I post them to find out what OTHER PEOPLE thought of my vision.
Yes, sure. Me too. But that doesn't mean I'm going to GET what I want, you know? Or that I'm going to enjoy hearing these thoughts about my vision if the other people do decide to tell me about them. Loquacious praise is only one of a variety of potential responses, after all. Others include loquacious condemnation, very terse praise, ambiguous praise that's actually a veiled insult, confusing comments that might be praise but might as easily be free verse somebody's decided to write in the comment box because it was handy, comments about things you had nothing to do with, corrections of your typos, mockery, flames, spam, silence or (gasp) an automated expression of non-specific appreciation similar to what you've probably unwittingly gotten for years from people who use text replacement utilities to spare themselves from typing commonly used phrases ("I really enjoyed this!!") over and over again.
Putting a story on a public internet space is like signing a waiver that states you understand these risks and would like to venture forward regardless. If you need your readers to reply to you in some specific way (or with a minimum wordcount), I suggest that you clearly state this expectation in your story header, so readers can decide for themselves if they want to enter this sort of feedback contract with you. I think you'll find the expectation is not as universal as you might think, so clarification might be helpful for you and for the people who are about to read your work.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2012-04-07 06:14 am (UTC)Yes, sure. Me too. But that doesn't mean I'm going to GET what I want, you know? Or that I'm going to enjoy hearing these thoughts about my vision if the other people do decide to tell me about them. Loquacious praise is only one of a variety of potential responses, after all. Others include loquacious condemnation, very terse praise, ambiguous praise that's actually a veiled insult, confusing comments that might be praise but might as easily be free verse somebody's decided to write in the comment box because it was handy, comments about things you had nothing to do with, corrections of your typos, mockery, flames, spam, silence or (gasp) an automated expression of non-specific appreciation similar to what you've probably unwittingly gotten for years from people who use text replacement utilities to spare themselves from typing commonly used phrases ("I really enjoyed this!!") over and over again.
Putting a story on a public internet space is like signing a waiver that states you understand these risks and would like to venture forward regardless. If you need your readers to reply to you in some specific way (or with a minimum wordcount), I suggest that you clearly state this expectation in your story header, so readers can decide for themselves if they want to enter this sort of feedback contract with you. I think you'll find the expectation is not as universal as you might think, so clarification might be helpful for you and for the people who are about to read your work.