Here's another topic that went by on another site that I have words on but didn't really care to format in a nice way, so here's a rambly thing about it. Should you, a person who makes x, publicly criticize other people's xs that you think are bad? In my case this could be games, music, or writing, though it applies to creative work in general.

The reasons to not do so often go like:

"People worked hard on it," which is pretty flimsy; people work hard on terrible things quite often. It is possible to respect hard work and not respect the result. It is also possible to not respect working hard! Working hard on something in no way guarantees how people will react to it, and I don't think it should. Still, it remains very common for people to imply that, because they worked hard on something, others are obligated to like it or respect it.

"It's bad for your career," since creative industries are fairly small and you may end up working with people in the future who worked on things you hated. I have made this mistake! But safeguarding your career is a pretty dissatisfying reason to hold back on your creative viewpoint.

These reasons aside, there is another reason I, personally, have largely stopped sharing my opinions about other works.

There was a time when I enjoyed takedowns of bad work (for the purposes of this piece I am talking about work that is just bad, not actively propagandistic or otherwise harmful). When I was young I thought of myself as someone who might write a polemic so thorough that entire teams of people making AAA games would hang their heads in shame at their mediocrity and lack of imagination. But something changed over time, and now I usually let bad work go by without comment. This is not to say that I don't still have strong opinions about what's good and what's bad, sometimes in line with what seems to be critical consensus (hard to tell what that really is these days) and sometimes totally contrarian.

I'm still actively involved in creating this work, so of course I have views like these. The thing that's different now is that I realized my opinions change over time. There are works I've totally hated when I first experienced them, but years later I've reevaluated and come to appreciate. There are other works I thought were terrific when I first experienced them, but have never thought about since because they don't linger in memory at all. With those possible trajectories in mind, it's irresponsible of me to encode my very first reaction to a work in some kind of influential way.

Your first reaction to something can be pretty suspect! This is pretty well borne out in the history of criticism in any media. Incredible work goes unnoticed and languishes for years before someone champions it. By the time that happens, it's often too late for the creator to reap any benefit. Other times, a new work is completely overpraised by a credulous critical consensus that is so cringey and embarrassing that a few years later everyone pretends they had never even heard of it.

I can't be bothered to find the actual source for this, but someone once asked John Carpenter if he felt vindicated that The Thing is seen as a classic now when it was critically panned when it first came out, and he said, not at all, the time to praise that film is long past. He lost out on real opportunities because of the initial critical reaction to that film. It being seen as a triumph decades later isn't going to reverse that.

So, assuming I have any audience at all, I would be unhappy with myself if I allowed my completely fallible, imperfect, first reactions to someone's work foreclose a promising career, or to lend artistic legitimacy to a fatuous poser. That's the real reason I keep my initial reactions to myself these days. Sheepish reevaluations and mea culpas that go "actually this thing was pretty good, huh," even in the rare case they're written, aren't enough to reverse the effect your initial strong opinion has. It's like a work meeting where someone ventures what's actually a really good idea and a knee-jerk, cutting comment from the boss quashes it forever. I don't want to be that person.

I do still try to promote work and artists that I like and feel aren't getting enough attention, though.