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.
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
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.)
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
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")
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).
What's the difference between corrections and criticism? Did you get any that changed the way you do things?
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.'
On a not very related note, what were your conclusions from the Hacker News posting experiment? The articles seemed to do quite well.
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.
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.
For the full writeup, see http://www.gwern.net/About#anonymous-feedback