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Do you know of a crowdsourced site dedicated to critique and review for beginners?

This question is a result of my discovery that critique is not provided on writing.SE; which completely understandable, criticism and reviews fall entirely outside of the scope of this site.

Here is what I'm looking for:

  1. A completely free site, no, plans, sales pitches, etc.

  2. Moderated by a community. Similar to StackExchange sites.

  3. The community collaborates on the critique or review.

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  • Does doing critique work to earn points to get critiqued count as free? (I will answer this if it does not get closed)
    – Andrey
    Commented Mar 15, 2019 at 21:25
  • Not much help, but there is an SE site for computer programs. codereview.stackexchange.com
    – Ethan Bolker
    Commented Mar 15, 2019 at 22:02
  • @Andrey, what kind of points and where? Reward points? Like at a gas station or Safeway?
    – iamtowrite
    Commented Mar 15, 2019 at 22:09
  • @EthanBolker I know of codereview.stackexchange.com. I doubt they'd review or critique fiction there; I know I wouldn't.
    – iamtowrite
    Commented Mar 15, 2019 at 22:09
  • Welcome. Group critiques tend to amplify whatever the first critiquer has to say.
    – SFWriter
    Commented Mar 16, 2019 at 0:58

1 Answer 1

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I would recommend Scribophile

Scibophile is a writing critique site based around earning points and then spending them to have others review your work. While there is a paid option to the site, this allows you to save more of your writing on the site but does not in a huge way impact your ability to get critiques.

The basic idea of the site is that in order to have others read your stuff you have to read theirs. On average you have to be ready to read and critique about three times more text than you are going to submit. In return, you are almost guaranteed to have at least 3 people read your work and leave meaningful feedback. Feedback quality is controlled by length, and not useful feedback can be flagged to regain your points. Other users also review critiques allowing you to get some feedback of what users think of other user's suggestions.

A challenge of submitting to Scibophile is that each submission should be around 3000 characters. For some of my writing, it was very hard to break it up into such chunks. Fortunately, the community is good and will often follow your work reading parts as you post them.

Overall I have found that not only have I received good feedback from the site, but giving feedback to other authors has helped me sharpen my skills as it made me be able to more keenly analyze my own writing.

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  • I came across Scibophile in my search but I couldn't understand their proposition, so thanks for explaining, but could you expand on the mechanism of submission, receiving/providing critique, and interaction with contributors?
    – iamtowrite
    Commented Mar 16, 2019 at 2:42
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    You look at posted work that is in the spotlight. You pick one, read it and give feedback. You get feedback. When you have enough points you post your work and it goes for a while into the spotlight until it gets enough feedback. Does that help? (I will update the answer if it does)
    – Andrey
    Commented Mar 16, 2019 at 2:51
  • What determines which pieces are under the spotlight, then?
    – iamtowrite
    Commented Mar 16, 2019 at 2:58
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    @imatowrite it's a queue in order of when something was submitted. When I was putting up writing it took about 24 hrs for my stuff to get to it's place in spotlight. Then when it gets 3 reviews it's removed from the spotlight. Your first submission gets to cut in line.
    – Andrey
    Commented Mar 16, 2019 at 3:43

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