Good and Bad Feedback

It’s a bit like… would a random Beatles song, if performed by a perfectly adequate but unheard of rock group, would it get to number 1?

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I’d echo the comment about a sandwich. First off, I only give criticism if I liked the story or can easily put my finger on what is going to make others dislike the story AND think the feedback will be positively received.

There are a lot of authors that post on the site that aren’t my cup of tea, but they write well and don’t need any feedback from me.

There are also a lot of writers, old and new, that are bad. Like their stuff is riddled with typos, mega long run-on sentences, repeated use of the same word, bad grammar, blah blah blah. Generally, especially if they’ve posted numerous stories, I don’t mention it, because they haven’t noticed it already and it’s not something they likely care about and they’re still posting and they’re posting for free, so why would I call them out on any of that? For new authors, it gets trickier. At which point, if it was a story I liked or thought the author had potential, then I will try and sandwich.

For a sandwich comment, start with something positive and glowing, then provide criticism but be gentle and make sure it’s actionable and clear (maybe get someone to review your next one first, you can post a message on the forums or discord asking, I’ll even volunteer!) and then end with another positive. That will let the author know you weren’t trying to be mean, and it will help them feel good about what they spent time and effort making available for free to readers.

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I don’t often comment on stories because I balance many different things when I decide whether to comment and what to say.

  1. Do I have time now to comment fairly?
  2. Do I think the author will care about/benefit from my comment?
  3. Is there some very simple issue that the author probably won’t mind looking at, like an obvious typo?
  4. Is the author way out of my league - much better or much worse (this is subjective) - such that commenting is unlikely to be helpful?
  5. How did the author respond to other comments on their work (if I have the time to look at this)?
  6. Did the author positively indicate that they welcome critique? If not, how did they react to comments of this nature?
  7. If I were the writer of this story, what would I want people to tell me about it?
  8. How much/how many points do I think the writer can realistically handle in terms of feedback/making edits?

I expect most people are naturally cautious and they will tend to say less than more, just in case the author reacts poorly.

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MonsterMash62 said it perfectly. Be kind and imagine you’re giving the feedback to the author in person (you can go a step further and assume they are mute and they have their back turned to you).

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This is a great thread, thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts. I’ve been lurking around for a long time, and wanting to get more active in writing, rating, and commenting on stories. I was always reluctant to share My thoughts on a story because I didn’t know how best to express My thoughts on it. I really appreciate that so many of you care to write thoughtful feedback on all these stories.

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Just be honest but not pretentious, that’s all. Some people take criticism of their work personally — it’s easy when you have an emotional investment. That’s why it’s easier for me to critique my old stuff than my new. Too fresh….

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I am dredging this thread up to say this: I’ve left many a comment good and bad, but even at my worst it was at least feedback that the author could take or leave, possibly gain some sense of what worked or what didn’t (if only for a single reader).

Now that I have a couple stories published I can say for myself at least, I’ll take negative feedback, even harsh criticism any day over the drive-by 0.5 rating. That is so demoralizing and the cowards who do it can’t even be bothered to say what they disliked.

I think if you are going to give a story that bad of a rating, you should have to say something. It’s hard to believe anyone would even read a 4k word story all the way through if they hated it that much.

That’s it. End rant.

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Martin would be able to detect this better than any of us can, but I’m convinced that there are a few people, possibly people with disposable accounts, who get their jollies out of rating everything as low as they can. Time and time again, almost always within the first 24 hours after I post a story, I’ll get one or two voters who give me insanely low scores across the board. I expect some people to give me low scores if I’m doing one of my rare no-sex or low-sex chapters—of course you’re not gonna cum from those—but rating everything at 0.5 is just malicious…there’s no two ways about it.

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They are getting smarter about it. The story I posted this morning was like 0.5/0.5/0.5/2/1 but it’s obviously malicious.

I can take criticism, but I don’t like being trolled. It also sucks to know I can never have those shiny little icons that drive extra traffic to your stories, because my stories can never be highly rated for a very, very small number of “reviewers” who allegedly rated my story, after reading it, in theory.

Which I fucking doubt.

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It’s really frustrating. Every so often I’ll write one where someone thinks 0.5’s across the board or 0.5/1’s are the way to go. I tell myself that it’s rare and it comes out in the wash. I also remind myself that it happens to everyone, and it’s probably not personal.

I know the weighted rankings are an attempt to get around that, but honestly I’ve never understood how the weighted rankings work. My weighted ranks are always much below my linear ranks.

