How and Why I Collect Reader Feedback

Feedback helps me better understand what people in my audience want to read, and how I'm doing at delivering on that. I developed a tool to make this as frictionless as possible. It needs more work, especially for screen readers, but you can expect to see it soon!

Privacy Policy:

I don't collect information, so there's nothing to share. I may sometimes use third-party analytics to better understand who uses my site, but none that set cookies.

What Feedback do I Collect?

I survey readers at the bottom of select content and ask their opinion about what they read by asking them to relate one of three emotes to their reading experience, and optionally provide more detail about the rating.

All but the emote are optional. I do not collect demographics.

I sometimes log events anonymously, like counting how many times people switch to dark mode or flip the font switcher. Scrolling is sometimes observed to see how people use new features, or to save your place when reading short stories. This is all stored locally, only in your browser, and never transmitted to any server or third-party. Interactive features keep their data local for privacy unless explicitly advising otherwise, e.g. when submitting feedback commentary.

I don't collect anything personal or identifiable.

How do I Collect it?

Mostly, with this little doodad I whipped up which appears at the bottom of most posts:

Your choices are anonymously sent along with any text to a database and I get alerted. Your response is saved locally, in your browser's local storage, which you can delete whenever you want and it won't affect any site functionality.

Deleting local storage also causes the site to forget preferences like dark mode, font, reading progress and other optional features, but those features will still work as soon as you use them again.

Does it Contain Personally-identifiable Information (PII?)

No. It contains a timestamp plus the information you offered.

I don't share the information with anyone. I sometimes refer to it in posts, but always in a general sense; e.g. "I heard some feedback on ... and ...".

It's specifically designed to be anti-creepy, both for me and for you! :)

What if I Want to Change a Vote?

Go to the post, scroll down to the bottom, click the delete button and leave new feedback. There's no way to delete the copy that was sent to the server; since it's anonymous, there's no way to know which row belongs to you. I usually delete feedback not long after reading it, with an occasional screenshot for posterity.