I used to be a person that criticized a lot. One day i realized what an cheap ass i was. Talking is easy. Now i say silently to myself:
"Shut up or do it better yourself."
It is very healthy to remove narcissistic micromanagers (driven by subconcious anxiety) from your life if you can.
Again, it depends on why you are designing something. If your goal is to just stroke your ego then you probably aren't going to care about the end user.
Whenever I see "should" in a sentence I think: why is this not how things are? What are the incentives? In this case: who is the person deciding what gets built? What are the consequences for being over budget? (Calatrava I am looking at you).
Meanwhile, anything on the internet you're reading/watching/listening to is by your choice.
This is about expectations. Good architecture serves many users. Good films serve many viewers. Good software ...
You get the point. And it is always better if you can serve two target audiences at once instead of one – IF you can do it without compromising.
But some software doesn't want or even need to serve all users. Take vim for example. For most people it would be a horrible experience to use it and they could criticise it for a ton of things. But what value is there in this cricism as they don't understand how vim is intended to be used? Their cirticism comes from a true place, but it still isn't worth a lot, because if you followed it to the end you would end up with something like notepad.exe or MS Word and loosing everything that makes vim special and interesting.
So if anything, what I say here is: good criticism is critcicism by people who see the same thing in your thing as you do, as their vision likely aligns with yours. If you are painting impressionist pictures for example, the criticism "it could look more photorealistic" by some guy is utterly useless, while the criticism "I think you should rely less on simple complementary color combinations" by someone who understands impressionism might be really helpful. The photorealism guy just tells you that there are people looking for this out there, but as you already know and/or actively decided against it, there is no use in this.
This is a good rule to go by. It is always way easier to critique a thing for whatever reason and critique can be good, but only to a point. When you start writing articles about how thing X is bad because of Y, you aren't doing any favors for anyone. You should instead try to channel that into something positive.
I have limited amount of time and before I spend 20 hours on a book or game I would like some indication that it's not a waste of time.
One could argue that both the good and the bad should be highlighted, but my experience is that I'm get most value from knowing about the bad parts.
My main take away from the post is that anything worth making will receive its share of critics. As a creator you should be aware of that and be ready to focus on the people you actually bring joy to and who appreciate what you do rather than the haters and take pride in actually moving the needle enough to be reacted on.
Closest thing in English that I could think of: history is written by the winners. Similar concept.
Or maybe "patches or GTFO" :-)
Which I guess speaks to how consumerist the US as a society is (said as an American).
The closest I can come up with is "Those who can, do." (Usually seen with "... Those who can't, teach.")
https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Learn-About-TR/TR-En...
> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
This is an absurd position. We can't all be masters of anything but that doesn't mean we can't recognize flaws. Sure, sometimes there is a good reason for something a novice would perceive as a flaw but just throwing the concept of criticims away entirely and demand that people accept whatever you crap out is ridiculous. Building echo chambers where no one dares to criticize does not help the art at all - that way lies mediocrity.
All creators should learn to find value in criticism, especially negative. That doesn't mean that you need to always follow laymen opinions but even things wrongly perceived as faults are perceived as such and you should at least think about why that is and if that means you can do something better rather than ignoring the ignorant plebes.
It's also pretty arrogant of you to assume that "consumers" (what a dehumanizing term that is) should care about your constraints at all - especially constraints that are self-imposed. If you are selling something (either for money or for the expectation of time/resouces put in by the user) then your struggles are and imho should be irrelevant - all that matters is how well you fill the need that the user is trying to fill.
> In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right.
Jeder hat so viel Recht, wie er Macht hat.
If people have the means to complain, they have the right to. You can ignore them (unless you depend on them) but others might not.
This obviously gives rise to picking an audience, but this idea goes beyond just demographics. There is no greatest book of all time only individual preference which doesn’t result in an absolute rank.
Commercial art is at best a compromise. No artist is going to inherently prefer exactly what the market wants directly, they only want the indirect things associated with that. Aka money, fame etc.
Even that is hard. App stores are full of negative reviews for apps because X app is not just like Y app…. when X app isn’t at all supposed to be Y app. Or situations where the user simply misunderstood how the app works and etc.
It’s so hard to get things in front of the right audience who understand.
I get what you're saying here, but part of any art program is critical review of each others' works. You don't have to change what you created, but to hear other perspectives on how it is received is important.
One professor told me how it is, partly, about keeping the artist from falling down their own rabbit hole. Sort of like the story about the servant who followed Marcus Aurelius around to whisper "you are but a man" in his ear. Highly creative types tend to have somewhat fragile mental states, and they can spiral out if not kept in check.
