When feedback is not a gift
softwaredoug.com
softwaredoug.com
However, I understand that phrase somewhat differently. Namely, that it means "others are not obligated to provide feedback, and if someone does provide thoughtful feedback, they have given you the gift of their time and energy irrespective of whether you agree with it or not".
Sometimes you get a GameBoy Color.
Sometimes you get a terribly ugly hand-knitted sweater from your grandma.
Sometimes you get a shitty prank from your crap uncle who think he’s being funny.
Sometimes the homeless person you found online and welcomed for Christmas Eve turns paranoid, becomes convinced your family wants to poison him, and just leaves screaming.
And sometimes you get a lesson from your other uncle, the self-absorbed one with insecurities, on how Christmas is a meaningless made-up consumerist commercial event meant to make people feel obligated to spend money under false pretences and you are a loser for falling for it and he’s thus not being a prick just to make himself feel smart, but actually helping you grow. Out of loving altruism.
Well, guess what, dear uncle? Almost everything is made up anyway. Your fragile ego included.
Personal aparté aside, yes, you could say that feedback, in that sense, is indeed a gift.
Which, given we're almost quarter of the way through the 21st century, is a bit parachronistic.
(Still, grandpa, I appreciate your effort; given that your understanding of technology ends at color CRT TVs and VCRs, a GameBoy Color is actually a surprisingly good pick. It may not be the Switch, but hey, it's still lots of fun!)
> Sometimes you get a terribly ugly hand-knitted sweater from your grandma.
Which is your favorite gift, because she made it to show her love for you, and it took her a third of a year to finish.
Or it will be your favorite gift, after she passes away before next Christmas, and you realize this ugly sweater is what she spent some of her last bits of energy on.
> Sometimes the homeless person you found online and welcomed for Christmas Eve turns paranoid, becomes convinced your family wants to poison him, and just leaves screaming.
To which you react with a huge :eyeroll: and go back to finishing the dinner; some homeless have their demons, but at least this one got a chance to warm up, fill their belly, and enjoy some kindness - all of which means they'll still be around for Christmas Day, instead of being found dead in the morning, on a park bench, buried under 3cm of snow, killed by exposure after they stopped there to rest, just for a moment, on their way to whatever temporary shelter they were planning to sleep in that night.
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I get your point. I want to balance it out a bit. Gifts, Christmas or otherwise, are often entirely different to what they may look like to an outside observer.
I just thought that some examples, some of which most people would be able to relate to, some outlandish but real nonetheless, could help drive the gp’s point home.
Yes valid criticism. Though I do find many organizations and people use “feedback is a gift” to mean “all feedback is helpful” without much nuance.
Writing a book makes you realize, statistically, how noisy feedback is. There are trends for sure. But you ignore 80% of it. Maybe 80% is too high for a performance review, but a good data point that one persons PoV on you is not gospel.
I dislike modern corporate feedback systems and philosophy intensely. They are driven by people who are in positions of power who love to believe the fiction that they got where they are due to their own “growth”.
The big lie is that human beings can be treated like a business and growth can go up and to the right continuously. The reality is our performance or personal growth on just about any axis is full of ups and downs and plenty of long plateaus. And that’s ok. Obsession about feedback and goal setting is
I don't really care for reviews. They reduce us to our produce. They ignore the very thing that materializes the creation: the human.
I take things to heart. It's not because I am "non-growth oriented" or over-sensitive. It's because I'm human.
Its so frustrating when one reads a review on Amazon or similar and the review is nothing to do with the product, but rather the circumstances - 'fast delivery', 'great seller', 'well packaged', etc. rather than reviewing the actual product.
There is a part of me which feels we could do better by having a slightly longer feedback system - first question 'what would you like the review: the product, the delivery, the seller', and the second actually asking for the review, but I suspect this wouldn't actually help.
You tell the best joke in the world and out of 100 people, fifty will laugh, thirty will smile, fifteen will not get it at all, and five will be raging mad and posting on twitter about how you should be tried for crimes against humanity for some perceived insult. It's very easy to only focus on the last group.
Not just easy, pretty sure it's the default that negative feedback looms disproportionately larger in the mind. A bias one must recognize and actively work against.
Sorry to hear about your experience though, I hope subsequent reviews were better.
> It's because I'm human.
I sometimes wonder whether a minority of other people on this planet have reached that level, or ever will.
This viewpoint doesn't make much sense to me. When something I make is reviewed, it's that work that's being reviewed, not me. I'm not being reduced as I'm not the thing being reviewed.
And as the primary purpose of a review is to inform others if the work in question is good for them, talking about the work and not the creator seems entirely the right approach.
Nobody wants to fix the "you" that is in the code, they don't want to redesign "you" to be better, they want to fix the code itself. This probably requires that you distance yourself from the code your produce, in order to let it go.
Can this be done at all?
If you’re writing off reviews because one bozo left a useless one-star review, then that does seem like you’re both human and non-growth-oriented.
Do you think any reviews are useful? Or do you think enough reviews aren’t useful so as to make reading any reviews useless? Or are you just bothered enough by negative reviews that you don’t want to look at any reviews?
