The following is a full copy of a post made on Battle of the Bits, with no modifications for presentation on cohost. This post is copied to cohost in an attempt to get a wider variety of answers to the question poised.
I wanna complain about something. I have been having an extremely hard time trying to get negative feedback for a touch more than a decade now, nobody seems to want to give negative feedback to people they know.
Yes, this extends to BotB, but moreso I mean in general, I go to get feedback from people on shit I've made and people seem to assume I'm looking for a hug and a pat on the head, and the only people who've ever given me useful negative feedback on my music are:
- directors on games I was hired to soundtrack
- a friend who really fuckin hates my music and knows I want him to be harsh, cus I'm still sending this stuff to him after 6 years (but who I can't send music to frequently)
- a random commenter on the album I released in 2023, who I didn't see the comment of until yesterday
- myself, a minimum of 3 years later
it's gotten seriously annoying and I don't know what exactly to do about it. the problem of too much default positive feedback even leaks into games I've been hired to soundtrack; one recent example includes a director who felt like they were trying to fluff up my ego to keep me on the team, and did indeed seem to have been doing that.
how the hell do I get more negative feedback (that isn't just slurs and mockery)? you can't exactly get better without knowing what you did poorly, and every time I've been successful in extracting a lot of negative feedback from someone trustworthy it's been huge, and you can track sudden obvious improvements in the quality of my work linked to single events of someone just giving me an itemized list of everything they hated, and sitting with me to discuss these afterwards.
There's even the fact that people seem to assume I'm fighting back against negative feedback whenever I try to discuss these things with people, no, I'm trying to fully and deeply understand your feedback and I need to see what changes in your wording when anything that is a potential "counter" is brought up, that's part of the scientific process for a reason, and I apply it to my music just the same because I want to get everything I can out of these random little scraps of people being willing to be potentially-rude.
At this point I've started resorting to attracting haters so I can read their hating and sift through the bits that are just hate from the bits that are actually useful criticism. That's desperation, man, that's not healthy, but it's still helped me get enough negative feedback to be able to keep improving.