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Do developers even give feedback?

Article news.ycombinator.com

Do developers even give feedback?

That was the question I asked my self last week. So I decided to re-search a little bit. I went on subreddits, such as SideProject, SaaS, Solopreneurs, webdev, basically everything that has something to do with programming, and just lurked. What I found was interesting, there were news posts, almost every minute, of people asking for feedback, and not receiving anything. It was a flood of people spamming their projects wanting to gain attention, while giving none.

Then I spend two days, researching some of the projects, reading through their docs, signing up, using their service, and writing detailed feedback. The feedback took around 20 minutes of research and another 10-20 minutes of writing. After writing long comments, the response was almost always the same, one upvote, one thank you. However, after getting a response, I asked for feedback back, aand, was ignored, completely. Either a single upvote, or nothing at all. This actually confused me a bit. Developer might not give feedback anymore, but will they not even give feedback if they receive feedback themselves?

That was my next post. I asked developers, would you give feedback if someone gave it to you? Surprisingly, the answer was yet, in almost all cases. Then what was the problem? It was freedom, actually. Users had the choice of giving feedback or not giving feedback, and because not giving feedback is faster, people opted to not give it at all. I talked to a few fellow devs that responded, and they agreed. Devs gone lazy, they do not want to give feedback if they dont have to. An enforcement of some kind, like, 1 Feedback required per 1 Post, would encourage giving feedback slightly. But there was still one issue that a user pointed out. Devs would not give feedback, because it takes too long.

After a long discussion with the fellow redditor, we both agreed on the fact that asking for structured feedback would cut the time for writing and reading, as the user would not need to write as much, and the reader would not need to read as much.

But this was all still theory, so I had to put it to the test. I asked a few devs if they were ready to give feedback to someone if they knew they would get quality feedback back, I found a few devs that said they were ready, and paired them, without them knowing about it. I requested their website with structured questions, and then send it to the other person, and then did the same with the other person. The result? A massive improvement. Mind you, both of the users were ignored within their subreddits beforehand.

So what is the issue? Well, I am the middle man, and not a good one at that. So I decided to program a website that implements what I do. My goal is to build a community platform where developers exchange feedback together, making sure that everybody gets feedback, and nobody gets ignored.

What do you guys think though? The experiments seemed like a proof of concept to me. Can feedback be brought back?

Discussion 5 comments · 2 points · xerrs · 2026-03-07
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