# Some Theses on Motivational and Directional Feedback

*Note: Probably reinventing the wheel here. Heavily skewed to my areas of interest. Your results may vary.*

1.  Feedback can be decomposed into **motivational** ("Keep doing what you're doing!") and **directional** ("Here's what you should do differently . . .").
    1.  There's also **material** support ("I like your work, please accept this job offer / some money / my hand in marriage / etc."), which isn't really a type of feedback; I mention it because it can come packaged with the other two or be mistaken for them. (Consider a famous director whose movie gets a rave review from a popular critic: they might not derive any more encouragement from this than their fans already give them, and they're unlikely to let the content of the review change the way they shoot their next movie, but will still appreciate it because of the extra tickets it causes people to buy.)
    2.  **Demotivational** feedback ("This isn't working, give up!") exists, but I'd say that's just **motivational** feedback with a flipped sign.
2.  People don't reliably self-report or consistently scale; this is particularly important for **motivational** feedback. "This is great!" might mean the commenter really enjoyed something, *or* they're a perennially polite and/or positive person who didn't actively dislike it. One way to handle this is with the human-brain-equivalent of proof-of-work computing: a long, thoughtful comment will have more of an impact than a single sentence - even if they're saying the same things for the same reasons - and fan\[art|fiction|whatever\] provides further evidence.
    1.  Visibly voluntarily consuming a work is a (weak, valid) form of feedback. And if a work is more difficult to consume, that makes this signal stronger: "I read the whole book" is more meaningful than "I watched the whole video", etc.[^48ki81vtnal]
    2.  "I just subscribed to your Patreon!" is - in addition to the obvious **material** effects - another form of hard evidence that what you're doing matters.
3.  From a purely **directional** view, "I loved your game, especially level 7!", "7th level best level, you should make the entire game like that", "just fyi level 7 was more fun than the rest of them put together" and "Your game was terrible, except for level 7, which was merely bad." are all effectively the same review.
    1.  This isn't *quite* true. If you're making something which someone might assign as required reading (or equivalent), it behooves you to prioritize making the worst user experiences least bad; if you're creating in almost any other context, it makes more sense to prioritize people who already like your work, since everyone else can just stop reading/watching/playing . . . and, from a business standpoint, you were never going to get money out of those ones anyway. (Implication: there's an important sense in which refusing to acknowledge criticism unless it's sandwiched between compliments is healthy and adaptive behavior.)
    2.  It's been said (I forget where) that feedback is almost always right when telling you what's wrong, and almost always wrong when telling you how to fix it; I think this is broadly correct. (Note that this doesn't mean that you should discount feedback which comes with solutions - if nothing else, the kinds of solutions which get proposed provide valuable evidence about how the problem feels to the person experiencing it - just that they shouldn't be surprised when you ignore their suggestions and invent your own fix.)
4.  There are a lot of precious and impressive amateur creators who are chronically under-feedback-ed. There's a phenomenal web-novelist for whom I spent some time being the only person reviewing chapters as they came out; there's a fascinating blogger whom I helped to understand important things about their own writing style. The bar is on the floor!
    1.  Amateur creators don't usually get significant amounts of money, fame, or career advancement from what they do. Feedback is their main - and frequently only - extrinsic reward: if you want there to be good art made by people who aren't professional artists (won't somebody *please* think of the selection biases?), it makes sense to provide it.
5.  People vary greatly in what feedback they want and will benefit from. Some creators have already settled on a heading, and just want fuel (**motivational** \> **directional**); some will be fanatically committed to their task but open to any form of advice regarding how they achieve it (**directional** \> **motivational**).
    1.  People also vary greatly regarding the preferred format of their feedback. An extreme hypothetical: "I liked that story so much I used AI to draw your characters having sex!" might get reactions ranging from horror to bemusement to glee depending on how the author feels about AI, and pornography, and their characters.
    2.  In general, more established and/or professional creators will prefer different forms of feedback; conventions learned here will therefore be skewed when dealing with amateurs. In particular, I think professionals tend to like **motivational** and/or **material** responses over **directional**: they have beta readers/playtesters/etc already, so unsolicited advice from the unwashed masses can come off as redundant and presumptuous, but everyone can always use another dollar and/or nice comment.
    3.  Everyone is convinced that their preferred form and format of feedback is the objectively correct kind.

Saying The Quiet Parts Out Loud
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*   I'm personally very grateful for any feedback, *especially* **directional**. I tend not to reply, because I find it mildly uncomfortable when I see other creators do that, and I don't want to make people who say nice and/or useful things to me mildly uncomfortable; also, I think people are less likely to offer criticism if they think it might start a conversation/argument. But if you've shared an opinion about any of my work - publicly or otherwise - please know that I appreciate it. (*Especially* if it was somewhat-but-not-entirely-negative!)
*   I tend to do unto others as I would have them do unto me: accordingly, I try to find something to criticize and something to praise in everything I offer opinions about. If this habit led me to feeding you some feedback you didn't like, mea culpa.
*   If you want my feedback on anything, let me know. This goes double for any inference-y project, and dectuple for any [D&D.Sci](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/d-and-d-sci)-ish project: however, "I want your opinion in particular on this thing in particular" is reason enough for me to take a look.

[^48ki81vtnal]: On the extreme end, I'm perpetually amazed and gratified that I can assign strangers homework and some of them will A) do it and B) be grateful for it.