> I don't really care for reviews.
The sheer fact that you decided to remember and write about some random 1 star review proves otherwise
As used here, "I don't care for" means "I do not like". You've interpreted it to be "I don't care about", meaning "it does not matter to me".
Right, so that cuts both ways. Then review the _product_, rather than using the review as a channel for a whinge about how it didn't land in your hands as soon as you'd have liked. That misses the point of what reviews are too.
You know the real circumstances
True hurtful one-stars is a rival who's mad at your book release
And got their buddies to spam the system w/ garbage reviews
It sounds like you're reducing yourself to your product, and so any commentary on your product is thus taken as a commentary on you.
Of course, this is much easier said than done.
This is false. You are reducing humans to their produce by claiming that a review of a product is somehow connected to the worth of the human.
One time I made a very negative comment on Reddit about a fantasy book, and the author actually responded to me. When that happened I felt incredibly bad, because I didn't expect the author to actually read what I'd written. But that experience taught me that you can just reach out to people that make stuff you like. You can make people feel good about something that made you feel good, and it's entirely free. Since then I've reached out to various authors just to tell them I really enjoyed their books.
One of the best things about reading indie authors and smaller creators in general is the ease with which you can communicate with them. I remember making a comment about a minor detail to an indie author about one of his series, and in the next book he actually incorporated my suggestion.
I think once you reach a certain scale or popularity there has to be some kind of filter or process between a creator and their comments.
On one side you usually don't want to hurt a fantasy novel author who put all their soul into their book and actually care about how it's received.
On the other side some authors will have a very strong message to convey, and use their work as a platform to expose more people to their ideas, good or bad.
Not engaging with the message and/or ignoring it when you see it as either damaging to the readers or an abuse of people's good faith would feel wrong to me. Not that readers have a duty to engage with a book, but if you were ready to pan a horrible propaganda piece on reddit but stopped because it could hurt the author's feelings, I'd have fully encouraged you into speaking your mind in reasonable terms.
And yes, there are non-fiction books, like the Bible and "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws", but those can also be approached with a dose of lightheartedness.
[^1] The Terraformers, By Annalee Newitz. Go, buy it, read it. It has real science in it, nothing else needs to be said.
But why? Was your comment dishonest?
Many people forget that the other side of a review is human. Social media, trip advisor, amazon, blogs, and reddit are all channels in which people feel free to be honest, but then are surprised to discover the human who you criticised is popping up and responding with hurt.
We all know being rude to a service worker to their face ks the sign of an absolute turd of a human being, but seem to think being “honest” in an indirect channel is just fine.
Being kind (empathetic, sympathetic, constructive), is less toxic for both parties, retains authenticity (more valuable than “honesty”), and is therefore socially more acceptable in a situation where you remember the criticism is going to be taken on by the other party.
It sounds like the person forgot - because it was Reddit - that human empathy towards a creator is a powerful thing, and that a lack of it is incredibly damaging, beyond what you would do if meeting the individual face to face. Being smart and “honest” (more often than not, actually just rude), are not the primary ways of keeping score when determining if somebody is being a good human.
Look up Jeff Bezos’ thoughts on being clever vs being kind: he’s not wrong. It’s easy to forget when you think the person you’re being clever about will never read your words, but that’s actually just really, really dumb.
I agree with what you wrote here and elsewhere about the kind/nice distinction, but I'm... not sure if the above is what "being honest" means. Or rather, I personally don't consider it being honest - saying "I hated it" is very vague and likely not what I actually felt, and "what a crock" would be me just doing knee-jerk next token prediction, so badly that even GPT-3.5 would do it better.
"Being honest" with feedback is what I imagine to look more like "I didn't like the ${aspect of the work}, I feel it was too ${something} / not enough ${something else}". It's free of bullshit, so it's not "nice"; it's also not making a specific effort to be useful/actionable to the receiver, therefore it's not "kind". It's also not "hostile", as it bears no ill intent. It's just being precise and accurate in reporting how I actually felt about the work and why.
Under this definition, I always strive to aim for "honest+kind" with any feedback I give. Of course, I still end up being "kind" or even just "nice" with some people - specifically those who tend to interpret any mention of a potential improvement as implying severe deficiency.
You don’t have to give 5 star reviews to every book (being nice), but you could give it to the ones that deserve it and no ratings at all to the ones you didn’t like, or a 1-star with a constructive review (being kind).
I think there's a popular blog post that kicked it off.
In this instance I’m saying “nice” is just giving pleasant vibes no matter what, and being kind is being friendly and supportive but not always being nice.
If you put on clothes that don’t suit you it is nice to say that they do (because I want to keep things pleasant), but it’s kind to say something else suits you better (because I want the best for you, not to pretend everything is fine). Telling you they don’t suit you and leaving it at that is just mean: I haven’t helped you and now you feel bad.
Worth noting the etymology for kind is from “kin”, meaning family. Family should want the best for you, and frame things in a way that can help you, even if they are telling you things that might not be pleasant.
We need more kinship in modern life. Less “honesty”.
