One Star Out of Five, Anyone?

Yesterday, I was talking to a fellow blogger friend about his blogging experiences. He is an aspiring writer with a pretty decent writing style (and a good sense of humour), and has contributed a piece or two to magazines (that I know of). He looks to blogging as a medium to improve his writing. So, I was very surprised when he suggested he was very unmotivated, and was thinking of shutting down his blog.

When I asked why, he told me that this was because of the feedback he was getting. He has a gadget for ranking on his blog (rather like the stars I have in left sidebar), and there are some 15-20 people who have managed to put him down in the last 20% on quality.

He told me he was planning to take down the gadget, as he felt it was not a nice advertisement for his blog that so many people feel his blog is so bad. I told him he cannot do that. That is like taking away freedom of expression of his visitors, and as we all know, you cannot do that. In today's world, every person should be able to say how he feels about everything, for it is their right.

Secondly, he is not the one who is clicking on that gadget (at least, I assumed that in the interest of fairness). So all his shouting was like a kid who is not allowed to vote, ranting against the elected leaders in democracy. i.e. completely pointless.

What really got his goat was that none of those people wrote any comments or criticize him, which would help him improve his writing. I told him that he should be thankful that people took time from whichever site they frequent, to let other viewers know how they feel about his site. And he cannot expect them to take more time off to write him any comments. Because although it is the viewers' right to give him feedback, it is not their responsibility.

His other option was to stop writing the blog completely. I told him he should do that, because if so many people think he is not good, does he really believe that he can improve given time and practice? But then, if he continues writing, I would respect that too, if only for his stubbornness.

And now that the markets have spoken (in the words of US Presidential candidate Stephen Colbert), I am wondering whether I should stop visiting my friend's (well, he is more of an acquaint., to be precise) blog, even though I like his writing.

But that also prompted me to think about how we give feedback to somebody. In today's fast paced world, if you can rank somebody on a scale of 1-5 by just a click, is there any point writing any comments and giving any "constructive" criticism? Isn't constructive criticism an oxymoron anyway?



P.S. In the interest of security (mine), some of the facts of this case might have been changed. I would suggest you not to go around hunting in my blogroll looking for the subject of this post.