Noticing Newbies

Having people in your life read your stuff is good (I'm blessed with a bunch of folks who dig my writing) but I wouldn't want that to be my only source of feedback--getting feedback from folks who are not your friends / family can be pretty helpful!

I was part of another online community with an explicit and highly-adhered to culture of reciprocity-- it was expected that, if you critiqued someone's writing that they'd critique yours.

So if you did a lot of critiques, you'd get a TON of feedback. I quite liked it!

I don't think that's so much the case here (I haven't been here long, so maybe I'm off-base)--lots of site members don't review other people's work at all, and the ratio of views to reviews seems something like 30:1 (optimistically) -- maybe lower than that.

There are some site-areas (... forums?) like Plug and Please Review (and you can offer Gift Point bounties to incentivize people to review your stuff) to explicitly request reviews and feedback.

Another suggestion: the modern AI's give outstanding feedback--better, IMO than a lot humans do. Depending on your material, asking Claude or Gemini to give you feedback might be useful... just be careful with those things: they can be sycophantic and you're at risk for hearing what you've written is the best thing since sliced bread from an AI... but read from a skeptical perspective, I think they're useful tools for getting input.