing the votes over the text with e.g. its color. It would be more realistic than asking for a different social custom for the same reason normal voting works and asking for feedback about overall impression doesn’t.)
I think you are rationalizing. I think you simply want attention and praise and don’t care so much about specific feedback. But I disagree with Vladimir: explicit personal attention and praise, while uninformative, are useful; they are better motivators than karma points.
I am also skeptical of people’s ability to tell you useful things about what they liked in an article. No one is going to tell you that they were convinced by the irrelevant picture of a brain.
Thanks. This is helpful, and I believe it to be accurate. I do disagree with this part, though:
When I only get negative feedback, and yet my posts are upvoted, I don’t know which parts are connecting with people. I only know which parts of my posts are upsetting to people, and which parts are wrong and need to be fixed.
What kind of protocol do you envision? Detailed review is way too much work in most cases, a single perceived flaw is easy to point out, and parts that seem correct usually both cover most of the essay and are expected to be seen as correct by most readers.
(More detailed feedback could be gathered using a new software tool, I suspect, like voting on sections of the text, and then summarizing the votes over the text with e.g. its color. It would be more realistic than asking for a different social custom for the same reason normal voting works and asking for feedback about overall impression doesn’t.)
One possible format is:
“I like X and Y. More like that, please. But I think B isn’t quite right, because Z.”
This could actually work… Fighting abundance of choice with sampling. I would modify it this way:
When making a correction or complaint as a top-level comment, choose one positive thing about the post, if any, and point it out first.
So this is a more informative form of “IAWYC, but...”
Exactly!
I think you are rationalizing. I think you simply want attention and praise and don’t care so much about specific feedback. But I disagree with Vladimir: explicit personal attention and praise, while uninformative, are useful; they are better motivators than karma points.
I am also skeptical of people’s ability to tell you useful things about what they liked in an article. No one is going to tell you that they were convinced by the irrelevant picture of a brain.