@jayna and @agmoore
I do wonder about some of the merits of what cool08 is getting at though. I feel that when I make constructive criticisms on the work of others, I get ready for a conversation. On one quite long comment I left recently, I asked for engagement back, and all I got was a 'Thanks'. That said, I don't think the responsibility should fall on the Ink Well team - but rather its members to be engaging in feedback processes.
To cool08, I went back and looked at the comments you left for others in The Ink Well last week - you made a general comment about the topic of the writer's post, but nothing concrete about the story or mechanics of the language itself. What an opportunity for you to offer something tangible moving forward, in the hope of being able to exchange ideas with others. I often do this by offering, 'I wonder...' - you're welcome to take on these words and make them your own.
That doesn't mean the comment didn't have value for the author. Hard to tell by a lack of response. Keep in mind that when you make a comment it is not only the author who reads it. Others may also benefit, so nothing is 'wasted'.
Keep them coming. Meaningful comments from the community are valuable.
I love this discussion! I think feedback designed to support others' development and understanding of different techniques in fiction writing is wonderful. We are not staffed to provide extensive feedback, unfortunately.
However, as you say, @lordtimoty, the community members should be supporting one another with feedback. (That said, some are open to it, and some aren't, so we will all come up against that.) One possibility is that now that we have opened our Discord server to the community, we could consider opening a workshop channel where people can request feedback on their content prior to posting. It would have to be in a Google doc. We'd also need to see active engagement on Discord to know this would work. The admin team can't take on more. We all have active, busy lives... some of us are working full time and also writing our own content on/off Hive, etc.