Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-4833240-20140301051701/@comment-4832646-20140304065621

To say it's being mean is something up to the user. Believe it or no, I've had several people tell me the only reason I'm a mod - and the only reason I'm an admin - is out of favoritism. I know full well that it wasn't, regardless of my applications having unanimous support. But that is their opinion and I strive to prove them wrong. Of course, it's already proven by the fact that they put that "support" down on the app in the first place or didn't vote at all.

Harsh criticism - Criticism in general - isn't meant to be nice. It's not meant to make a user feel welcome because they wrote their first pasta. It's to make sure that their second is better. Again to use Guy as an example (sorry Guy), if you call half his criticisms on terribly bad stories "nice" you need to go back and reread. I've seen him tell people the only way their pasta would get read is if the reader thought it was a troll pasta.

Think of it this way: If you make a story that is so terrible it's ridiculous, am I to tell you that it could use improvement or am I tell you the truth? Which would be more likely to make you strive to improve, and prove that you are willing to put more effort into the next shot? Would you respond to the former, or would you respond better to the latter in order to prove me wrong?

My answer is, and has been proven to me more times than not: the latter. Getting told your stuff is shit hurts. Of course it does. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, unless for some reason you think that the person is simply just bashing you and don't bother reading the whole critique. Think of it this way: If someone who actually criticizes you calls it shit, then you know you didn't put a whole lot of effort into it. Which is usually the case.

Particularly, a harsh, terribly mean criticism can, yes, knock you off the high horse of thinking you're the next Slimebeast, but like all other criticism, literally takes off half the work for you, by telling you what was wrong so that you don't have to go hunting for it when those troll comments start popping up.

Once again, writing is not hard. Especially with this site's standards and resources that are linked just about everywhere. A harsh criticism on a story is a criticism that is well deserved if you refuse to put that much effort into it.

It's a fine line. Just telling them it's shit is a bad move. Telling them it's shit but listing out how to fix what is wrong, and telling them what is wrong, is a constructive criticism. It may be aggressive, insulting, butt-hurt causing and terribly mean, but that doesn't make it any less constructive.

The entire point I've been trying to make is give the story what it deserves and why it deserves that. If it's shit, tell them it's shit. Older writers who have been in the game for a long time, can recite the Style Guide and Quality Standards in 25 seconds, and know what to do with a keyboard and Source Editor don't get babied; why should someone who is here for the first time and hasn't even bothered reading said things before posting get the opposite treatment?