For example, if I worked on your team, and always gave harsh PR feedback, I wouldn't be nice, but if I always sent feedback to your manager after you fixed up the PRs, saying how rigorous you were in your followups, and how good your code is, I'd be kind.
On the other hand, if I always gave you positive feedback on good things you did in the code, didn't call out nits in your code, I'd probably be nice. If months later I went back and looked at your codebase and it was a mess due to lots of little things adding up and told your manager you coded poorly, then I wouldn't be kind.
"My car broke down"
"Oh that is so bad! I really feel for you!"
New York = Kind.
"My car broke down"
"Well I guess I have to drive your broke ass to work now"
So you are sabotaging the system not just not believing in it
Roughly 50% tolerate or like them The other 50% completely hate them
One for how well book's topic or genre gelled with you as a viewer.
Another for execution of the concept.
Some books are well written but not for me. Some are interesting enough but flawed. One dimensional scale would land both squarely in the middle
For me it's about how you should react when you get a gift. If a relative offers you something that you don't like, you still appreciate the gesture.
Feedback is a gift, but not all gifts are good ones.
There is an industry of some people, rather than looking to provide feedback which accurately reflects the merits and flaws of a given work, who seem to deliberately hate-review everything to a) get clicks, and b) try to make themselves sound smarter than the people who create stuff. It doesn't really help anyone, and is almost entirely a selfish act.
Would you call it a gift if a visiting neighbour brought a smelly trash bag to your door while screaming at you for "looking like a dead squirrel"? They certainly took the time to carry that leaky bag, think of a sequence of helpful words to tell you, and even risk damaging their vocal cords! They certainly weren't obligated to do so, either. A slap in the face isn't necessarily "a generous act of ancient Egyptian medicinal practice to prevent disease".
We don't have to accept all "gifts" as gifts, so we certainly don't have to call any hurtful garbage as "feedback" in the first place. We don't have obligation to take it as a generous act, either -- wouldn't this make us feel guilty about feeling hurt?
I don't intend to be mean or snarky. Your comment made me think and come up with this sort of "insight".
Hurtful garbage yes
But still a gift
My working definition of feedback is “things I tell you about something you did with the intent to help you do better next time,” which does warrant the “feedback is a gift” mentality, even if the feedback is poorly delivered, misguided, or wrong. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s apathy.
As other have mentioned, sometimes people say things to you that are not feedback, and are primarily them seeking status, expressing hurt, etc. a caution though that “this person is just having a bad day” is an easy, universal response for dismissing valid but critical feedback.
IMHO, in work settings it can represent a sort of a power play, esp. if done in public. I, wise, experienced, and objective, have the perspicacity to critique you, a humble, inexperienced, unskilled clod. See how awesome I am?
This likely to be quite a bit more subtle than I've framed it above, of course, but the dynamic remains. And, these dynamics aren't mutually exclusive -- one may have a genuine desire to help and get an ego/status boost from it, (which makes it sometimes tricky to handle gracefully if you're on the receiving end.)
Feedback comes from the editor or the critic and unless the critic has been a creator should usually be taken with a fair dosage of salt. Rather than the rating per-se I think feedback without an explanation is more often than not an opinion.
People who care about their feedback having an impact, often time think through on why they are giving this feedback, have thought through on their own expertise around the field and whether they bring a valuable perspective to the table on the subject.
Until you reach that point, you may be disappointed due to mismatched expectations.
A good cover + summary + intro + PR can help to reduce it.
So:
* Positive feedback from people who love your product: use this, double down on what's great
* Positive feedback from people who don't love your product: ignore this
* Negative feedback from people who love your product: use this if it seems helpful, but it may not be critical, because it didn't prevent them from loving it
* Negative feedback from people who almost love your product or kinda love your product, and who could really love it, but don't because of issues: use this feedback to sandpaper away the issues
* Negative feedback from people who don't and will never love your product: ignore this
If I get a 1-2 from someone I thought would give me a 3-5 that's valuable information that I didn't understand how they saw me. With the updated information I can more effectively navigate the relationship.
Folks are generally not that interested in giving positive feedback. "It does what it says on the tin, not much else to say."
However, they are often profuse in negative feedback. This can be extremely valuable.
I mention that, here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...
As the author says, what you really want are people who are aligned with you in most dimensions, understand what you're trying to do, and can see how to make it better. Those people are worth their weight in gold.
The important thing is to know what _you_ want to do well enough to know when feedback is going to help you get there, and when it's trying to get you to go somewhere else.
Here I define “too much” as when the data suggests nothing new/actionable or is so ambiguous so as to confuse.
Feedback from those who really want to see you succeed is rare - even at 3-4 stars out of 5, but when you receive those gems, they can be life changing.
It’s a bit dishonest, but also impossible to prove since feedback is completely subjective.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36056299
600+ comments, 4 days ago
Feedback on play store etc *is* a gift. A gift of making your content more discoverable by others. Anyone that has ever written a book and is making it available through online platforms should know that so I have to consider the article as a bit of a click bait rather than genuine opinion of the author.