Don’t read the comments
How useful is the feedback from your fans, and at what point can it have an adverse affect on your creativity? Matt Berninger, Lily Fontaine, Anna B Savage and Richard Dawson give me their insights
Anyone who’s ever posted anything they’ve made online will be well aware of the Russian roulette of the comments section. Mostly, you’ll find exactly what you want there, a happy empty chamber of “love this!”, *crying laughing emoji*, “come to Brazil!”. And then click. Your head is blown off by, “Oh man, I’m old, but listening to this was like listening to my parents talk about music.” Somebody actually posted that under a Loud And Quiet podcast recently, which I’m so completely not bothered by I’ve written an entire article about the effects unsolicited feedback has on creativity, speaking with The National’s
, English Teacher’s Lily Fontaine, and Richard Dawson.The origin of online comments dates back to 1998 when they were rolled out by the journaling site Open Diary. Considering it was the age of dial-up, with an estimated 147 million Internet users worldwide (3.6% of the global population versus today’s figure of 67.9% – 5.56 billion people), I can’t imagine Open Diary had much …