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You should mentally add "you idiot!" to the end of all your sentences. If the resulting sentence makes sense, rewrite it until it's so polite that adding those

• maxklein 18y ago
  I know I'm a bit mean, but someone has to be the mean guy. Personally, I dislike this fake politeness and niceness that people hide behind all the time. It makes life boring. I'm just saying things the way I see them without sugercoating them at all, I'm not being mean for the sake of being mean. I'm just saying what's in my mind without trying to reformulate it such that the other guy does not get hurt. When I demo my own project, I hope others do the same. Because that will make me improve and change till I can hopefully finally make something that is just frickin great. I care about this stuff here, this is not my job, it's my art. Art has to be aesthetically pleasing, and you would not criticize someone for saying his honest opinion about a crap piece of art, would you? And I'm not saying that the project above is crap, it's actually quite good, but there are some things that are not right in my opinion. Niceness is overrated. If you're trying to make something great, then you need to feel the flames when you're small. That's what will mould you and make you into a hard mean money making machine. If everyone just pats you on the back and encourages you to "follow your dreams", then you'll end up making something that nobody wants. When people tell you straight to your face what they don't like about your project without trying to be all diplomatic and sparing your feelings, you have an opportunity to look at other peoples perspectives and improve and change things.
  • dcurtis 18y ago
    What you're talking about is being honest with people regarding feedback. I respect that and agree with you. But it is possible to be tactfully honest. You're not.
    • maxklein 18y ago
      Okay, I'll try to be nicer next time while still staying honest.
    • deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
• iamdave 18y ago
  I think that was the most objective critique one could ask for a startup like this. He got right to the point of each topic and didn't beat around the bush just too say something.
• mechanical_fish 18y ago
  Once there was a man who went on vacation and left his neighbor to take care of his house while he was away. One week into the vacation, the man phoned his neighbor. "How's it going?" he asked. "Well," said the neighbor, "I'm afraid your cat is dead." The man was, naturally, shocked and horrified. "That's terrible!" he said. "You shouldn't have just told me flat out like that. Couldn't you have broken it to me gently? You could have said something like, 'Well, your cat got stuck on the roof. We called the fire department to get him down, but the cat slipped and fell. He landed badly and was knocked unconscious. We rushed him to the vet, but there was nothing to be done, so I'm afraid we had to put him to sleep, and he went blissfully to heaven.'" Two weeks later the man called the neighbor again. "How's it going?" he asked. There was a pause on the other end of the phone. Then the neighbor said, "well, your mother-in-law got stuck on the roof..." --- Anyway, enough with the old jokes. What I'm trying to say is that I don't see anything wrong with maxklein's critique. It's not mean. It's just blunt. And it's barely even "Linus Torvalds blunt" -- it's certainly not "Philip Greenspun blunt", and it isn't even visible on the Steve Jobs bluntness scale. Maybe it could have been more elegantly blunt. I certainly aspire to that, but it's still better to be inelegantly blunt -- it's better to be inelegantly blunt and completely wrong, so long as you're being honest -- than it is to just say "gosh, it sure is a website! great job, guys!" and let the poor folks run the risk of being schooled, quietly and politely, by the market as they bleed to death over the course of two or three years.