up vote 10 down vote favorite

In the past 24 hours there were two questions that were just requests for feedback on someones site.

http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/15904/looking-for-feedback-on-our-website

http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/15900/provide-feedback-on-playtictacphoto-com

Both users who asked the question only have one rep point, based on other SE sites this means they are less likely to return to the site (based on them logging on, asking a single question and not participating in any other activity).

Although the two questions above will likely receive some response from the great people that use this site, but ultimately I feel that these sorts of questions will become repetitive and just filler content amongst better questions. Which is ultimately harmful to the community.

This site has a couple of specific issues that are unique to a startups site: feedback and advertising.

Many people who come to this site have a project that they would like feedback on. Also, many people have services or products that they would like to advertise.

It would be good if the nice folks running this site could come up with a solution for these types of questions. I would suggest a separate part of this site to post these kinds of feedback or advertisement type questions (similar to careers).

I then suggest that these questions be closed as noise as they distract from the main point of this and other SE sites, to build a top quality, searchable repository of knowledge.

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I agree it would be good to have a formalized method to handle this - or even a place to point them to. the old Joel on Software discussion group seemed to have this sort of behavior - but that has turned into a bit of a ghost town. Other places are the paid sites by bob walsh and rob walling - but I hate to point people to those places as the only choices. – TimJ♦ Nov 3 '10 at 3:34
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We should have a rate my startup section... where you can review a startup, (internet) and give advice on business model, advice, etc. Sort of like a community business coach. Hot or Not ! :) – Frank Nov 14 '10 at 9:14
This is the kind of question that the ASP handles all the time. But you have to be a member there ($100 / yr) to get their feedback. – Gary E♦ Nov 15 '10 at 19:31

2 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

Great question. I've been meaning to ask this myself.

I agree with you that the "feedback on my site/idea" questions are doing more harm to the community than good. They provide very little benefit to the community. I think these questions are off-topic and should be closed, but since the community hasn't come to a consensus on that I've been hesitant to close them. I would like to hear what others think about this as well.

That said, I do think it's fine to include a link to your site if it provides value to the community. It can be in a question to provide more background, so that the community can provide a better answer, or in an answer to suggest a tool that can solve a problem or a detailed blog post on a particular subject. Sometimes it's hard to tell if it's spam, but for the most part you can tell the difference. I'm a lot more accepting if the link comes from someone who actively participates on the site, than if it comes from "Mr. 1 rep" who answers 5 questions, all with links to his site.

I like your suggestion of having a different section of the site dedicated to website feedback type questions, but I'm not sure if that's possible. Maybe Robert can answer that for us?

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I was hoping to get feedback from Robert or one of the other SE guys, that's why I tagged it as feature-request. I can see this as an important part of the overall experience, but not really part of the Q&A side. Thanks for your feedback. – xiaohouzi79 Nov 5 '10 at 4:58
I don't see how they harm the community. The comments are useful to anyone interested in critiques and analysis of web sites. Blatant attempts to get traffic of course are counter to the sites purpose and should be closed. – TimJ♦ Nov 5 '10 at 16:31
@Tim: I disagree. I think the critiques are specific to an individual website, and therefore are only useful to the OP. General comments about website design are fine, and do help the community, but when someone posts a link to their site and asks for feedback it is usually very specific. I personally don't get any benefit out of those questions. – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Nov 5 '10 at 17:05
@Tim: (Cont.) They harm the community because if one person does it, then everyone is going to start doing it. Next thing you know, that's all you'll see on the site. That'll discourage new users to join, and probably cause some old time users to leave the site (I would). And as xiaohouzi79 pointed out, most of these questions are coming from people with 1 rep. What are the chances these people will actually come back and contribute to the community? Very little - they are only interested in getting feedback, not becoming involved in the community. – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Nov 5 '10 at 17:06
@Tim: (Cont.) But I do think it's a good idea to dedicate a separate portion of the site to these questions. I understand that people have these concerns (I know I do - my website looks like crap right now), and I think it would be great if we could help them out. I just don't think those questions belong on the main site because they will end up drowning out the real startup/business questions. Do you think is an acceptable solution? – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Nov 5 '10 at 17:15
@xiaohouzi79: I think Robert is the only SE guy participating on this site right now, but I'm sure he can pass this along to them. However, I don't think they'll do this for us unless we get more feedback from other community members on this issue. As of right now, Tim and I are the only ones who have expressed an opinion. We need to get more participation over here. – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Nov 5 '10 at 17:29
@Zuly - interesting. I don't see how it is different from all the other "here is my problem" questions that are specific to one company that are all over onstartups. People certainly can ignore those requests. Frankly I don't like those either. I guess we should just leave it to rob walling and bob walsh. Maybe Onstartups just isn't the success it could have had. Oh well. – TimJ♦ Nov 5 '10 at 18:43
@Tim: presumably, other questions relating to "how do I do X" are relevant to more than the person asking. Whereas "give me feedback on my project" won't be. Of course, if you read tens of those, you would eventually learn something (have a better home page, use an action button, etc.). But that doesn't sound like the right way to share that knowledge. But I'd be ok with questions such as "How do I improve the conversion rate on my site, here's the URL". What do you think? – Alain Raynaud Nov 6 '10 at 22:41
I have found plenty of useful bits when reading comments on web sites over at JoS. I agree in general that those are not as good as more generic questions, but I don't think they have value ONLY for the OP. – TimJ♦ Nov 7 '10 at 1:26
I agree with Alain's analysis. – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Dec 19 '10 at 16:09
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+1 to "little benefit to the community". See also meta.answers.onstartups.com/questions/109/… and meta.answers.onstartups.com/questions/132/… . My personal opinion remains the same, the "advertising my new site" posts are understandable, but off topic. – Jesper Mortensen♦ Dec 23 '10 at 22:50
Sometimes with some rewriting we can get reasonable questions. The key is that the community should encourage persons to rewrite their questions to be of a certain quality. I've noticed that sometimes people, who of course have a question regarding the activity they are currently undertaking, forget or don't know how to ask their questions properly, e.g.: My website is out, I need foreign partners, or maybe sell it to foreign people. I rewrote it as "Product Internationalization: How would you I do?" answers.onstartups.com/posts/34933/revisions – pdjota Jan 26 '12 at 14:54
up vote 5 down vote

"Review my startup" posts shouldn't be allowed. They can be closed as "Off Topic," or, perhaps "Too Localized."

There are four main reasons:

  • They only help one person. The goal of Stack Exchange is to build up a large site full of general questions and answers that will help thousands of people who come after us. The goal of answers.onstartups.com is to build up a bunch of high quality questions and answers that will help many entrepreneurs. These critiques are so specific to one person's exact business/website/startup idea/business plan that they are not useful to anyone else.

  • The site tends to fill up with them. This happened on the Business of Software and it just became very, very irritating for the regulars.

  • They're not questions. There is no correct answer. You're asking people to do too much with one question.

  • They can be spam. Many times they are posted in good faith, but more often than not, they're simply posted as a way to get initial traffic to a site.

I say, close 'em.

DISCLAIMER: this is my personal opinion and does not reflect Stack Exchange policy.

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I've been closing these as off-topic and adding a comment to each with a link back to this question. For example: answers.onstartups.com/questions/7174/…. – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Apr 20 '11 at 3:36

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