What are these thoughts?
In no particular order:
- We're already limiting how many people we allow on the site at once to limit how they do forum crit, what if instead of having every forum crit person to at least one thread we only accepted a certain number of threads per day? Make forum crit invite-only and have a queue for how many days it will take to get critique? If newbies get frustrated, coldpost, and fail, then they'll be deleted shortly therafter and that's one forum crit doesn't have to deal with.
- Alternatively, we could make forum critique by appointment, the butterfly squad roster could list the days/times critters are available and the butterfly would be the one making the thread, and any threads posted outside that could be removed/locked/what-have-you. The appointments could be made on the page so that butterfly squad members aren't inundated with PMs, at least not by design.
- Another possibility, we do actually go all-in on form responses so that we could have more unskilled users be critters, and then we could have either of the above go alongside that so you could make an appointment/get in the queue for a skilled critter to help you and in the meantime get some level of evaluation/attention.
- I would love to see the critique boards be little community gathering places, maybe people bouncing ideas off one another and having fun with the conceptualizing process and I think if the pace were a little slower and we had room to breathe we could see more of that taking place.
Aside from getting more quality reviewers who post consistently, there's no straightforward solution to the current state of the forums.
That's what I'm asking about, I think we need to re-think our approach to forum crit because for quality reviewers, posting consistently on forum crit is a quick way to burn out because the work never ends.
it's already gotten to the point where newbies seeking crit are getting one or two boilerplate responses before their idea disappears into the vast sea of threads
None of these are bad critiques, in my mind, there's just only so many way to address what is essentially the same idea over and over. They're all essentially different phrasings of the same few core critiques, most commonly: The idea is derivative, the idea is simplistic, there's no narrative, and it is similar to a specific existing article. I've also tried not to include any critiques which use these critter tropes but also did any bits of brainstorming to try to help the author pump up their idea.
Similar to existing content
Similar to existing content
Idea is derivative/Similar to existing content
Idea is derivative/lacks narrative
Derivative idea/lacks narrative
Read the guides b/c you don't know what you're doing
Read the guides b/c you don't know what you're doing
Derivative idea/lacks narrative
Derivative/lacks narrative
Figure yourself out because you don't know what you're doing
Along with the last thread, I saw a lot of threads on the first few pages where the only response was informing the person they were doing stuff wrong, which is probably the only way to deal with them, and I'm not trying to say there's anything wrong with that but I've included it as an example of a boilerplate response because there's only so many ways to tell people they don't know what they're doing/are doing it wrong.
If there were less intensity and a lower quantity of pages I think we could combine these critiques, all of which are accurate, with more stuff that brainstorms/helps them develop their idea rather than telling them what's wrong with their concept.
