I went through subreddits, the dev community, and also discord. A lot of people were asking for feedback and were ignored. No replies, no nothing. And even when there were replies, they were vague, and self-advertised, like "Looks very nice! Check out my website ". This was chaotic, and I wanted to understand why it happens. After a researching a bit, I found out that Solo Devs are commonly struggling with isolation, toxicity, and no feedback. The fear of getting feedback, gets mirrored to the fear of giving feedback. Most Devs were afraid of getting backlash, so they just ignored posts. I ran an experiment. Went on dev-related subreddits, found posts that wanted feedback, and gave them detailed, and quality feedback on each of their posts. I got a lot of praise, upvotes, and "Thank you"'s, however, once I asked them back if they were okay with giving me feedback, I did not get any response... So I tried to understand the psychology more. Made a post asking developers if they were even ready to exchange feedback if they got feedback. Actual code of someone's comment; "In theory yes. In practice most people won’t. [...]" Now I wanted to test that. Multiple people did respond with "yes" under my post, so I reached out to them. Asking if we can exchange feedback, and surprisingly it went well. People were open to giving feedback when they knew, they were gonna get feedback, back. However it took a very long time to give feedback (around 20 minutes for a single text). So I asked around again, do others struggle with time aswell? The answer was yes, time was a big factor. It took too long to write detailed explanations, so most people opted to not giving feedback. If there was a structure to uphold. That was the missing piece to the puzzle. Users can add their own questions, in a sort of FAQ, and ask developers to only answer the given questions, saving time for the feedback giver, and bloat for the person reading the feedback. This was the very idea of Dobda. After building the landing page, and talking to a few people about, some developers joined the waitlist and loved the idea of enforced feedback. People want to be seen, but in order to be seen on Dobda, you need to see first. After running this experiment for a few times, I realized that praise for feedback is also something that keeps people hooked. A simple "Thank you for your feedback.", is enough to give a developer somewhat of a confidence boost. Each comment can be rated with Helpful or Not Helpful. My Goal with Dobda is to bring back the idea of giving quality, and well structured feedback. Solo Devs have a hard time growing together, we need to grow together.

Dobda

Bringing constructive, and structured feedback, back

Bringing constructive, and structured feedback, back