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Anonymous feedback forms revisited

by gwern
1st Dec 2013
1 min read
15

36

Postmortems & RetrospectivesUI Design
Personal Blog

36

Anonymous feedback forms revisited
13Kaj_Sotala
12Vaniver
20gwern
0gwern
11Douglas_Knight
2gwern
10Luke_A_Somers
4gwern
8gwern
0pewpewlasergun
0gwern
0ShardPhoenix
7gwern
2Douglas_Knight
7gwern
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[-]Kaj_Sotala12y130

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.

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[-]Vaniver12y120

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

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[-]gwern12y200

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.)

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[-]gwern8y00

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

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[-]Douglas_Knight12y110

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")

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[-]gwern12y20

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).

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[-]Luke_A_Somers12y100

Did the last two categories overlap?

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[-]gwern12y40

No.

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[-]gwern12y80

Extortion: 1

More details: http://www.gwern.net/Blackmail#anonymous

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[-]pewpewlasergun12y00

What's the difference between corrections and criticism? Did you get any that changed the way you do things?

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[-]gwern12y00

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.'

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[-]ShardPhoenix12y00

On a not very related note, what were your conclusions from the Hacker News posting experiment? The articles seemed to do quite well.

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[-]gwern12y70

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.

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[-]Douglas_Knight12y20

Can you tell if the submission penalty is for your account or for your site?

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[-]gwern12y70

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.

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15Comments

In 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