Increment.me: easily get anonymous feedback on anything | Hacker News Reader

Increment.me: easily get anonymous feedback on anything

increment.me

68 pointsjfdi31 comments

Cool. I would think this would only be effectively anonymous for people who are sending huge amounts of emails a day. Otherwise, it's probably simple to identify who is giving what feedback based on timing. Maybe you have a way of presenting feedback in staggered buckets, so timing becomes less of an issue?

Thanks for the feedback! I originally had a similar thought but haven't experienced this yet or seen it in the early feedback. For example I'd setup a topic to get ideas for guest speakers to an upcoming staff meeting from a relatively small team I know well - and was unable to delineate who said what (and it felt more authentic that way, which was reassuring).

That's good. I'm thinking more about 1-on-1 support rep or sales rep interactions though. If the rep only has a handful of those per day, I think they would be able to tell.

I think a simple "hold feedback from me until increment.me has collected x responses" would address that. So for example, I'd get a dump of 5 responses at a time instead of getting them as soon as they are written if I choose x=5.

It sounds like this works for getting anonymous feedback from groups of people though, which sounds like a decent addressable market.

I have no reason to collect feedback at the moment, but I could see myself paying $4/month for this if I ran a small business.

Makes total sense, thank you. Will reflect on this.

Hi HN community, normally I'd have done a "Show HN" but our community guidelines discourage Show HN pages that include a sign-up step, and since we're still invite-only, alas we're in this camp.

Thanks for everyone who's taken the time to share your feedback so far. Grateful for your perspective. And thank you for those who've asked to try out the service, some really great use cases.. inspiring! Keep the feedback coming!

Just a heads up: I tried leaving some feedback using the "Give Feedback!" link at the bottom of your site. Submitting the feedback resulted in a 500-error.

Thank you, interest maxed the site out for a few moments. Green across the board now. I'd welcome that feedback if you're open to making another attempt at sharing it!

How would you compare it to a Google form with notifications enabled for new submissions? For Google forms, they are:

- anonymous - free - data can be exported (google sheets, excel, csv) - customizable (text, choices etc.)

Presumably the platform can guarantee anonymity a little more than that. For instance, you could uniquely generate a Google Form for each person you're emailing and so that removes the 'safety' they'd feel responding.

However, if the platform said "The user you're giving feedback for has received 10 unique pieces of feedback over 15 different links" you skip reviewing that guy but if it says "The user you're giving feedback for has received 10 unique pieces of feedback over 1 link" then you feel more like it's trustworthy.

The platform could have a "which email did you receive the request from" and you could punch it in and the platform can tell you how many unique feedback requests the person has and so on and so forth.

You're not wrong, but... I feel like if there's that much distrust then there are significant other problems and the distrust is going to persist regardless of which tool is chosen.

From my experience, as a user requesting feedback, I have zero knowledge regarding the origin of that feedback unless it is given within the feedback itself (within a specified channel).

I'm thinking of it in a 'nudge' sense. Like if you make someone feel super safe, you move the marginal person into a participant.

This project is closed beta, so I am guessing here, but couldn't this also be used to de-anonymize users like with Google forms? I think it comes down to trust. Trust that the platform is not complicit with the feedback organizer. I see not guarantee of that provided.

People can establish trust with google forms too. For example, recipients can cross check if they are getting the same link for feedback.

Reminds me of a popular Japanese service called Marshmallow (マシュマロ), used widely by quasi-popular people such as YouTubers. The idea of anonymous feedback services has been around for quite a while (I believe Marshmallow is the first and most popular, and there are multiple alternatives), but seems unknown outside of Far East Asia. https://marshmallow-qa.com

The “what are you doing with my data?” section didn’t answer the question. Are you planning on selling or distributing the dataset to anyone?

Great idea, and nice execution on this initial prototype.

My biggest fear is that the effort of providing feedback is huge, and that only specific people are so open in receiving feedback. I'd venture to say that the ones in need of feedback are less likely to sign up for a service like this.

Thanks for your feedback. It turns out this hunch you have is spot on. A favorite use case is to set a topic for personal or team feedback and leave it in your email signature. There is some cultural thing that happens in this use case where many times you don't see much feedback come in. That said, some teams do - a lot more. May be something here around quantifiably improving team performance around this dynamic. Might turn out that in teams like this, those who need it most start to get more of it.

I really like the idea. I have been looking for such a platform for a long time but couldn't find one. Therefore, I developed a quick solution for myself some years ago: https://constructeev.com/ I used it for many use cases (for my students, team, workshops). People were happy about it but some didn't trust it in terms of anonymity. Even computer science student who should know better. So maybe you can also address this issue.

Neat idea. I’ve been wanting to build something akin for 360 performance reviews.

Minor technical feedback: the page jumps up and down in portrait mode because of line wrapping on the carousel text.

This is a great idea and I'd love to have a go with it, but I'm struggling to submit my information for the beta - getting a 500 error.

Try again if you’re open to it, love to hear from you. HN traffic..

I’ve been using it for a little bit during the beta, by adding to my email signature. Although there can sometimes be a hurdle to get people to provide feedback (good or constructive), I have had some come in. I’m guessing that different groups are already tuned in to giving / receiving individualized feedback, and also imagine that the population will only go up over time.

Just remember that adding a URL to your email signature is going to increase the likelihood of your emails being caught in spam filters.

If I wanted to give anonymous feedback, I'd email your boss from a throwaway account, not click a link that may as well be tied into Marketo or Salesforce to measure my engagement. I'm not super privacy paranoia, but good enough. But maybe there's enough of a market here then for people who aren't me :-D

I get it. Part of the ethos is anti all of that. For example I'm making a point to have zero 3rd party cookies or JS analytics cruft. Tracking pixels & the like should be dead already and might be soon enough, one can hope. Businesses should create value for and get out of the way of their customers, not view them as "users" and strive to maximize "engagement" with them.

Oh wow, I spent the last week working on a similar idea: https://feedfeedback.com

let me know if you wanna chat! my username at gmail

How do you guarantee anonymity to the users filling out the survey? The surveyor could send different increment URLs to different users.

It's a soft deterrent based on effort (to create individual topics) currently - and will be made tougher when the private beta ends because there's likely a pricing/cost impact tied to topics. Have yet to see anyone attempt this, and it is against the general ethos - so it's a situation that would get more actively discouraged if it actually started to happen. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on it.

This is genius

interesting implementation, kudos to the developer

Asked for an invite.

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