Hey, i joined FCC a little while ago, before the forums gitter was the only active community hub, it wasn’t so crowded as it is now and the conversation topics usually stayed focused on webdev. The forums didn’t exist, so gitter was where most of the community was and usually you could receive good feedback from the people that in there. I stopped coming around and came back a few months ago, and one of the main differences i noticed is the lack of feedback on camper’s projects.
Here in the forums, in the discord channel and in the gitter chat, feedback seems to have vanished from the Freecodecamp community entirely. Often i see projects with horrible decisions and the only comments are “hey that’s great keep at it”, and while i understand that people try to encourage others, this is really harmful behavior.
When someone uses a background image of 25x25 with no-repeat active, saying that they did a great job is not in any way helping them, this greatly halts growth and it shows on these people’s future projects, pointing out flaws in their decisions is not the same as offending them or being mean, this is what constructive feedback is, you receive their work and give your honest opinion about it. If someone is asking for feedback they want to improve, and if you tell them “nope, looks great to me, that child of rosemery does have lovely red eyes” you’re stabbing them in the back and offering no room for them to grow.
This is not facebook and you are not commenting on pictures, this is a place to learn and improve, and you cannot learn and improve if all you know is that your job is always great.
Do keep in mind i’m not talking about the idiotic notion of meritocracy, or even about the idea that “struggle builds character”, these are both very harmful notions that have nothing to do with feedback, i’m talking about honesty. Telling someone that yellow fonts with white background might not be ideal is not being condescending, hurtful or mean in any way, you have eyes and a brain that tells you that those choices are not ideal, when someone asks for feedback that is exactly what they should hear, your honest opinion about how you feel about their work.
Often i feel like it’s better to not post any projects here at all, because i won’t get any feedback. Most of the comments feel very…sycophantic, not honest, just like facebook comments quite honestly.
This is just a feedback to the community, i’m nobody and you can do whatever you feel is right. Just felt like commenting on this, which feels like a huge, important issue on any community that leans towards learning.
