An idea: feedbackshare.com

[photon_off]

Here's the idea:

feedbackshare.com -- give feedback, get feedback. A fair feedback sharing site for webmasters.

The idea is simple.

1) You create a feedback request which consists of a link, and some guidance as to the feedback you want (there should be guidelines: eg - it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to provide this feedback). (Note: After the site has a decent sized pool of feedback requests, it's probably a good idea to require that a user has given at least 1 feedback before being allowed to create a feedback request, otherwise people will just "create and wait")

2) You provide feedback to other posts. Your feedback is anonymous (though of course you can provide your identity within, if you want). Feedback is measured by number of words, sentences, or some other intelligent metric. All feedback is hidden.

3) You are notified when someone answers your feedback request. You only get what you give. You must have provided similar feedback (as per the aforementioned metric) to another website in order to view feedback for yours. For example, if you've submitted 3 high quality feedbacks, you can view up to 3 high qualify feedbacks on your post. A "credit" system would work.

I believe a lot of "Show HN" posts go unnoticed because there's really no incentive to answer them. This should eliminate the problem. The process is easy, painless, and instant... go around giving feedback, and in return you can view feedback people have given you. It's win-win.

I've already registered the domain name. But if you make it, I'll happily point the domain to your DNS server, so long as the site is operational, free, and gives me props for the idea. Or, you can find your own domain name and launch it there. I just want to see and use the service :)

Thanks.

[duck]

The problem with this approach is that it is more of a one-on-one feedback system, which to me is the opposite of what you find here on HN. I love the "Show HN" posts b/c I learn something from them even if it isn't my app. If I put the effort into giving feedback I would hate to know that there is a good chance it won't be seen b/c the poster doesn't have enough "credit".

Also, I think most of the quality "Show HN" posts don't go unnoticed and the incentive to comment on them is the same as any other post on HN.

[photon_off → duck]

I love the Show HN posts too. I recently had a rather successful one here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1564183 A lot of very, very interesting discussions arise from them, and there's a lot to be learned from them.

But for the purpose of receiving simple feedback like: "Was it clear what this site does?", "Which feature was most useful?", "Your thoughts on the usability of the site?" Show HN will often fall short. While often times there is incentive to add feedback on HN, there is often times not incentive to just ramble on about your user experience -- though this might be very helpful to the op.

Finally, I'm pretty confident that people will want to view the feedback they've gotten, and will happily give feedback to other people in order to view it. I don't think there's a "good chance" that the user won't give someone else feedback to get credit to view yours. I think there's an exceptionally high chance all feedbacks will be viewed within a very short amount of time. Only the very latest feedbacks would not be viewable, and with a high enough churn, they wouldn't be unviewable for long.