But from students the content of their critique is less important than what it implies. Did they fail to notice something you were trying to make obvious? That’s useful feedback which can’t be directly included in their criticism. The actual content may also be useful, but it isn’t guaranteed.
So it’s definitely a useful, but not necessary useful as criticism.
People naturally want to provide criticism, but it’s surprisingly inefficient without a great deal of context.
> If people have the means to complain, they have the right to. You can ignore them (unless you depend on them) but others might not.
Having the means to do something in no way gives you the right to do so. I have the means to speed in my car. I have the means to murder someone. I don't have the _right_ in either case to do so.
Right is earned through investment.
A creator invests a substantial amount of time and effort into something.
A complainer can invest no time or effort into something.
And specific to the gaming community, there's a distinction between investing consumption time (e.g. playing) and creation time (e.g. modding or building).
I'd allow that playing confers substantial rights ("I've played this game over 1,000 hours and I think..."), but those rights should never be confused with creator rights.
Which is what makes amateur game criticism so toxic to me ("I can't do what you do, nor have any interest in investing the effort, but let me tell you how to spend your time to do what I want").
Especially in the performance-limited era of Half Life, most gamers didn't know a damn thing about the boundary of the possible.
The ability to complain doesn't need to be earned, only the respect itself needs to be earned.
Which I guess boils down to "Don't listen to the internet."
You don't have to have invested in creation to know what you like and you don't. Claiming that the creators are the only ones who understand things enough to critique them is vanity and is toxic to projects.
Every time I've seen project leaders talk like that it's been a disaster. Jensen Harris et. al used that language to dismiss feedback about the Windows 8 Star Screen, for example.
Rights are absolutely not earned, they are granted. You do not earn the right to vote, or to have legal protection. A right is granted either by the state, by society, or by 'god'.
That kind of theoretical nonsense might be how certain sociologists of state discuss it. But no normal person cares about that.
I didn’t say that I earned it.
> Making this into some sort of weird history lesson and berating "the state" (?) is not helpful.
Weird? It’s about the causal origin of rights, i.e. history.
Weird philosophy lessons on “rights” are not helpful.
Complainers: I am certainly strong enough to complain your ears off.
Makers: No, not like that! That’s immoral!
Few creators will object to criticism that shows an understanding of the work/product. Most will object to personal abuse empty of any actual criticism.
Understanding the context of a product makes for better complaints. Just venting is not helpful and often abusive.
I see it a lot in small communities centered around open source games. It is easy for some one to vent their anger in a useless fashion (can we agree that pr teams calling it passion is a euphemism they use to avoid insulting people giving them money?), and comparatively difficult and rare for people to put their experience into relatable terms or to criticize a change as it pertains to the project's goals.
Of course we know nothing about that inflamed moderator. Oh well.
Hier geht es um die Gemeinschaft des Spiels, nicht um das Spiel selbst. Dieser Mann hat das Spiel nicht programmiert, nur eine kleine Ergänzung zu einer Ergänzung.
I do think they should stay polite and if the author isn't willing to change (for either objective or subjective reasons), move on.
What people do not have any right, or entitlement, to is agreement from the person they're complaining to. People are allowed to dismiss a complaint and not do anything about it, no matter how unhappy the complainant might be about it. You have no right to demand someone does something; you can only inform them that you're not happy about the status quo.
I have a right to complain that it's raining. And I have the free speech right to say "I demand it stop raining". But I have no right to come to you and demand that you make the rain stop, because that implies a claim on you that I do not have.
It's amazing how relatively mild denotational differences can have such wildly different connotations and perceived tones.
The first layer is the makers, but after that there are a couple of layers of assessors and distributors before ideas and products hit the masses. For someone in a community that makes things, criticism isn't so useful. In the other layers that are there to work out what ordinary people should do armchair criticism is a lot more useful. Still not very impressive, but more useful.
The armchair critics aren't at all interested in making things. Their self-appointed role isn't to make things. They are part of a community that generates chatter to help guide the conversation of the people who actually decide what should happen at the mass-market level.
Ain't dealing with an avalanche of Abmahnung, and ain't going to shut up either.
There's unfortunately also the saying "Nicht geschimpft ist genug gelobt", i.e. something like "Not being scolded is enough compliments".
If things work, they are taken for granted and some people only speak up if they are irritated.
Which of course leads to a biased perception of how satisfied the people on average really are with your work.
Last week I wrote an email to an author to a blog I have been following for a year or so. Just wanted to let him know his work was appreciated and I hope he continues writing.
He replied and told me this little gesture made his day. So I guess I should do more of that.