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"Negative feedback" is not positive when it's merely an insult. Let me clarify: "Your app is so slow it's proof you have absolutely no business writing softwa

by msla 7y ago

"Negative feedback" is not positive when it's merely an insult. Let me clarify: "Your app is so slow it's proof you have absolutely no business writing software and evidence of the moral decay of the entire field of computing, if not humanity as a whole. Give up. You deserve a six-foot nap." is not merely an insult. It contains an actionable point. "You have absolutely no business writing software. You're a monster. You do not qualify as human. I would like to see you in an immense amount of pain." is most definitely negative feedback, but it does not contain anything actionable. It has no positive aspect to it. The fact unquestionably sane people can generate feedback of the second kind is one of the things to consider when accepting feedback.

sovok_x 7y ago
It can be actually positive anyway. You just need to understand that strong emotions often stem from unfulfilled or broken expectations. It is not about you, it is about them. Some people just don't vocalize those expectations in the initial response because the emotion is too overwhelming. But it is also true that there are crazy and inadequate people out there that either respond randomly or have unrealistic expectations. Their replies can be considered somewhat positive too - they indicate that people use your product. If your product doesn't attract crazies by design and is not a totally unusable, deceptive and buggy garbage they usually represent only tail of your userbase distribution.
luckylion 7y ago
> The fact unquestionably sane people can generate feedback of the second kind is one of the things to consider when accepting feedback. It's easy to drive people to (temporary) insanity, too. A recent anecdote: PayPal sucks (as usual) and doesn't let me log in. They've been requiring me to change my password before because of some strange Californian paranoia, so I hope that'll help and reset my password successfully. I still can't log in. I'm looking for ways to contact customer service. It says "log in, then use the contact options to send us an email". It has a "can't log in? call us!" option, I call them, sit through an annoying 60 second phone menu, only to be told that they're not working right now and to call back on monday. I notice that their "password was changed" info wasn't sent from a no-reply-address, but some service-email, so I just reply, annoyed. I get an auto-reply, saying "to send us an email, please log in ...". Needless to say that I never heard back from anyone. It's such a broken process by a global corporation and it was so annoying, that I was pretty close to just responding with insults, but I'm trying to control my emotions, and also I still need my PayPal account. AliBaba/AliExpress is another example, they use (used? haven't tried in a while) chatbots pretending to be human support agents, and they're so bad at it that it's a) absolutely not helpful for most cases where you need support b) easy to spot. The insulting part is that the (clearly labeled) first response chatbot says "let me get you a human agent that can handle this", only to put you into contact with another copy of itself that asks the same questions. The part that really makes me want to scream at them: their bots have artificial "thinking time". They'll say "one moment please", have typing indicators, only to say "you're asking about '$keyword', right?". Very strong negative feedback could just mean that you're really messing up, or the way you collect feedback is broken. Have a form that only accepts 200 characters in the message field but only says so when you submit and resets the form? You won't get a lot of friendly messages from people that had just written long bug reports or messages.
imtringued 7y ago
Feedback is the process of finding problems and initiating a change to solve it. If you get feedback but can't find any problems or there is no need to change anything then you can just ignore it. If you have a blue website and constantly get feedback from people saying they love blue then you didn't need the feedback.

by msla 7y ago

sovok_x 7y ago

It can be actually positive anyway. You just need to understand that strong emotions often stem from unfulfilled or broken expectations. It is not about you, it is about them. Some people just don't vocalize those expectations in the initial response because the emotion is too overwhelming. But it is also true that there are crazy and inadequate people out there that either respond randomly or have unrealistic expectations. Their replies can be considered somewhat positive too - they indicate that people use your product. If your product doesn't attract crazies by design and is not a totally unusable, deceptive and buggy garbage they usually represent only tail of your userbase distribution.

luckylion 7y ago

> The fact unquestionably sane people can generate feedback of the second kind is one of the things to consider when accepting feedback. It's easy to drive people to (temporary) insanity, too. A recent anecdote: PayPal sucks (as usual) and doesn't let me log in. They've been requiring me to change my password before because of some strange Californian paranoia, so I hope that'll help and reset my password successfully. I still can't log in. I'm looking for ways to contact customer service. It says "log in, then use the contact options to send us an email". It has a "can't log in? call us!" option, I call them, sit through an annoying 60 second phone menu, only to be told that they're not working right now and to call back on monday. I notice that their "password was changed" info wasn't sent from a no-reply-address, but some service-email, so I just reply, annoyed. I get an auto-reply, saying "to send us an email, please log in ...". Needless to say that I never heard back from anyone. It's such a broken process by a global corporation and it was so annoying, that I was pretty close to just responding with insults, but I'm trying to control my emotions, and also I still need my PayPal account. AliBaba/AliExpress is another example, they use (used? haven't tried in a while) chatbots pretending to be human support agents, and they're so bad at it that it's a) absolutely not helpful for most cases where you need support b) easy to spot. The insulting part is that the (clearly labeled) first response chatbot says "let me get you a human agent that can handle this", only to put you into contact with another copy of itself that asks the same questions. The part that really makes me want to scream at them: their bots have artificial "thinking time". They'll say "one moment please", have typing indicators, only to say "you're asking about '$keyword', right?". Very strong negative feedback could just mean that you're really messing up, or the way you collect feedback is broken. Have a form that only accepts 200 characters in the message field but only says so when you submit and resets the form? You won't get a lot of friendly messages from people that had just written long bug reports or messages.

imtringued 7y ago

Feedback is the process of finding problems and initiating a change to solve it. If you get feedback but can't find any problems or there is no need to change anything then you can just ignore it. If you have a blue website and constantly get feedback from people saying they love blue then you didn't need the feedback.