Be communicative
PrevNode LinkNextJosephus: And so did my good Greek friend, Alexander, who started by writing some poems to her which I didn’t like, and told him why. So he ended up improving slowly but surely, until he wrote a truly great poem about her, and people loved it.
Josephus: Then Phoebe — that’s her name — told him, while crying, that she loved the song, but that she still is not going to marry him.
Alexis: The Bitch!
Josephus: My thoughts exactly. Anyway, he felt very down for a long while, so I decided to introduce him to my redhead cousin - her name’s Elishevah - hoping it’ll cheer him up. He ended up liking her and he wrote a hack of that song as a love song to her, and she ended up falling in love with him, and he converted to Judaism and married her, and she’s now pregnant with their first born, and he writes more songs about her. Very good ones.
( “So, who the Hell is Qoheleth?” by Shlomi Fish (= me) )
Note that I employed this strategy, in real life, with an Internet friend of mine who is a retired Finnish software developer in his 40s, who lives in a small Finnish town. He shared some poems he wrote and I and other chat participants commented what we liked or disliked about them. His poetry did improve mostly consistently and… he now has a young woman living with him. I do not know what she thinks about his poems, but he's a cool guy regardless.
If you do not like a work, please try to comment on why you think it is lacking, rather than completely dismissing it or vaguely criticising it. Some examples for such non-helpful criticism are:
"It sucks."
"You cannot write."
"It’s a waste of space."
"Try to write it as if you were there."
People are often amazed by food reviewers in the recently trendy cooking competition ("reality") shows being very pedantic and pinpointing small and large problems, but it comes with experience and "with the territory". So I applaud these reviewers.
One tip I can offer for dealing with critics who only provide vague criticism is to ask them to point out one specific issue.
Telling a contributor why you dislike their work will make reworked and future works better, and your own future job easier. Reportedly, film studios often silently dismissed screenplays that they received. I recently submitted my Sesame Street / "Harry Potter" crossover screenplay to the Sesame Workshop and received no reply.
Another different approach is the canned response. While sometimes useful, it is often indicative that the problem needs to be fixed more permanently. I also recall being given a list of reasons by a web ad service for why my site was unacceptable, and they were far too vague.