FeedbackRequest and FeedbackResponse options

[RuairiD]

Several people have made suggestions for user-selectable options for requests and responses (e.g. #2), some of which would affect the grouping algorithm. I'm making a list of them here with my initial thoughts, and everyone is welcome to chip in with thoughts below.

Requests:

• Genre - probably the most requested feature. Users can pick a genre for their track and only get grouped with those submitting tracks in the same genre.
  • A popular suggestion and an interesting one. I didn't implement genre at all for the following reasons:
    • Without a lot of users, fragmenting the userbase may just make the whole thing unsustainable if there's not enough daily requests to fill out groups for each genre. It's also possible that you end up grouped with the same people multiple times and end up in an echo chamber.
    • People (including me) struggle to put their music in the right genre bucket. It's hard. As a result, separating by genre might not even be that accurate.
    • It's not strictly true that musicians from other spheres and genres wouldn't have anything to offer you. The idea of having groups instead of 1:1 feedback is that you can get a variety of feedback. Maybe the deep house producer has some interesting ideas for your future bass banger.
  • I'd like to address this is we consistently get enough users to make it worthwhile but I would almost certainly keep the genre buckets broad (e.g. 'Electronic', 'Hip-Hop/Rap', 'Rock' etc.); I could audit 100 requests or so and see what genres are being submitted, and use that to determine which genres we can offer.
  • There would be a small technical challenge to this though as the assign_groups job would need to take genres into account and group within them.
• Feedback category e.g. do you want feedback on your mixing? On the drums? On the arrangement?
  • I think the prompt serves this purpose already; adding an extra textfield or a dropdown for users to choose a specific category for their feedback seems unnecessarily restrictive.
  • Plus, there's advantages to not specifying a specific area of feedback e.g. there's a school of thought that says if you're worried your bass is too loud (or something similar), instead of mentioning it, just wait and see if anyone brings it up of their own accord.
• Track state e.g. is it a demo? is it unmixed? is it mastered and ready to go?
  • I personally don't really see the point in this one. If it's an important detail, it can go in the prompt. But I don't think the feedback should change much based on whether it's a demo or a final mix or anything in-between (also if it's already mastered, are you even going to implement the feedback or are you just looking for validation?)

Responses:

• Listening medium (first referenced in Feature idea: listening medium #2) - what is the listener using? Monitors? Airpods? $5 earphones? In the car?
  • Useful for those concerned with their mixes/mastering and haven't had the opportunity to listen across multiple devices.
  • I didn't consider this initially as my initial thought was that anyone submitting a request for mixing advice would likely mention it in their prompt and then this listening medium information would be volunteered.
  • It's possible novices won't know to ask for or volunteer this information though.
    • This may be something to be resolved with some kind of tutorial or documentation so users get a better idea of what useful feedback is and how to write it.