Hmmmm... this is a good question really. I've had bad experiences with writer's groups in that I was the only writer who met the word requirements every session, and was often the only writer with ANY writing at all in every session. Still, the folks in the group, some were published writers, other were not, managed to help me dissect and deconstruct the stuff I submitted. Those few who occasionally submitted tended to get more attention from me in the editing phase.
Some of it you've heard here, for example, Off-White Lies was one of the tales that the group worked through with me.
That said, identifying a good crit or a bad crit is really subjective. I've had long crits that took great pains to meticulously explain everything wrong with a story, and I've had very short crits that only talked about the general. In both cases I've gleaned something useful from them. For me, just getting a piece finished and in front of a reader is worth whatever they say about it because once I get a draft to the point I want to share I am confident that it works well enough to submit.
The real acid test for me is to talk with someone about the story in person. I can't count the number of times I've had to defend, or explain a plot point to one of my edit-readers. When that happens I know that whatever I was trying to convey in the draft was not clearly presented. Other times I have to explain what the nature of the story universe is, again, not clearly presented in the draft, or the story is too reliant of previous stories to make any kind of sense. Finally, it allows me to talk through the piece and usually come up with a better angle for basic stuff like POV or tense or whatever.
Sometimes it's even helpful when a reader tells me "this story is shit," and makes no other comments. Such comments ALWAYS force me to re-examine a story with a much more critical eye than I might have had in my regular editing phase. Sometimes too they are right, the story sucks, sometimes they are wrong and it does suck. But the fact that the comment made me revisit the mateiral and really review it in microscopic detail, and in such cases I always find something that could be better said, described, or clarified.
On the contrapositive, a reader who says only "this is great" and makes no other comments can also be helpful. I tend to look even more closely at these stories because my first-readers are always people I trust and who themselves write. If they don't think it needs any changes, even punctuation or type-o fixes, I know they were distracted when they read the piece. Sometimes though, they are right, and the piece of perfectly fine the way it is. You've seen several of these here at Escape Pod from me, especially Cleanup in Aisle Five. I hesisted to send that one in because all of my first readers replied with "best one yet" or some variant of that and little else.
Crits that focus on me as a writer and not the material are less useful, but I've developed a pretty thick hide after submitting for so long. Once I get past the "you suck and your writing is crap" comments there is usually something beneath that in the comments that's useful. I am my own worst critiquer. I let stuff sit for a week or a month or longer, then savage it, tear it down almost to the blank paper, and rewrite.
The real problem I have is with the writiing I do for work - technical training development. Writing is a skill that one hones through years of constant practice. However, every Tom, Dick, and Gloria thinks that because they received an A in their college Gen-ed writing courses, they are writers and editors. These folks don't know what semicolons are, or how to use them. They can't fathom the function of a comma. They are ambivalent to hyphens and their role in writing. Em dashes and en dashes may as well be Chinese characters for chicken soup with and without noodles. Yet when I submit technical training scripts, their edits always feature dozens upon dozens of introduced errors, mispelled terms, prepositions and contractions to begin sentences, and improperly capitalized words "for emphasis".
These edits make my blood bubble and steam because it is an offhand way of saying that they don't trust my skills with the written word.
That's never happened in any fiction I've submitted. Oh look, I'm ranting!!!
