Don't Get Grinfucked By Your Users

All of this reminds me a little of Crocker's Rules on SL4, where participants would explicitly invoke a special conversational mode to request brutal honesty. That's an important distinction: It's okay to ask for brutal honesty, but if you dish it out to someone without having been asked to, they may react more to the brutality than the honesty, which will probably make the rest of the exchange markedly less efficient.

As far as the service industry goes (which I think is different), if you're working as a waiter and you're unfriendly to the person, take forever, mess up the order, and ignore their requests (which was my friend's experience in France) then I think you're mostly not doing a good job and I think most people would think they were rude.

That being said, we get a lot of feedback but I admit I as developer talk to too few customers to get a big picture. I'm sure I could get honest feedback from them however.

the one country where they'll always tell you what they think: South Africa. unbelievably straightforward.

I just moved to Sweden and immediately noticed the lack of "dishonestly niceness" that I took for granted in the US. It's quite refreshing actually and communication is more efficient.

Edit: In a US workplace you can't tell someone directly "that's wrong" or "I don't like that". You have to politely get to the point in an indirect fashion so as not to offend. It's an especially acute problem when giving that kind of feedback to superiors or other people in power.

I grew up in the upper midwest, and the politeness there is almost pathological. It seems to be mostly conflict avoidance. In California, I've seen more people wanting to paint everything a peachier shade than reality might otherwise indicate, due to optimism. In NYC, friendliness without cause is commonly looked at with suspicion, and there's a tendency to treat it like the 'grinfucking' in Suster's original article.

So, you might get the best feedback in NY (assuming someone doesn't have reason to exploit you). In terms of quality of life, I think there's a lot to be said for the California approach, which is why I live here and (in my opinion) why the bay area has a better culture of innovation. For the purposes of this article, the Midwest 'just trying to be nice' mentality is pretty ubiquitous (though more glaringly obvious there), and well worth being aware of.

Set it up that way and they're primed to give critical feedback. If they can help you articulate what's problematic about the interface, they end up being the hero. You both win.

That was my experience as well at first, but then I realized that there is a certain pattern to the way americans communicate, and it goes something like this:

- First state the positive aspects that you like, or show appreciation for the effort - even though those things have already been said by other people in the thread. - Then count what you find negative but don't use words such as "sucks" and "not good" etc.. but use words such as "could be better" and "can be iterated on" or "needs improvement". - Then end the post by encouragement.

This technique has also helped me IRL as I started working with other americans in a startup in the bay area.

It takes some practice, imo, but it makes for some better communication with americans.

Good luck! ;)

It's good though that you can leave negative feedback on a rather open article. Keep up the Ivory Tower routine.