EdgeXplore

Asking your friends, colleagues, and loved ones for feedback is hard. Feedback itself can be scary—it’s generally difficult to hear honest, candid criticism of something we’ve done (or ourselves), especially if the people on the other end are bad about giving it. It shouldn’t feel insulting; it should feel supportive.

However, step one is getting that feedback to begin with, and simply emailing your friends or colleagues probably isn’t the best way to go about that, especially if you worry that they won’t give you an honest picture for fear of hurting your feelings.

To solve that, check out the website Tusk, short for “Thought You Should Know.” It’s a free way to create a quick, temporary website that you can use to solicit feedback from anyone else. You’ll enter a name—a subdomain, technically—and provide some kind of description for the feedback you’re looking to get.

Credit: David Murphy

Once you give other people the link to your custom domain, they’ll see the same little feedback form. When they use it to offer some constructive criticism, anything they share will be fully anonymous—no IPs, emails, or names logged. Of course, the specific feedback they give might not be anonymous if they mention details that only a small group of people, or one person, might know; but, technically, anything sent to this small feedback site won’t be tracked.

Credit: David Murphy

Those you share the page with will have three days to provide feedback from when you launched it. After that, the criticism session will be over. You’ll want to review your feedback on that third day, as once the site disappears, that’s it:

Whatever you see on your browser is whatever is stored in the database, nothing more. After 3 days, all data for the domain (domain name, description, feedback posts) is hard deleted forever.

Also, everyone submitting feedback will be able to read everyone else’s. That’ll either help stir the memories of those you’re asking for their opinions, or it’ll create a giant, merciless dogpile of fun. Hopefully you experience the former. And, yes, that’s a live link, so have fun being merciless for the next few days. I probably won’t check it; I only read Kinja comments.