If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original – Sir Ken Robinson
I’ve seen this play out too many times.
Someone shares their side project in a group chat or dev forum and says, “Would love your thoughts!” But when you actually give thoughts, real ones, like “Nice, but this part feels confusing” or “I got lost on the second screen”, you can almost hear the discomfort.
It’s like they didn’t expect someone to actually look closely.
That’s when I realized that most people aren’t asking for feedback. They’re asking for validation. They want a pat on the back. A “Nice work!” A “Clean UI, bro.” Something to reassure them that they’re doing okay.
I’m not judging that. It’s human. We all build things in isolation, and it’s natural to want someone to say, “Hey, this is cool.” But if your goal is to grow, if you actually want to make something better, then empty praise won’t get you very far.
Real feedback isn’t flattering. It’s often annoying. It interrupts your self-satisfied moment and forces you to look at what you missed. But that’s what makes it useful.
I remember once when a dev dropped a product demo in a community I follow. Everyone said the usual stuff like fire emojis, etc., One guy replied, “Looks great, but why does this take so long to load?” The original poster went quiet.
But that was the only comment worth thinking about.
The others were nice, but they didn’t help the product get better. That one bit of discomfort and that’s what leads to growth.
You might argue that appreciating the people, they will do good. Just giving feedback is not enough.
That’s a big misunderstanding which most people have. Feedback is not only about saying the negative things. Feedback is a combination of what is good and what is not. When someone is asking for feedback, you don’t just point out the negative things, you tell them what is good as well.
Feedback is a mechanism which helps others become better. They become better by doing more of what is good, and doing less of what is not good. It is a general mechanism which is employed in almost all fields.
Take re-inforcement machine learning as an example. The model is repeatedbly given with feedback such as “correct” or “incorrect”. Based on this feedback, it becomes good in accuracy.
If you’re shipping something and you want real input, ask the kind of questions that give people permission to be honest. Instead of “Thoughts?”, ask “What’s one thing you’d change?” Or “Was anything unclear?”
And more importantly, be ready to listen.
There’s a big difference between wanting to look good and wanting to get better. Validation helps you with the first. Feedback helps with the second.
Just be clear about which one you’re after.
