Hi dear HN,

Shall I create a critique exchange site that is open, free and works well? A place where you give feedback to other people about their designs / web apps / short-stories, for example. And you get back feedback about your own work.

The main point is, you would get back roughly as much useful feedback as you gave.

Are you interested in this?

I've tested many critique/review-my-work services. They tend to make me feel disappointed-in-humanity — the reviews I get tend to be like "this looks great add more images" (when there are many images already). Some sites do work well, but focus on critiquing images only, or have different "problems", e.g., I have to pay to talk with other users.

But why would critique.exchange work well?

Because it'd work like this: If you write a 1 000 characters long and useful review, you'll get back useful reviews of a combined length of roughly 1 000 characters. You get "gas" for each character in the critiques you write. You spend that gas to get critique from others.

If people fill their reviews will garbage just to get gas — then you click the Unwanted button. Now the reviewer gets no gas.

If someone gives you concise feedback that helps you improve your work — then you can click the Like button. This gives the reviewer extra gas (at no cost for you).

Another feature is that http://critique.exchange would let you discuss the critique with the reviewer. And other people in the community can join the discussion, and click Like or Wrong on the critique.

I'm not looking to make money from this — instead, I'm looking to get feedback about the discussion software I'd use for this, and make that software popular.

1) Do you think I should proceed with this idea?

2) If you want to be notified about any launch, please send me an email:

    kaj.magnus.lindberg at gmail dot com

If you want to use the site ( = get useful critique of your work) before it's been well tested, please tell me.