Anonymous feedback forms revisited
post by gwern · 2013-12-01T02:50:25.202Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 15 commentsIn 2011, I added an anonymous feedback form to
gwern.net. It has worked well (116 entries) and justified the time it took to set up because it encourages people to correct various problems or tip me off on things. If you have a site, maybe you should add one too.
For the full writeup, see http://www.gwern.net/About#anonymous-feedback
15 comments
Comments sorted by top scores.
comment by Kaj_Sotala · 2013-12-01T15:00:00.647Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Interesting. I've held off with creating an anonymous feedback form of my own, given that I occasionally have a somewhat thin skin and some self-esteem issues, but that was with the expectation that the feedback would be predominantly negative (since people are usually much more likely to voice criticisms than praise). I would not have anticipated as much positive and as little negative feedback.
comment by Vaniver · 2013-12-01T03:33:58.389Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm glad it worked out well for you! In particular, it's good that you've got another vector to get praise; your site is fantastic and you deserve it.
The cybering and extortion were amusing, if nothing else.
Should I infer anything from you not specifying "the cybering request"? :P
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2013-12-01T03:56:21.630Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Should I infer anything from you not specifying "the cybering request"? :P
The request was hilarious, but I didn't respond. I want a woman who will love me for my body, not because she has a Spock fetish! Or... something like that, anyway.
(I haven't posted it or the other feedbacks because I'm sure everyone assumed their feedbacks were private and wouldn't be shared publicly years later, even if I deleted the obviously identifying information like email addresses or names.)
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2017-03-19T01:06:36.462Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
That said, excerpting some of the praise of myself seems harmless enough, so as part of a sort of experiment in whether adding social proof (such as in some tweets) will help my Patreon profile, I've excerpted a number of them to https://www.patreon.com/gwern
comment by Douglas_Knight · 2013-12-01T06:03:17.230Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Yes, you should do a log plot
plot(Visits ~ Day, data=feedback,log="y")
but I prefer ggplot
qplot(Day,Visits, data=feedback,log="y")
↑ comment by gwern · 2013-12-01T14:39:34.013Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I prefer ggplot2 too, but due to an ill-considered invocation of fdupes I yesterday trashed my local R installation, among other things, and haven't had time to make things right (I was busy with the Sheep Marketplace fallout and then writing up the post).
comment by Luke_A_Somers · 2013-12-01T20:40:44.889Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Did the last two categories overlap?
Replies from: gwerncomment by gwern · 2013-12-23T02:44:01.702Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Extortion: 1
More details: http://www.gwern.net/Blackmail#anonymous
comment by pewpewlasergun · 2013-12-08T08:57:02.859Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
What's the difference between corrections and criticism? Did you get any that changed the way you do things?
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2013-12-08T15:54:28.988Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Corrections are things like 'you have a typo in X' or 'your CSS is broken' or 'you forget this'. Criticism is closer to, to paraphrase one, 'X is the worst thing on your site, is incredibly embarrassing, and you should feel bad for ever writing it.'
comment by ShardPhoenix · 2013-12-01T07:21:21.257Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
On a not very related note, what were your conclusions from the Hacker News posting experiment? The articles seemed to do quite well.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2013-12-01T14:40:32.932Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I haven't finished yet. I seemed to have been hit with a massive submission penalty which makes me unable to reach the main page anymore, though, so I will probably stop soon.
Replies from: Douglas_Knight↑ comment by Douglas_Knight · 2013-12-01T16:03:14.684Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Can you tell if the submission penalty is for your account or for your site?
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2013-12-01T16:28:26.676Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Account, I think. All my submissions languish at +1. One or two since the penalty have made it to the main page, and those two were non-gwern.net, but I can't judge from just those two whether there is an additional gwern.net penalty.
EDIT: I asked one of the HN admins and he said there was no penalty on my account or site he knew of, so I'm not sure what it is now.