Here’s something about those shiny little badges – they used to be really effective at driving traffic, but I wouldn’t worry about them anymore. Unfortunately, since Martin put in a delay before showing them, I haven’t found that getting a highly ranked story really drives more traffic than a more moderately ranked one.

Maybe that’s just me – I know I’ve built an audience here, and the people who like my stories are gonna click on them when they see them, regardless of the badges. But I don’t have the analytics to understand if most people just look at the front page, or if it’s genuinely valuable in the archives.

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@amul:
The only guy giving your latest story bad ratings was this guy:

This guy is giving harsh ratings all over the place but not exclusively. And even your story got an average of 2.3 and 2.8 - which is certainly bad but not an overall 0.5.

To me it seems he’s really very hard to please and rates about everything he reads, even if he doesn’t like it. Or if he doesn’t like certain aspects. Which, in itself, is not a bad thing, it’s just honest.

Problem with that is, that any story he’s giving a rating is treated unfairly.

I don’t want to disable all his ratings either, that would sound like manipulation. This is not an “only accept good ratings” show.

I do have some parameters for the rating system to compensate, though, but I’m not really sure how to use these in this case…

“Percent of ratings stripped” would mean how much of the best and worst ratings should be stripped. I.e. if this is set to 10%, the highest and lowest 10% of all ratings wouldn’t be taken into account. The current setting of 0 disables this function.

The two “Ratings ignored” work together: As they are set now, this means that if a person rates a story in less than 3 categories and the average of his ratings is less than 2.5 (50 means 2.5, internally the scale is from 0 to 100), his whole rating would be ignored.

I can tweak this a bit, but in my experience, neither have much effect on the overall statistics. A change will just favor one story at the cost of another.

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The weighted rankings are usually lower than the average ones as long as the total number of ratings is less than 20. At around 20 it usually turns around. Reason: The “weighted” algorithm takes the total number of ratings into account.

Thanks Martin, that helps me understand it a bit more. I’m always confused when I’ve got the first few rankings and it’s really low, but then I get more with about the same distribution and it creeps up. Black boxes drive me a bit nuts – thanks for the insight here!

Is that a ‘less than or equal to’? I thought 0.5 was the lowest you could rate a category, and so I’m not sure how you could rate less than 0.5.

Less than. And it’s supposed to be 2.5, not 0.5. My mistake when I wrote that explanation above.

(internally the scale is from 0 to 100 - i.e. 100 means 5.0).

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I of course cannot see who individual rankings came from. That story has a 0.5 or a 1 in each category except one, which has a 2.

So maybe it’s just not a good story. Definitely felt like I’d been drive-by’ed, but I guess some people here just give toilet-grade scores as a matter of course.

I’m not sure whether I feel worse or better that it’s a combination of people who gave the low rankings.

Again, I think if you’re going to rate something that low you should offer some constructive feedback. A 0.5-1 in hotness or wank factor when it’s totally a sex story should mean there is a glaring fault, something that could be improved.

We all obviously have different standards for rating an aspect of a story that we did not feel worked well. I wonder if those people who feel that that means a 0.5 realize what that actually communicates to the author.

As someone who literally grades papers for a living (in addition to actually educating sometimes), if I’m going to give a 0 to someone who turned in work, I had better have actual evidence they plagiarised it.

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I don’t think it’s a bad story. It just seems some users (one or two) are reading everything as soon as it’s released and rate harshly.

I can actually mask their ratings easily (that’s what that checkbutton in the screenshot above is for), but that would feel like a manipulation to me.

I added that feature to protect challenges (to avoid competitive users to up- or downvote stories in their favor). And actually I only had to use it twice so far.

I’m really not sure what to do. I feel for you, and I had the same problem on my latest story. This issue is especially unfair to recent stories, since this kind of ratings only started a couple of months ago.

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It’s ok, Martin.

My feelings are just hurt and I’ll get over it. Some of us are sensitive, you know?

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I know, and I really understand you all too well!

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It’s probably worth saying out loud: I hold academic markers to a higher standard than people giving ratings on a website. Academic work has a defined criteria for success, an expectation of consistency and fairness, and a pretty high bar in terms of who gets to do the marking.

Nobody is claiming plagiarism or anything of that magnitude. Sometimes it’s just an opinionated person who can’t tell the difference between ‘not for me’ and ‘bad’. Know that your fans love you and your work, and as for the other people, who the hell cares?

Write for the people who love you.

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