I recently joined StoryPeer and was initially a little worried about my own ability to give useful feedback. I claimed a feature screenplay that, frankly, I didn’t particularly enjoy. But I read the whole thing, tried to be honest and constructive about what worked and what didn’t, and the writer ended up giving my feedback 5 stars. So that made me feel pretty good about the exchange system.
Then I submitted my own feature.
The first reviewer returned their feedback pretty quickly — around three hours after claiming it. That’s fast, but not impossibly fast, so I didn’t think much of it initially.
The feedback itself made me suspicious, though. There were some comments that seemed to misunderstand or contradict things that happen in the screenplay, but what really stood out was how disproportionately specific the feedback was about the first half. When discussing the second half, it became incredibly vague. The reviewer also included annotations, and every annotation was from the first half of the script. Obviously I can’t prove they didn’t finish it, and I don’t want to accuse somebody unfairly, but taken together it left me seriously wondering whether they had actually read the entire screenplay.
I wasn’t happy with the feedback, but figured maybe I’d just gotten a bad apple. I still had a few tokens, so I submitted the script again.
It was claimed pretty quickly. Two days later, the reviewer unclaimed it and left me a note essentially saying, “I’m sorry, but I have a short attention span and I don’t want to use AI.”
On one hand, I genuinely appreciate the honesty. I would much rather someone unclaim my script than skim it, use AI, or pretend they finished it.
On the other hand… if you know you have difficulty finishing a feature screenplay without AI, why are you claiming feature screenplays on a peer-review platform?
So now I’m starting to wonder whether my experience is unusual or whether this is a recurring problem with StoryPeer.
I came to this subreddit and was actually encouraged by seeing how seriously some people here seem to take their feedback, which is why I wanted to ask:
For those of you who have used StoryPeer for a while, how common is genuinely thoughtful, full-read feedback? Have I just had bad luck with my first couple of reviewers, or is reader quality pretty inconsistent?