Freesound Forums

Hi guys!

Ok, I am one of the uploaders here on freesound, and it is a pleasure that people use my samples. The only negative side of it is that downloaders are LAZY and do not leave almost ANY feedback. Feedback is very important, and positive and negative criticism from others always inspires you to keep going. This way, uploaders only get discouraged because they get so little feedback. Therefore, I suggest:

Every downloader must either rate or leave a comment before he or she downloads an audio sample. Only after rating or leaving comment, the download button appears and enables them to download a sample. I think this is very good idea.

I had some other suggestions:

1. It would be very useful that on your main profile page you can see ratings right next to sample you uploaded. This way you don't have always to click on your sample and wait single sample page to open up in order to see ratings of your sound sample.
2. I also think that adding 'next' and 'previous' button in the single sample view window would be a real goody for uploaders so that you can browse through your samples more efficiently.

Thank you for reading this, please tell me what you think!
Best,
Matt

I think, that it's too much ... you must be more patient to hear real effects from your work. Forcing people to rating or commenting will cause many accidental rates (which imo are not objective anyway). Sometimes downloaders send you effects of their work using your samples with credits or thanks and this is more important to me. After some time you will "google" your nick and find many work made with your samples.

Anyway previewing user samples should be better - there's no one who can spend hour to rewind to my first uploads

Robinhood76
I think, that it's too much ... you must be more patient to hear real effects from your work. Forcing people to rating or commenting will cause many accidental rates (which imo are not objective anyway). Sometimes downloaders send you effects of their work using your samples with credits or thanks and this is more important to me. After some time you will "google" your nick and find many work made with your samples.

Anyway previewing user samples should be better - there's no one who can spend hour to rewind to my first uploads

I agree with you about the patience. But, on the other hand, you have to agree with me that some downloaders take all the samples for granted and simply don't care about the feedback. Let me explain...I am not any kind of ego maniac...in fact I would like to hear constructive criticism because it would make me do better work and try even harder. I think many uploaders agree with this. One more thing...I completely and absolutely respect your opinion.

Best,
Matt

Robinhood76
Forcing people to rating or commenting will cause many accidental rates.

cajo

Robinhood76
Forcing people to rating or commenting will cause many accidental rates.

true.
like fake coins in the vending machine.
there's no way to oblige somebody to do something - Free means free.

Free IS free. Nobody is charging downloaders for downloading. The fact that they will be 'forced' to rate or comment, as you say it, doesn't have to mean that they MUST do it. Of course, freesound moderators would make it sound pleasant and polite and explain the whole story behind why you actually have to comment or rate before downloading.

Best,
Matt

Matt, I proposed an idea similar to yours, and received comments just like Robinhood76's comment.
If Freesound oblige to comment/rate before dowloading, many downloaders will comment/rate randomly, only to download - like putting fake coins in the machine (it's just an example).
These fake comments/ratings would pollute the reliability of the whole feedback.
I believe a small but sincere feedback is better than a huge amount of nonsense.
btw, politeness and pleasantness will never move a non collaborative user

cajo
Matt, I proposed an idea similar to yours, and received comments just like Robinhood76's comment.
If Freesound oblige to comment/rate before dowloading, many downloaders will comment/rate randomly, only to download - like putting fake coins in the machine (it's just an example).
These fake comments/ratings would pollute the reliability of the whole feedback.
I believe a small but sincere feedback is better than a huge amount of nonsense.
btw, politeness and pleasantness will never move a non collaborative user

So, if you proposed it before, what happened with your proposal, man?

Matt, I also like it, when people comment samples or rate them high it gives me a positive energy and motivation. But when i look at ratings of my samples, sometimes they are very strange and hard to understand - some people rates samples randomly even without being forced to rate it. Anyway with this solution Freesond will become one big competition. And another problem - how to rate a preview of sample - some files loses very much in high frequencies, you can change your mind after downloading and rate it after, now.

I do not agree in forcing people to rate and/or comment. Why? What is the basis for rating? A Pro Sound Designer may rate your sound 0 and a person desperate for a sound but with no ear may rate it a 10 out of pure joy at finding something! Others who are in a hurry may just randomly click on anything. So what value is the rating?

So a comment then! I am a Software BA and when we design systems with fields for Comments we ask why? The reason is that experience has shown that people in a hurry or not wanting to make comments will simply put a single character or a space in the field and that is all. So we up the minimum to 5 characters or 10 characters - well the users just randomly key 5 or 10 characters and press enter. Same result - no value at all.

If you want comments and ratings on your work then ask the forum. For me, the fact that someone actually wants to download my sound samples tells me something The more that it downloaded tells me the more the sound is useful/meets the expectations of the freesound audience.

Cheers

David

Tomlija
So, if you proposed it before, what happened with your proposal, man?

higginsdj says it all: our reward is to be useful

cajo

Tomlija
So, if you proposed it before, what happened with your proposal, man?

I gave up after understanding the side effect of fake comments/rating.

higginsdj says it all: our reward is to be useful

Yeah, but why would they necessarily have to be fake, if you ask them politely??? :?

Well you aren't asking them politely, regardless of how it might be worded - making it compulsory means that you are demanding it!

Maybe occasional automated polite reminder emails, if the DL to Feedback ratio goes below a certain point for a downloader. Forcing doesnt work (remember you'll likely just get a 'thanks' message or something, if you had 500 downloads you wouldnt be able to find the constructive criticisms in the list of thank yous).

I've only upped a couple of samples, they've had approx 100 downloads all together and I just got my first feedback - it made me smile to get it and want to upload more definitely.

Well I think it would help if you could more easily reply to comments. When someone comments on one of my samples, I will always try to reply something, but I have no clue if they ever read it. And when I comment on somebody else's samples, I'm not going over them all every week to see if the uploader or maybe another member replied. Without that possibility, comments are really only half useful. If you could have whole conversations on a sample with uploader and downloaders, they would have much more value and people would leave comments sooner than they would now, I think.
Compare YouTube or deviantART or whichever, you can use comments to quickly ask a question, for example, knowing you will get notified whenever you get a reply.

@Tomlija: I do believe in politeness, despite of what I wrote some days before
Actually there is already an invitation to comment and vote after downloading, in the sample page.
but, thinking about non-collaborative downloaders, I suppose politeness won't work anyway.

I think nemoDaedalus touched the most important point about comments.
Comments are "dead" now: the author is notified when someone comments, but if I comment I won't be notified if the author replies to mine. Thus no thread, no conversation, only isolate sparks. I have plenty of bookmarks to track my comments, but after a while I gave up trying to spot authors' reaction.
This situation appear (to me) to come from the original nature of Freesound: a sound database - not a social network. We now are all used to have a quick response to our comments, in a way of sharing not only files but ideas too. I suppose comments in Freesound were allowed more as a technical feedback than as a social feedback.

maybe a compromise would work: when I leave a comments I will be noticed of other comments on the same sample. it may work internally, without ebot. as nemoDaedalus wrote, this could push users to leave more comments