Should Feedback be Public in a "Forum" or Private?

[nelsonic]

One of the core guarantees of this project/app is that anonymous feedback remains anonymous.
But one of the issues I have personally faced with feedback systems in the past is that
in addition not having anonymity (which means nobody speaks their mind and nothing improves) if anyone did spot an area for improvement their feedback would go into a "inbox" (i.e. "black hole") and nobody would know the "status" or "progress" (towards resolution).

So the question is: should feedback be public or private?
Follow up question: should we give people the <option> to send feedback to a specific person and let the recipient decide if they want to make it public?

note: I realise I'm baking a couple of features/assumptions into this question...
what I really want is to start a discussion so w can get people's feedback on requirements.

[jackcarlisle]

I've been doing a bit of research into this. I found a basic example of how a platform has created a public forum to give personal feedback to a given person. It's called sayat.me and here's a link to the example -> https://sayat.me/john/ (it also gives the option for the person who gave feedback to respond privately)

We could have something similar whereby a question is posted for feedback to be made on, then answers can be submitted beneath. We could then have comments beneath each answer that only the person who gave the answer and the person who asked the question at the top, can make so it's a private conversation in terms of participants but everyone can see it.

The person's email could be replaced with an alias but a potential issue would be that we won't be able to attach a user_id to the answer, otherwise it would be traceable in the database i.e. not completely anonymous

Alternatively we could have it so that anyone can comment on anyone's initial feedback with aliases like google drive's anonymous animals when you're working on a file with more than one person -> for example: Anonymous Anteater or Anonymous Chupacabra (what a word).

I'd vote to make the feedback public. If everyone's identity is completely anonymous then it shouldn't matter if the comments are public or private. It will also reduce duplication of similar feedback, and we could have a 👍 👎 ❤️ rating system like GitHub to show which answers are popular or not and if the majority of people share that view.

[nelsonic]

@jackcarlisle have you had a look at https://elixirforum.com ?
They have the number of times a link is clicked next to the link and a few other niceties. 😉

[jackcarlisle]

@nelsonic hadn't seen that 🙌🏼 really really nice! Could definitely integrate some of those