Not everyone is going to like the thing you made, and that’s okay

Not everyone is going to like the thing you made, and that’s okay
wilwheaton.net

Looking at a site like Rotten Tomatoes, where the metric is "professional reviewer thought thing was at least decent" and seeing that there is surprisingly little agreement even on such a simple metric (even a terrible movie, like Season Of The Witch, has a 10 so 10% of the reviews like it; even a great movie, like wall-e, only has a 94 - so somebody didn't like it - and most movies are in between with lots of critics liking and lots of critics disliking the exact same thing. Yet we still try to arrive at a truth by considering all their opinions equally as a group. This is obviously doomed to failure.)

It's even more clear when you think about something more abstract, like a favorite color. My favorite color is purple. If yours is yellow, does that mean I'm wrong? Clearly there isn't an obvious objective "This Is Good" when it comes to taste or opinions. Why then is up/down arrows the current state of the art?

I know Netflix has managed to do more by looking for similar reviewers and weighting their opinions, and Pandora does audio classification, but I'm not aware of this concept catching on well in other areas, and I particularly don't know of it being applied to multiple things at once - if I want a recommendation about a new movie that isn't on Netflix yet, or if I'm tired of the repetitiveness of Pandora's stations, their clever algorithms don't help me a bit beyond their limited walls. I don't know of a site like reddit or hacker news or videosift trying to capture more than 'good/bad' for evaluating links on the web. I don't know of a site that is really trying to help me pair my taste with other reviewers, so that I can get personally curated content and we can end up with a world that recognizes some people love action movies and others love romantic comedies and recommending a movie for me to see should take that into account. How wonderful will it be when there is finally a site that can suggest I should read these three articles because -I- will find them good, maybe I should be sure to catch Pacific Rim, and a new band I might like has a video out; while giving completely different recommendations to my sister, without trying to limit to an objective non-relative definition of "good", because we're talking about taste and opinions aren't wrong.

When one of you smart folks makes that site, please let me know.

Man that was/is a freaking lot of work. Over 30 mini-classes so far. People get one each week. When people sign-up, I ask them for comments, and I hand-reply back to why they're there. When people unsub from the list, I apologize and ask what I could have done better.

I am learning this lesson, but very slowly. Whenever somebody unsubs from the list, I always look at what the last email they got was. Can I make it better? Am I writing the series too long/too short/wrong reading level/to the wrong audience? It's enough to drive you nuts.

But it's been a great lesson, because with any email list, you're naturally going to lose people. It actually doesn't have to have anything to do with what you're creating. Maybe they don't have time to read it any more, or their job changed, or they just clicked on the spam button on Gmail because they had too much stuff in their inbox. Yes, it might be something I can control. Or it might not. All I can do is do the best job I can, ask for feedback, and move on.

Every second and every bit of emotional energy I spend worrying about what I can't control is taking away from the things I can control. Creating things and interacting with people ain't like programming. Things aren't boolean, there are tons of hidden variables, and "debugging" doesn't work the way it does in code. Tough thing to learn.

So whenever someone isn't very nice with me, I prefer to assume that they're a nice person who just happens to have bumped their toe into a table leg or something.