The feedback you leave

People who were delighted and people who were angry. Almost nobody writes feedback about something that went exactly as expected, because nothing happened worth reporting.

That means any body of feedback is a sample of the extremes, presented as though it described the whole. It is not dishonest, nobody arranged it, and it is a strong distortion that everybody reading it forgets about.

• Volume says how many people felt strongly, not how many were satisfied.
• The absence of complaints is weak evidence, because most satisfied people write nothing.
• A specific account is worth far more than a general verdict, because specifics can be evaluated and verdicts cannot.
• Recency matters more than quantity, because whatever is being described can change.

Write what happened rather than how you feel about it. The feeling is the part that will not transfer and the events are the part somebody else can use.

Write it when the strength of the feeling has dropped a little, which is also when the account will be more accurate. Immediate feedback is the most emotionally honest and the least useful.

And write the ordinary case if you have one. It is the least satisfying thing to write and the most valuable thing in the pool, precisely because almost nobody does.

Feedback sometimes gets used during a disagreement, as pressure. That converts it from a record for other readers into a bargaining position, and it stops being information.

It also tends not to work in the direction people intend, and it puts something permanent into a situation that is still moving. As with several other steps in this section, the thing to notice is that it cannot be taken back afterwards.

Nothing on this site is rated, ranked or scored. Not the addresses, not the panels, not anything. The three published addresses are printed in the order supplied with no marker of any kind, and the panels are listed by section rather than by importance.

The reason is the same one this panel is about. A score compresses a lot of things into one number and then gets read as though the number carried all of them, and this board has no basis for producing any such number about anything.

This is the last panel in the orders section, and it is the only one about something you produce for other people rather than for yourself.

That makes it a reasonable place to end. Everything else in the sequence was about handling your own situation. This one is about what you leave behind for the next person, which is the same thing this board is trying to do with the whole of the corpus section: be clear about what a record is worth and how it should be read.

There is one structural weakness worth naming, and it applies to every feedback pool anywhere rather than to any particular one. Feedback attaches to a name, and a name can change hands.

Nothing in a body of accumulated feedback tracks whether the thing being described is still the same thing. The record is about the past, the name is in the present, and the connection between them is an assumption every reader makes without noticing.

That is why recency matters more than volume, and it is a specific instance of the general point this board keeps making about records. A record describes what was recorded. Everything else about it, including that it still applies, was supplied by the reader.

Is a lot of positive feedback a good sign?

It says a lot of people felt strongly enough to write. It does not tell you what the ordinary experience is, because ordinary experiences generate no feedback.

Should I leave feedback if nothing notable happened?

That is the most useful kind to leave and the rarest, for exactly the same reason.