Nobody Wants Your Feedback

2 points · November 2026 · 1 comment

I mean this precisely. When you tell someone you'd welcome their feedback, you are asking them to do unpaid work whose only reward is your possible displeasure. They know this. They will say looks good! and mean please don't make me.

The word itself is the problem. Feedback is a signal that comes back through a system. It is what a microphone does when it gets too close to a speaker. Nobody gives feedback; they say what they think, or they don't.

So ask for what you want. Tell me which paragraph you'd cut. Tell me where you stopped reading. Tell me if the ending is a cheat. Those are questions a person can answer in a sentence, on their phone, without pretending to be an editor.

And if you get nothing back, take the nothing seriously. It is the most honest feedback there is.